8 ms·

The Rise of Extreme Daycare

48 points by tokenadult 12y ago

veb 12y ago
I have so many feelings about this article. I feel so much sadness for the parents who need to use these kind of places, but yet I feel happy that the kids have somewhere to go and that the parent(s) can pay for it. I still don't like it much. The article's projections just left my head shaking. Someone needs to tell these programmers/marketers that there's a wee factor called "humanity" that they need to use when creating their algorithms. I wish it was as easy as that. :( Could someone enlighten me around this? I'm not in the US, and I have a hard time even thinking about everything being open 24/7. (New Zealand is where I reside) Though, the people who run these wee centres are doing some selfless work. Absolutely amazing, and good on them for doing it. It makes me happy there's still people like that around. (I realise not everyone would be like the daycare in the article but I'd like to think so.)
- pilsetnieks 12y ago
  > Someone needs to tell these programmers/marketers that there's a wee factor called "humanity" that they need to use when creating their algorithms What have programmers, marketers, and algorithms to do with this, since you explicitly pointed them out?
  - mattlutze 12y ago
    veb is referring to this paragraph from the beginning of the article: " Working people who live below the poverty line are particularly afraid to say no to these unusual schedules. They may have no one to say no to, anyway—those schedules might have been created by computers, rather than human managers, in the hopes of saving a corporation money. Many companies now use data and algorithms to schedule employees so fewer hours will be spent sitting around. The software doesn’t care if a shift falls in the middle of the night, or that it might tear a big hole in an employee’s family life."
- jessaustin 12y ago
  I'm not in the US, and I have a hard time even thinking about everything being open 24/7. (New Zealand is where I reside) I'm not surprised! When I worked in NZ for a few months, years ago, I found very few businesses open outside of "business hours". This made e.g. grocery shopping a challenge. A few touristy places were open on Saturday morning. Please don't take this as a criticism; run your country however you want to run it. It's just that cultural differences go both ways, and the other side looks weird no matter which direction one is looking.
  - veb 12y ago
    We used to have a 24/7 grocery store in Dunedin! ;-) Now it shuts before midnight. You'll find in the major centres like Auckland or Wellington that there'll be more of those open 24/7... but I can't think of anything else. Mind you, banks that shut at 4.30pm are kind of annoying for many people and I can't blame them (even though my wife is a banker). There's only _one_ small branch open in a city of 140,000 people on a Saturday. No other banks open in the weekends here at least. That being said, and on topic with the article... it'll be much easier for a single mum to stay at home with her kids and collect money from the govt, rather than to work nightshift at a supermarket most likely. I don't even think we have these extreme daycares in NZ. She may not get more money than someone who stacks shelves, but it's definitely much better than her losing out on her children growing up or the children missing their only parent from their lives. Many parents like this will normally go back to work once the kids start full-time school, but still receive maybe $100 for accommodation help if they're not making enough. I like this a lot better than them having to be in the same circumstances as the women in the article. (I know men fall into this too, I just used women as an example as the article primarily did)
    - jessaustin 12y ago
      I don't even think we have these extreme daycares in NZ. They're not the norm in USA either. As TFA implied, this is not just a failure of the state (although it is that), but also of the social structure. The single parents described have no one to whom they can turn. I know a family (parents not married, but together for a long time) that had a hard time over the summer. They camped in a state park for over a month. (The younger son loved it.) The good news is that now both parents are working, incidentally at jobs that allow them to still eschew daycare. (Not that daycare is bad for other families; this is just an indication of this family's views.) My time in NZ was almost entirely in Wellington, and was over a decade ago, so maybe everything is different now. One challenge for me was living and working downtown without an automobile. When walking absolutely wouldn't work, I found the buses to be less convenient than buses I've ridden elsewhere.
