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What, you think either of you matter? They don’t give a fuck about you.
What’s not to understand? The owning class owns the facilities and sets both the prices and the wages, and they will do this in the way that maximally benefits themselves, i.e., maximizes profits. It’s a really, really basic feature of capitalism (yes, also whatever super duper special unicorn flavor of capitalism you think works better than “crony” capitalism).
It’s a rhetorical device I forgot the name of. If I say “I don’t understand X”, that will have one of two effects on most people: either they also don’t know, realise that and hopefully get curious, or they do and know the point I’m aiming for. If they offer that explanation, it creates a Socratic approach to making an argument: Framing it as an explanation of a question the rest of the audience is hopefully also curious about.
You explanation is the second part of the argument.
So, I know of the existence of this rhetorical device, but I’ve been around enough people who operate in a theoretical framework where this statement cannot be taken as anything other than genuine, namely that of capitalist realism. This has two implications:
- the original tweet could’ve been written with this mindset (which, I should add, is the dominant mindset, btw), and should be taken at face value
- many of the readers will have this mindset, and will not have the theoretical tools on their belt to appreciate it for the rhetorical device it is, much less take advantage of it and learn something (they might walk away with anything ranging from “huh that is weird” to “it’s those darned republicans/democrats”)
In either case, making an explanation (there’s more than one) explicit is useful, if only to open up space for people to disagree with the explanation. (In fact I’d be willing to bet that the person who wrote the tweet disagrees with my explanation, specifically the part involving flavors of capitalism. I bet they’re advocating for something like the nordic model.)
If you can afford it, it will be exactly that expensive.
When government of my country passed a bill that gives monthly payouts of X per child to parents who both work and have at least one child, all daycare centers in the country raised their prices by X next month citing inflation.
Supply and demand do not set the price, when people have no choice but to buy anyway.
It’s still super scummy for them to raise the prices after a bill passed to help struggling families went into effect
Funny thing: countries where govt cap what can be billed and a min bar on the quality of service and salaries (tied to inflation) fare better than countries where a sum of money is paid out or a sliding scale based on family income is used
Submit to market and die
For daycare at least, ours and most others in our city got bought out by one company. Even daycares no explicitly renamed after the company fall under its umbrella.
They raise rates 8% per year and added two new annual fees. Yet they struggle with teacher retention because they don’t pay them hardly anything but charged us $3k/monthf or two kids full time.
Holy shit that’s too much. You could basically hire someone from a foreign country to live in your house full time and nanny your kids for that much.
They’re stupid expensive because:
- Corporate profits.
- Continual legal settlement payouts.
- Obscene referral fees to scammy referral companies like “A Place for Mom.”
There do exist places that treat employees well and treat residents well. But they are harder to find since the referral places pretend they don’t exist.
it is to avoid paying RNs/NP, and MDs. its a cost cutting measure.
“Can’t afford to pay a living wage” means “I can’t afford a yacht if I pay you”
More like “my yacht would be slightly smaller if I pay you”.
“My second yacht would be slightly smaller if I pay you”
So I really have to wonder if the insurance required to run these places is over-priced as well.
What’s funny in a sad-not-haha way, is that labor for caretaking of small human beings is the enormous untenable driving cost here.
Parents can’t afford the rates, daycares can’t afford living wages for the caretakers. This is an endeavor, like many, that the Hand of the Market™ is OBVIOUSLY unsuitable for solving.
The “funny” part: Parents would gladly do this job for free as they have for centuries and millennia. This problem was already solved, and wouldn’t be an issue if every member of the household wasn’t forced into full-time 40+ hour work plus hunting for side-hustles, and being taken away from their loved ones for most of their waking friggin lives, just to survive.
How many generations deep are we now? Where so many kids spend so long in daycare from infancy that they never even get to form a decent bond with their own parents? How healthy is that, for anybody, much less larger society?
“Parenting as a Service” is peak capitalistic hellscape…
Edit: spelling
The irony is that this causes birth rates to plummet, which eliminates the future workforce for the very companies forcing childcare to be untenable. One of the major contradictions of capitalism is that it does not reproduce its own labor force. I guess the resolution is to replace human workers with AI.
no we just need to import workers from outside the environment.
“Parenting as a Service” is peak capitalistic hellscape…
bullshit
these are some strong opinions right there without much substance
i called my childcare guardians “comrade teacher” and i gladly pay half of my salary for a childcare in the “capitalist dream” now. neither has anything to do with the real reasons why we have childcare nor why it is expensive somewhere or free somewhere else.
childcare enables parents to do more with their life than just have kids and as such is good both for parents and for the society in general. it also enables children to access early childhood education and community that their parents wouldn’t be able to provide otherwise so - if done right - is also great for the kids.
but of course, as with everything with life, things can be messed up by the people. parents or teachers can screw up in many different ways or even the whole childcare might be organised for an entirely wrong reason… that doesn’t mean childcare is a bad idea in general.
childcare enables parents to do more with their life than just have kids and as such is good both for parents and for the society in general. it also enables children to access early childhood education and community that their parents wouldn’t be able to provide otherwise so - if done right - is also great for the kids.
