Labor Day originated as a celebration of the American worker and the gains organized labor won for him, most preeminently the fixed, 40-hour workweek. But not every “pro-labor” government mandate is actually what workers want.
Public intellectual Oren Cass summed up a just concluded Wall Street Journal series about where the money of today’s new parents goes—and, therefore, why young people are reticent about parenthood—as “the big math problem.” The finances of three families with young children in which both parents work revealed:
- For family 1, 75% of new, child-related expenses were the cost of a nanny.
- For family 2, 100% of those expenses were daycare.
- For family 3—where one parent decided to stay home with the child—no new costs but a major income loss because the stay-at-home parent was dad.
Cue Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and AOC announcing the government must expand subsidies for daycare to alleviate the costs for working parents. But surveys by Oren Cass’ think tank, American Compass, suggest that “solution” is actually backward. What many parents want is not daycare subsidies so they can work; they want a system where a parent can remain at home with young children during their formative years.
Why is the subsidies solution backward? Because two groups are looking at the problem in two very different ways. Most Americans look at the problem within the context of what Cass calls “Middle-Class Security”: What does it take to live a reasonably modest but comfortable, secure life? What the policy wonks look at is “how to solve the daycare costs problem.” It’s a difference between macro- and micro-visions.
What Cass calls “middle-class security” is what the average American once expected a provider’s honest, hard work should be able to provide: a house; affordable health care insurance you can use to stay healthy; being able to save toward kids’ college; retirement security. Note I wrote “a provider’s honest hard work.” Singular. One pay. One provider. In other words, what Pope Leo XIII described, more than a century ago, as “a living wage.”
As Cass sums it up:
most families don’t want subsidized childcare so that both ‘parents are freed up to work,’ they want to have a parent at home with young children. The problem is the paradoxical economic model in the United States that depends upon two incomes to obtain middle-class security, even though families rightly recognize that middle-class security requires being able to support themselves on one income.
Labor Day originated to honor a political decision about what constitutes an ethical economy—i.e., that an individual’s and nation’s prosperity should be achievable in an economy that demanded no more than 40 hours of work per week. That’s roughly one-quarter of a man’s life each week, one-third of his working days. Given he spends the other third sleeping, having one-third of his life for all his other obligations and rights outside of economic activity seems fair.
In other words, just as Labor Day was born in connection with taming the amount of time a job can take out of a worker’s week, the question for Labor Day today seems to be taming an economic model in terms of the time it can claim, as the price of middle-class prosperity, out of people’s lives. That means recognizing that other things—most preeminently families—may and should govern, even trump, that model.
Stable families in which good parenting is recognized as contributing at least as much to a commonwealth’s prosperity as the GDP makes political and economic—as well as moral—sense. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to the economist guided by next-quarter earnings, but the work of creating good, solid, reliable, and prosperous future workers, businessmen, and consumers starts with long-term investments in families. That reality is overlooked by the Scylla of economic laissez-faireists who dismiss it as a purely “private” concern and the Charybdis of government interventionists who proffer expanded daycare as the solution to the “problem” of kids getting in the way of work. Consciously or not, the latter form common cause with the former because both reduce humans to homo economicus, refusing to see the problem may not be the kids but what Claudia Goldin called “greedy work.”
Labor Day was born of the conviction that a man’s prosperity should not consume his whole life. Forty hours was a moral boundary, not just an economic bargain: one-third of his week to work, one-third to rest, and one-third to family, faith, and civic duty. Today, the great question is not only how much time work demands but whose time. An economic model that requires two full-time incomes to secure middle-class stability has already failed the family, even if GDP rises. The measure of prosperity is not quarterly earnings but whether parents can give the gift of presence to their children.
The “labor” question in 2025 is: Should the “living wage” due for work require consuming the time of two parents to ensure familial economic security? Because, especially in the case of mothers, woman does not live by or on work alone.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.