josh_fyi 12y ago
Notice the 29 hour-a-week job? Healthcare, anyone?
- socialist_coder 12y ago
  Terrible. People working 2 part time jobs at 54+ hours a week and still no health care benefits, while corporate profits and executive pay continue to increase. I think this 29 hour per week loophole was supposed to be fixed in the ACA but it was one of the things that got left on the negotiating table.
  - ssmoot 12y ago
    Isn't it fixed though? I thought that was the whole point of the insurance subsidies. You should be able to get healthcare (possibly even better healthcare), even if your employer doesn't provide it. I thought.
  - viggity 12y ago
    what negotiating table? The dems didn't need (or get) any republican support. The whole thing was done behind closed doors "we need to pass it so you can see what is in it". All from the "most transparent" administration in history.
    - TheCoelacanth 12y ago
      They needed every single Democratic vote to pass it in the Senate. Many concessions were made to get some of the more conservative Democratic senators on board.
vidarh 12y ago
The US looks more and more like a third world country. The descriptions of working situations in that article are horrifying.
- alkonaut 12y ago
  This. "working poor" is an oxymoron in comparable countries. Like it should be. I'd be laughing at it if it wasn't so bloody tragic. How is this not a top political issue?
  - fpgeek 12y ago
    Well, the people caught in this trap can find it difficult to take time out of their schedule on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, not to mention the many other hoops they may have to jump through in order to be counted politically.
    - alkonaut 12y ago
      This is just the next tragedy. Register in order to get to vote? People (100%) not having ID's? Why not issue ID's to everyone and just be done with it? Passports would be good... Early voting seems to be possible in most states, and with at least 4 days of voting before the tuesday, most people should be able to do it. How can it not be a requirement for all states to provide early voting?
      - gambiting 12y ago
        I am not from US, but as someone explained this to me - issuing everyone national IDs like we have in EU would be incredibly hard if not impossible,because there is not one certain way to establish if someone is a citizen or not, so a lot of people in US would perceive such attempt as being a discriminatory one.
        dkhenry 12y ago
        Its actually quite easy to issue everyone an ID as most people already have one. Over 90% of individuals have a drivers license that could be used, That has nothing to say of any of the other official ID's that you could use, however the very very very small minority of individuals who don't have ID's are so reliable a voting bloc for one party that anything that might reduce the size of that bloc is not even entertained. So no amount of resources or effort will ever convince that party to adopt a policy requiring ID's since that will result in the loss of at least some votes which would hurt them.
fwn 12y ago
It is a great tragedy that there is the need for such 24h daycare services. - Both for children and parents. Speaking about parents: I really wonder how they got to this point. Clearly creating two children while in need of two low paid jobs seems like the opposite of a risk averse strategy.
- alkonaut 12y ago
  > Clearly creating two children while in need of two low paid jobs seems like the opposite of a risk averse strategy. Conversely, not making sure that every family feels comfortable creating >= 2.0 children surely isn't a good strategy for the society as a whole either. This means calculating a decent minimum wage is simple: it's what a single parent needs to support two kids (including healthcare, holidays, ...) with some margin, while working just one single full time job.