WAIT HOLD ON I GOTTA SHOW THIS TO MY WIFE (teaches kinder) she’s gonna love you
well we have that situation in germany right now where supposedly daycare is good because it allows women to work more hours (full time instead of half time)
it’s … let me tell you, it’s a shitshow. i have come to understand that the internet is largely a propaganda apparatus. they install the thought in you that a certain way of seeing things is “normal”, because everybody sees it that way. in other words, the other bots or paid influencers (idk which one) that the algorithm then pushes sothat everybody sees it.
you got 1 crazy person saying things like “actually, we should all work more, i like it, it’s fun” and you know what, they can say that. anyways, that’s 1 person in 1000. then the algorithm pushes it on everybody’s front page sothat now everybody thinks “ah, that’s a normal thing to think”. and since most people follow group-think, that’s now society’s opinion.
internet exists to cause a shift in public opinion by astroturfing. the illusion that the thought comes from within society organically.
the illusion that the thought comes from within society organically.
Hmm so I both agree and disagree with you here. Hustle culture arises from societal things here such as hyperindividualism, Puritan work ethic and toxic masculinity that grifters package and push (where I agree with you). But it’s metastasizing from us to you all so it seems alien.
My wife is starting her own home daycare Monday for many of the reasons you listed. Almost a decade at a YMCA run Montessori, ~18/hr.
And the poor kids! The caregivers are all burnt out by terrible management and shit pay, have no motivation to provide anything beyond the necessities, and God bless them, at least a few spend their own money on supplies to at least try and enrich the time the kids spend there.
I’m really proud of her, taking a huge step into somewhat unknown water. I know the kids she cares for are going to get so much more value from her, here in her space, on her terms, than they ever would have at the center.
My wife is starting her own home daycare Monday for many of the reasons you listed. Almost a decade at a YMCA run Montessori, ~18/hr.
good luck. the regulatory hurdles are not fun, but regulations are written in blood. they don’t go to the trouble of setting regs unless someone had been seriously harmed.
If you want to keep her employees (if she has any) happy, don’t push the limits of the caregiver:child ratios. I’m not sure what [the amount of money you want to have saved up so your business doesn’t fail] in early childhood education is, but a good rule of thumb is start with 2 years worth of expenses saved as most businesses take at least that long to break even. Restaurants, 5 years.
[BOILERPLATE CYA WARNING]
i did accounting for 25 years and virtually all of my clients were small businesses and their owners, so while this is arguably professional advice, it is not tailored to your specific situation. it is general advice and not intended for you to rely on. if you want advice tailored to you and your situation that is intended for you to rely on, hire an accounting consultant.
Anyone who sells to ordinary consumers has to pay 20-30% taxes, and so do their customers, and so on, so eventually the money dwindles to nothing as it exchanges hands. Meanwhile, mega-corporations don’t pay any taxes on their on income no matter how many steps their money goes.
We should not tax anyone that sells services to consumers. Waitstaff, daycare professionals, nursing aids, etc should have a tax rate of 0%.
…Because it’s ridiculously labor intensive? And emotionally draining?
Have yall ever had to take care of someone really old, with failing health? Or really young?
I’m not saying there aren’t huge structural issues, or leeches on the system. But it’s fundamentally hard. Taking care of just a few others will absolutely drain a professional, and paying them a livable wage + tax/benefits, with no other expenses whatsoever, will drain savings of those taken care of.
I think you misunderstood the OP. Yes, taking care of our elders can be a very exhausting task. But those of us trained in taking care of them should not be paid a sub standard living wage while the nursing homes (and their managers/owners/w-e) get paid the big bucks.
Do y’all really think managers make “big bucks”? Don’t get me wrong, most management is living the 90’s middle class life in 2026. But when did that become aspirational?
I still remember the Simpsons being the representation of a poor family. Now they are high class. That shit is not managers fault. Most managers are just working to not lose what they have while supporting their people as much as they can.
No, my friend. The Simpsons were middle class. Go watch it again and show me evidence otherwise.
they’re explicitly upper lower middle class folk
This is a naive understanding of where the money goes. The corporate owners of nursing homes could make less profit. It would be ideal if those leeches didn’t exist but we still live in a capitalist world, so they won’t be going anywhere soon, unfortunately.
Because nursing homes are mostly ran by private assholes that only care about making money? Go on the rounds to interview them, the smoke and mirrors are real. It’s like all of healthcare.
