"Care" is the big idea that can unite, and transform, the country

In your life, you will care for others and be cared for. Veteran organizer Ai-jen Poo believes that supporting the care economy can be America's next great political undertaking -- and a unifying one

Whether you realize it or not, care is everywhere.

Care is what allows you occasionally to sneak out without the kids for date night. Care is what reassures you that your aging parents are being tended with dignity. Care is what lets you get back to work building that business after having a kid. Care may be what keeps your home clean, or your diabetes at bay, or your mental health on fleek.

We are all, at various moments in our lives, givers and receivers of care — from family members, neighbors, and paid professionals. The burden of giving care and the fact of needing it — this is one of the only things that unites Americans in an age of fracture.

In spite of there being a vigorous and essential “care economy,” however, care is woefully unsupported by public policy. Professional care workers lack vital protections and security, and ordinary citizens providing care to loved ones lack crucial supports, like paid time off work.

But this neglect may be about to change.

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Biden made plain that a care agenda would be a centerpiece of his second term as president. By focusing on care-related policies as his re-election agenda, Biden signaled his political evolution on matters of domestic policy: from what could be called the politics of personal decency to the politics of structural decency.

The centrality of care in the speech was what Biden might call a “big F-ing deal.” And what you may not know is that that centrality was also evidence of the profound influence of the domestic workers’ movement on the Democratic Party’s electoral agenda, and in particular of the way Ai-jen Poo, founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and executive director of Caring Across Generations, has been able to drive the discussion of care nationally.

Biden followed up on his care remarks in the State of the Union with an address in April at the Care Can’t Wait rally, at Union Station in Washington D.C. He again laid out his vision of a “care economy” — a system that supports the jobs (care work, for instance) that make all other jobs possible. In a care economy, no one should need to choose between working and taking care of a child or a parent, and care workers (who find themselves in the same impossible situation) would benefit in the same way.

This idea was at the core of the care provisions in early versions of Biden’s Build Back Better proposal, and while those elements didn’t make it into what became the Inflation Reduction Act, care is the first order of business for a second Biden term.

As Poo tells it, the important thing about care is that it is a potentially unifying issue like no other. Because of that, it is deeply felt and will be even more so as an aging America puts greater demands on our care infrastructure. She argues that the current devaluation of care is a major driver of inequality, and correcting that — looking at care as an industry ready to boom rather than as a societal cost — would mean transformative opportunities for all Americans. It’s the kind of issue that doesn’t respect ideology, that transcends partisan identification, that goes right to the heart of what people actually need to flourish. 

We talked with Ai-jen Poo about how the organizing she’s done among domestic workers provides a model for the labor movements of the future more generally, what a care economy would mean in practice, what the Biden administration has been able to achieve since the compromises of the Inflation Reduction Act, and the prospects for building a care economy in 2024 and beyond.

We urge you to read this conversation. You’ll come away with a new understanding not just of care, but of the structure of the American economy — and, we think, some renewed hope for a better future where you never have to choose between chasing your dreams and caring for those you love.

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You’re known as an advocate for care, and you’ve probably been one of the most significant influences on the incorporation of the language of care into the Democratic Party platform and the Biden campaign. Tell us what the focus of your work is right now.

Ever since the New Deal in the 1930s, domestic workers — the workers who work inside of our homes, providing caregiving and cleaning services as nannies, as care workers, as cleaners — it's a workforce that has always been predominantly women and majority women of color, especially Black women and immigrant women. And ever since our nation's labor laws were put into place, including the right to organize and collectively bargain, to form a union, these workers have been excluded from those protections.

It’s really rooted in this history of slavery and racial exclusion in our legal frameworks. And despite that, this workforce has also always organized because the working conditions are so brutal. It's a workforce where the entire workforce is disaggregated. It's like you could go into any neighborhood and not know which homes are also workplaces. A lot of times, you are the only one who knows that you work there, you and your employer. There's no list. There's no registry.

So how do you think about how you would organize collectively and how you would bargain? Especially because there's really nobody to bargain with, the people you work for are essentially people who need care.

Domestic workers were perhaps canaries in the coal mine, because more and more Americans work as disaggregated independent contractors and suffer job insecurity and struggle to make common cause. How might what you’re doing with domestic workers spill over into other sectors?

We always say that domestic workers are the original futurists.