  - fwn 12y ago
    Prohibiting low income jobs for those in need seems like a very cynical idea to fight low income poverty.
    - alkonaut 12y ago
      What's cynical is a system where having a job doesn't provide a living wage. That just needs to be fixed. There is no point trying to scare with the fact that this would take people from a job that doesn't pay enough, to welfare that pays even less. Higher minimum wages could mean higher unemployment of course, but it isn't a right to employ people without paying them a living wage. Raised minium wages would need to be coupled with increased spending on social benefits/welfare.
      - ciupicri 12y ago
        What is a "living wage"?
        12y ago
parennoob 12y ago
If you have a bunch of single people raising kids on their own, something like this is bound to happen. "Diana and Ivette’s mother, Marisol, for instance, is raising the girls on her own, working at a supermarket from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. and at Home Depot from 6 to 10 p.m., six days a week. " "This clock has highlighted weakness in our social networks. In 2013, 28 percent of children were living with a single parent; 77 percent of those single parents are mothers." Sounds like at some point, people are going to have to make a specific choice between raising kids on their own (potentially) or not having them at all; and vote for Governments that favor the policy they prefer.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  How can we as a society survive if most people decide to not have kids at all?
  - parennoob 12y ago
    Adoption? Immigration? The US is supposed to be a nation of immigrants, after all.
    - eidyia 12y ago
      "How can we as a society survive if most people decide to not have kids at all?" > at all, suggests adoption is out of the question its not a matter of giving birth to a kid but raising it. > immigration is hardly a "solution" its like having 2 pans and a pizza dough enough for 1 pan, and split it to 2 pans making half a pizza in each. you have 2 pizzas, but smaller, thinner and sadder =[
    - guard-of-terra 12y ago
      If you rely on immigration from 3rd world countries to replenish population, you'll become a 3rd world country. Do you really want that?
      - tokenadult 12y ago
GrinningFool 12y ago
Something about psmag.com makes firefox very sad.
tokenadult 12y ago
"Marisol works 29 hours at each of her jobs. This is common. If an employee works more hours, her employer is required to provide health insurance." This is just one example of how poorly drafted the Affordable Care Act is. The lobbyists who wrote the bill (remember, the President provided almost no leadership on the detailed provisions of the bill while it was in Congress) ignored the certainty of elasticity of demand for labor by employers. If it becomes more expensive to provide full-time employment, because of a mandate to provide health insurance to full-time employees, then employers will offer fewer full-time jobs and more part-time jobs with few enough hours not to trigger the health insurance mandate. The drafters of the Affordable Care Act forgot Economics 101, or maybe never learned economics at all. "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
- extra88 12y ago
  Or they knew exactly what would happen but went with it anyway so they'd have a bill that would actually get through the Senate. If you assume employer-provided insurance (which is bad but what the U.S. has), what's the alternative? Any part-time number you pick, some employers will schedule people just below it so if someone works even one hour, they get covered? How do you then sort out which of multiple employers actually provides insurance? Short-sighted, penny-pinching employers will always look for a loophole, if they couldn't get out of it by reducing hours, they'd do something like call each worker a "contractor" and not employee.
  - fulafel 12y ago
    To answer the "How would you you...", you enable the employee to sue if they are artificially given less than full work-hours. It's not a hard thing to prove if there's a nontrivial part time work force. These being the odds, the companies don't try to pull it off too often, even if the court cases would mostly come from ex-workers.