Why are Walmart employees using food stamps and medicaid when the family that owns Walmart are multibillionaires? It doesn’t make any sense. :\
Gotta keep that overhead low to return value to shareholders. They also use prison labor.
you’re wrongly assuming that the family that owns walmart has any empathy besides what is required to keep the business running
It makes perfect sense for them. It doesn’t make sense that the rest of us don’t beat them until they change their ways.
eh, i tend to think that political action is more meaningful than bashing the companies. if you bash 1 company and it goes down, another one takes its place. you need to implement higher taxation because that affects all companies.
also we need more effective politics at the local level. washington doesn’t care about us
hey i’m supposed to be the tax expert here stop being right about stuff
We should tax wealth not work. But that’s not socialism. Socialism is workers owning the means of production.
wealth is accumulated income. income is generally from work. that’s the logic they use to justify “already” having taxed wealth. simple as that.
Wealth disparities of millions of times are anathema to democratic government. If you don’t want peasants and feudal nobility, you have to offset wealth accumulation.
Inheritance taxes have proven insufficient. So wealth taxes are the next best compromise.
Sarcasm is forever lost on the internet.
yeah buddy sure
(i am new to the sarcasm how did i do)always should have been ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Daycare is a crazy one. Insanely expensive, yet the workers are damn near indentured servants.
It’s almost like somebody pays the workers much less than the revenues and pockets the difference
You would think, but for the most part daycare is a very low profit industry. The problem I think is that all the costs tend to scale with size. So having a lot more clients just means a lot higher costs.
There are exceptions of course, but all of those that I’ve seen also have some other luxury additions to basic care.
I can’t see it as being a high expenditure business. Majority of spending should be towards rent/mortgage and repair and maintenance. It’s not like there is a lot of consumables or anything. All that money has to go somewhere.
probably bs things like admin, or managment fees.
Cleaning supplies alone are a huge consumable. Arts & crafts materials. Toys are basically consumables because kids play rough. Same for books. Some daycares include breakfast, lunch, and snack. First aid supplies, kids hurt themselves all the time.
But yeah, definitely also lots of diverting profits up to the CEO 😓
probably not as much as employee salaries, if they offer benefits. and managment or administration costs(they claim)
I appreciate your realistic assessment here.
When we consider all that reasonably goes into running such a service, we can rationally figure out how much is being diverted to the wrong pockets and make it better.
i assume its for some type of insurance but I also don’t run a day care.
It’s honestly a major contributor to the labor shortage. For anyone with a decent job, it’s significantly cheaper for the spouse to just stay home until the kids are old enough to take care of themselves.
Don’t let the media force you to twist your words-- it is not a labor shortage, but a wage and cost of living crisis.
agreed, if you look at specific industry, or different stem industry. its shortage, but its artificially caused one. its the underhanding gatekeeping by keeping out entry level and choosing people already magically having years of experience in a low level position. all sorts of things like ghost listings, "internal hire but make claims of “not being able to find candidates” on the job sites. or its academically suppressed, for CLS(clinical labs) very limited amount of universities teach this program(1 year grad program) but im hearing they have shortages. and where do you think people will try to apply(california, most of them zeroed in on norcal) and only 9 schools teacch it in cali, you are competing with out of the state people.
“Nobody wants to work anymore” == “I pay so shitty wages that no one can even afford to come work for me.”
I’ve run into dozens of people who are complaining about how they have applied to literally everything and never heard back or get rejected for things like gas station cashier and yet those places always put up the help wanted signs. Shortage seems like a fabrication when these places hire nobody and keep the ad up
When I.T and nurses are complaining that they keep getting ghosted and can’t find work? That feels like a major economic failure signal to me. It’s freaking mad.
nurses, usually shouldnt have a problem, i think they are desperate enough to fill spots. but its likely things like mandatory hours or whatever is required.
they keep the ad up sothat when roxy and joe walk in in the morning, the employer can tell them “uhm, unfortunately we can’t find any other hire, so you 2 people will have to do the work of 3”, effectively cheaping out of paying another person’s wages.
You know what your life is when you are out of work; and when you do have a job, how the fear of losing it hangs over you. You are also aware what a danger the standing army of unemployed is to you when you are out on strike for better conditions. You know that strikebreakers are enlisted from the unemployed whom capitalism always keeps on hand, to help break your strike.
‘How does capitalism keep the unemployed on hand?’ you ask.
Simply by compelling you to work long hours and as hard as possible, so as to produce the greatest amount. All the modern schemes of ‘efficiency’, the Taylor and other systems of ‘economy’ and ‘rationalization’ serve only to squeeze greater profits out of the worker. It is economy in the interest of the employer only. But as concerns you, the worker, this ‘economy’ spells the greatest expenditure of your effort and energy, a fatal waste of your vitality.
