D.C. childcare workers will get up to $14,000 to help fix the domino effect causing the Great Resignation: No childcare options for working parents

• D.C. day-care workers are getting either $10,000 or $14,000, a 25% pay bump for the average employee.
• Thousands of care workers have left the industry for better pay, leaving working parents in a bind.

Childcare workers in Washington, D.C. are about to get a sizable bonus, which comes as thousands leave the industry in search of better pay, leaving working parents in a bind.

Thousands of workers will get personal checks from the government, after the D.C. Council voted on Tuesday to use $53.9 million from a tax on the city's wealthiest residents put into place last year. Workers who care for young children will be eligible for either $10,000 or $14,000 payments, depending on whether they work as assistants or leaders in classrooms.

In most cases, day-care workers barely make more than minimum wage, which many cite as a reason for leaving the industry during the "Great Resignation" in which 47 million people fed-up with their working conditions quit in 2021. As of last December, there were still more than 110,000 child care employees missing from the workforce in comparison to February 2020, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The sector lost 3,700 positions between last November and December alone.

That's created a domino effect throughout the economy: parents who can't secure childcare can't go to work, and end up leaving their jobs. That's been especially true for mothers, who have left the workforce en masse during the pandemic. The D.C. Council hopes that the cash will reverse the trend.

"We depend on early childhood educators to nurture our children during their most foundational years and care for them so parents can go to their jobs," Councilmember Janeese Lewis George told Insider. "It's the work that makes all other work possible."

Shrinking childcare options are keeping working parents at home

The D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education will hire a company that will oversee the application process and administer funds, although they haven't decided whether or not the money will come in installments or a single payment. This year, every day-care worker who applies for money will get it, and the council says about 3,000 people are eligible.

A task force created by the council said that the money will represent a raise of nearly 25% for the city's average day-care worker. The average pay for child-care workers in the US is about $12 per hour, or $25,460 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That rate has been why workers have been migrating to other industries. Young women in particular, who mostly staff day-care centers, are taking jobs as administrative assistants, retail clerks and bank tellers instead, according to a Washington Post investigation from September. Day-care workers are also moving into full-time teaching positions at elementary schools, which usually pay better and come with more benefits.

Without enough employees, day-care workers have been turning away families, which leaves parents — usually mothers — unable to go back to work.

More than 4 million US jobs have been lost since February of 2020, the National Women's Law Center says, and women make up more than half of that total, with a lack of childcare options partially to blame. That number is even worse for women of color, Black and Latina women in particular.

And that goes both ways — 93% of child care workers are women, and 45% are Black, Asian, or Latina, according to the Labor Department, whose data also shows that half of childcare businesses in the US are owned by people of color.

"The predominantly Black and brown women who do this work have been underpaid for decades and are being forced out of the field in large numbers because the pay is unsustainable," Lewis George said. "Dignified wages will bring long-term stability and growth to child care in the District as we work to ensure that every family has high-quality, affordable early care and education."