48 points by tokenadult 12y ago

veb 12y ago

I have so many feelings about this article. I feel so much sadness for the parents who need to use these kind of places, but yet I feel happy that the kids have somewhere to go and that the parent(s) can pay for it. I still don't like it much. The article's projections just left my head shaking. Someone needs to tell these programmers/marketers that there's a wee factor called "humanity" that they need to use when creating their algorithms. I wish it was as easy as that. :( Could someone enlighten me around this? I'm not in the US, and I have a hard time even thinking about everything being open 24/7. (New Zealand is where I reside) Though, the people who run these wee centres are doing some selfless work. Absolutely amazing, and good on them for doing it. It makes me happy there's still people like that around. (I realise not everyone would be like the daycare in the article but I'd like to think so.)

pilsetnieks 12y ago
> Someone needs to tell these programmers/marketers that there's a wee factor called "humanity" that they need to use when creating their algorithms What have programmers, marketers, and algorithms to do with this, since you explicitly pointed them out?
- mattlutze 12y ago
  veb is referring to this paragraph from the beginning of the article: " Working people who live below the poverty line are particularly afraid to say no to these unusual schedules. They may have no one to say no to, anyway—those schedules might have been created by computers, rather than human managers, in the hopes of saving a corporation money. Many companies now use data and algorithms to schedule employees so fewer hours will be spent sitting around. The software doesn’t care if a shift falls in the middle of the night, or that it might tear a big hole in an employee’s family life."
jessaustin 12y ago
I'm not in the US, and I have a hard time even thinking about everything being open 24/7. (New Zealand is where I reside) I'm not surprised! When I worked in NZ for a few months, years ago, I found very few businesses open outside of "business hours". This made e.g. grocery shopping a challenge. A few touristy places were open on Saturday morning. Please don't take this as a criticism; run your country however you want to run it. It's just that cultural differences go both ways, and the other side looks weird no matter which direction one is looking.
- veb 12y ago
  We used to have a 24/7 grocery store in Dunedin! ;-) Now it shuts before midnight. You'll find in the major centres like Auckland or Wellington that there'll be more of those open 24/7... but I can't think of anything else. Mind you, banks that shut at 4.30pm are kind of annoying for many people and I can't blame them (even though my wife is a banker). There's only _one_ small branch open in a city of 140,000 people on a Saturday. No other banks open in the weekends here at least. That being said, and on topic with the article... it'll be much easier for a single mum to stay at home with her kids and collect money from the govt, rather than to work nightshift at a supermarket most likely. I don't even think we have these extreme daycares in NZ. She may not get more money than someone who stacks shelves, but it's definitely much better than her losing out on her children growing up or the children missing their only parent from their lives. Many parents like this will normally go back to work once the kids start full-time school, but still receive maybe $100 for accommodation help if they're not making enough. I like this a lot better than them having to be in the same circumstances as the women in the article. (I know men fall into this too, I just used women as an example as the article primarily did)
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    I don't even think we have these extreme daycares in NZ. They're not the norm in USA either. As TFA implied, this is not just a failure of the state (although it is that), but also of the social structure. The single parents described have no one to whom they can turn. I know a family (parents not married, but together for a long time) that had a hard time over the summer. They camped in a state park for over a month. (The younger son loved it.) The good news is that now both parents are working, incidentally at jobs that allow them to still eschew daycare. (Not that daycare is bad for other families; this is just an indication of this family's views.) My time in NZ was almost entirely in Wellington, and was over a decade ago, so maybe everything is different now. One challenge for me was living and working downtown without an automobile. When walking absolutely wouldn't work, I found the buses to be less convenient than buses I've ridden elsewhere.

josh_fyi 12y ago

Notice the 29 hour-a-week job? Healthcare, anyone?

socialist_coder 12y ago
Terrible. People working 2 part time jobs at 54+ hours a week and still no health care benefits, while corporate profits and executive pay continue to increase. I think this 29 hour per week loophole was supposed to be fixed in the ACA but it was one of the things that got left on the negotiating table.
- ssmoot 12y ago
  Isn't it fixed though? I thought that was the whole point of the insurance subsidies. You should be able to get healthcare (possibly even better healthcare), even if your employer doesn't provide it. I thought.
- viggity 12y ago
  what negotiating table? The dems didn't need (or get) any republican support. The whole thing was done behind closed doors "we need to pass it so you can see what is in it". All from the "most transparent" administration in history.
  - TheCoelacanth 12y ago
    They needed every single Democratic vote to pass it in the Senate. Many concessions were made to get some of the more conservative Democratic senators on board.

vidarh 12y ago

The US looks more and more like a third world country. The descriptions of working situations in that article are horrifying.

alkonaut 12y ago
This. "working poor" is an oxymoron in comparable countries. Like it should be. I'd be laughing at it if it wasn't so bloody tragic. How is this not a top political issue?
- fpgeek 12y ago
  Well, the people caught in this trap can find it difficult to take time out of their schedule on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, not to mention the many other hoops they may have to jump through in order to be counted politically.
  - alkonaut 12y ago
    This is just the next tragedy. Register in order to get to vote? People (100%) not having ID's? Why not issue ID's to everyone and just be done with it? Passports would be good... Early voting seems to be possible in most states, and with at least 4 days of voting before the tuesday, most people should be able to do it. How can it not be a requirement for all states to provide early voting?
    - gambiting 12y ago
      I am not from US, but as someone explained this to me - issuing everyone national IDs like we have in EU would be incredibly hard if not impossible,because there is not one certain way to establish if someone is a citizen or not, so a lot of people in US would perceive such attempt as being a discriminatory one.
      - dkhenry 12y ago
        Its actually quite easy to issue everyone an ID as most people already have one. Over 90% of individuals have a drivers license that could be used, That has nothing to say of any of the other official ID's that you could use, however the very very very small minority of individuals who don't have ID's are so reliable a voting bloc for one party that anything that might reduce the size of that bloc is not even entertained. So no amount of resources or effort will ever convince that party to adopt a policy requiring ID's since that will result in the loss of at least some votes which would hurt them.