It pays the employer to use up and exploit your strength and ability at the highest tension. True, it ruins your health and breaks down your nervous system, makes you a prey to illness and disease (there are even special proletarian diseases), cripples you and brings you to an early grave — but what does your boss care? Are there not thousands of unemployed waiting for your job and ready to take it the moment you are disabled or dead?
That is why it is to the profit of the capitalist to keep an army of unemployed ready at hand. It is part and parcel of the wage system, a necessary and inevitable characteristic of it.
It is in the interest of the people that there should be no unemployed, that all should have an opportunity to work and earn their living; that all should help, each according to his ability and strength, to increase the wealth of the country, so that each should be able to have a greater share of it.
But capitalism is not interested in the welfare of the people. Capitalism, as I have shown before, is interested only in profits. By employing less people and working them long hours larger profits can be made than by giving work to more people at shorter hours. That is why it is to the interest of your employer, for instance, to have 100 people work 10 hours daily rather than to employ 200 at 5 hours. He would need more room for 200 than for 100 persons — a larger factory, more tools and machinery, and so on. That is, he would require a greater investment of capital. The employment of a larger force at less hours would bring less profits, and that is why your boss will not run his factory or shop on such a plan. Which means that a system of profit-making is not compatible with considerations of humanity and the well-being of the workers. On the contrary, the harder and more ‘efficiently’ you work and the longer hours you stay at it, the better for your employer and the greater his profits.
You can therefore see that capitalism is not interested in employing all those who want and are able to work. On the contrary: a minimum of ‘hands’ and a maximum of effort is the principle and the profit of the capitalist system. This is the whole secret of all ‘rationalization’ schemes. And that is why you will find thousands of people in every capitalist country willing and anxious to work, yet unable to get employment. This army of unemployed is a constant threat to your standard of living. They are ready to take your place at lower pay, because necessity compels them to it. That is, of course, very advantageous to the boss: it is a whip in his hands constantly held over you, so you will slave hard for him and ‘behave’ yourself.
from Now and After, by Alexander Berkman, Chapter 5: Unemployment. Available to read for free here.
A perfectly apt analysis. Thank you for the link. Anarchist Library has some good gems in there!
it’s not a crisis. companies have to pay more if they want to find employees. that’s higher wages.
that is if there was an actual labor shortage. sadly, there is not.
or depending on the field, have these BS listing on the job sites, or if thier AI/software is even looking at a cv/resume at all.
I read an interview, probably from NPR, but I can’t find it at the moment. The upshot was that caring for infants is insanely expensive, since they need one-on-one care pretty much continuously.
But parents can’t afford that cost, so, essentially, the price they charge for infant care is a loss-leader, and parents of older children (who need less supervision and thus more favorable staffing ratios) subsidize the cost of caring for infants. Daycare operators are barely keeping afloat.
Edit: Ah, here it is: Baby’s first market failure
They may require 1-on-1 interaction, but generally the ratio for 0-2’s is around 1:4.
And many childcare companies are owned by huge multi-billion dollar investment firms because they are cash generators.
yucky, just like with MDs/nurses, MDs are being snatched up by teledoc and PE firms. so there is less private or specialists out there. the only other “common” one is based on a scam condition(chronic lyme)
This is the only answer that is not just a hand waiving “investors bad”.
Are they required to provide for the more costly babies?
My wife and I had to pay $1600 a month for daycare as things opened up after the pandemic. The teachers there would have made more working at the Burger King across the street.
im not surprised. thats why people dont want to join the services, why bother when you can make more at walmart, target,etc. and they have a higher min wage.
Run by private equity?
mostly but its a cost-cutting measure to avoid paying MD, and RN prices.
No, not really at all. Some of the more expensive ones are, but that’s only because there is a profit margin on the wealthiest kids and aged. The floor for cost of care is ridiculously high for both groups, so there’s no margin to be made at anything below the crème de la crème facilities.
Most are, the investors need to make their money too! /s
The responses:
most are
no not at all
🤔
I’ve served on the board of non-profit daycares and I [vaguely] know at least one person who actually owns a for profit daycare.
Only a complete idiot would think they were going to make any money on a daycare. The overhead is nuts – even when paying really shitty compensation – and the competition is relentless.
What kind of things does the overhead go to?
if its corporate is likely Large admin/managment fees. minus the staff salary, and benefits if they even provide it. other thing like maintaing the facilities.
Cheesy poofs
And, here’s the kicker, they’re not even very profitable. This is the case for both for the same reason caring for the elderly and the young is insanely expensive.
It’s a weird one because it’s a huge expense but it’s also completely concentrated to a subset of the population for a subset of their life. I think it should have a public option. 2 toddlers, not infants, could cost us 50k/year