fwn 12y ago

It is a great tragedy that there is the need for such 24h daycare services. - Both for children and parents. Speaking about parents: I really wonder how they got to this point. Clearly creating two children while in need of two low paid jobs seems like the opposite of a risk averse strategy.

alkonaut 12y ago
> Clearly creating two children while in need of two low paid jobs seems like the opposite of a risk averse strategy. Conversely, not making sure that every family feels comfortable creating >= 2.0 children surely isn't a good strategy for the society as a whole either. This means calculating a decent minimum wage is simple: it's what a single parent needs to support two kids (including healthcare, holidays, ...) with some margin, while working just one single full time job.
- fwn 12y ago
  Prohibiting low income jobs for those in need seems like a very cynical idea to fight low income poverty.
  - alkonaut 12y ago
    What's cynical is a system where having a job doesn't provide a living wage. That just needs to be fixed. There is no point trying to scare with the fact that this would take people from a job that doesn't pay enough, to welfare that pays even less. Higher minimum wages could mean higher unemployment of course, but it isn't a right to employ people without paying them a living wage. Raised minium wages would need to be coupled with increased spending on social benefits/welfare.
    - ciupicri 12y ago
      What is a "living wage"?
      - 12y ago

parennoob 12y ago

If you have a bunch of single people raising kids on their own, something like this is bound to happen. "Diana and Ivette’s mother, Marisol, for instance, is raising the girls on her own, working at a supermarket from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. and at Home Depot from 6 to 10 p.m., six days a week. " "This clock has highlighted weakness in our social networks. In 2013, 28 percent of children were living with a single parent; 77 percent of those single parents are mothers." Sounds like at some point, people are going to have to make a specific choice between raising kids on their own (potentially) or not having them at all; and vote for Governments that favor the policy they prefer.

guard-of-terra 12y ago
How can we as a society survive if most people decide to not have kids at all?
- parennoob 12y ago
  Adoption? Immigration? The US is supposed to be a nation of immigrants, after all.
  - eidyia 12y ago
    "How can we as a society survive if most people decide to not have kids at all?" > at all, suggests adoption is out of the question its not a matter of giving birth to a kid but raising it. > immigration is hardly a "solution" its like having 2 pans and a pizza dough enough for 1 pan, and split it to 2 pans making half a pizza in each. you have 2 pizzas, but smaller, thinner and sadder =[
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    If you rely on immigration from 3rd world countries to replenish population, you'll become a 3rd world country. Do you really want that?
    - tokenadult 12y ago

GrinningFool 12y ago

Something about psmag.com makes firefox very sad.

tokenadult 12y ago

"Marisol works 29 hours at each of her jobs. This is common. If an employee works more hours, her employer is required to provide health insurance." This is just one example of how poorly drafted the Affordable Care Act is. The lobbyists who wrote the bill (remember, the President provided almost no leadership on the detailed provisions of the bill while it was in Congress) ignored the certainty of elasticity of demand for labor by employers. If it becomes more expensive to provide full-time employment, because of a mandate to provide health insurance to full-time employees, then employers will offer fewer full-time jobs and more part-time jobs with few enough hours not to trigger the health insurance mandate. The drafters of the Affordable Care Act forgot Economics 101, or maybe never learned economics at all. "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."

extra88 12y ago
Or they knew exactly what would happen but went with it anyway so they'd have a bill that would actually get through the Senate. If you assume employer-provided insurance (which is bad but what the U.S. has), what's the alternative? Any part-time number you pick, some employers will schedule people just below it so if someone works even one hour, they get covered? How do you then sort out which of multiple employers actually provides insurance? Short-sighted, penny-pinching employers will always look for a loophole, if they couldn't get out of it by reducing hours, they'd do something like call each worker a "contractor" and not employee.
- fulafel 12y ago
  To answer the "How would you you...", you enable the employee to sue if they are artificially given less than full work-hours. It's not a hard thing to prove if there's a nontrivial part time work force. These being the odds, the companies don't try to pull it off too often, even if the court cases would mostly come from ex-workers.