Ms. Collins (no, she’s not TOMC today) has a column called “None Dare Call It Child Care.” Mr. Cohen writes about France’s finance minister, Christine Lagarde, and her efforts to rehabilitate the concept of work in France. Here’s Ms. Collins:
In the last presidential candidate debate, Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked whether this country would ever get back to the days when a young guy could come out of high school, get an industrial job “and provide for a family with a middle-class income and his spouse wouldn’t have to work.”
Given the fact that more than two-thirds of American mothers have been working outside the home since the 1980s, Matthews could just as easily have demanded to know when we’ll get back to using manual typewriters and rotary phones.
Still, it might have been a great conversation-starter. While it’s becoming virtually impossible to support a middle-class American family on one parent’s salary, we never hear political discussion about the repercussions. In a two-hour debate that focused on job-related issues, the Republican presidential candidates managed to mention the Smoot-Hawley tariff and trade relations with Peru but not a word about child care for America’s working parents. John McCain, who was on the receiving end of Matthews’s question, chose instead to focus on the fact that “50,000 Americans now make their living off eBay,” that the tax code is “eminently unfair” and that Congress wastes too much money studying of the DNA of Montana bears.
We live in a country where quality child care is controversial. It was one of the very first issues to be swift-boated by social conservatives. In 1971, Congress actually passed a comprehensive child care bill that was vetoed by Richard Nixon. The next time the bill came up, members were flooded with mail accusing them of being anti-family communists who wanted to let kids sue their parents if they were forced to go to church. It scared the heck out of everybody.
Right now, the only parents who routinely get serious child-care assistance from the government are extremely poor mothers in welfare-to-work programs. Even for them, the waiting lists tend to be ridiculously long. In many states, once the woman actually gets a job, she loses the day care. Middle-class families get zip, even though a decent private child care program costs $12,000 a year in some parts of the country.
The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, or Naccrra, (this is an area replete with extraordinary people organized into groups with impossible names) says that in some states the average annual price of care was larger than the entire median income of a single parent with two children. For child care workers, the average wage is $8.78 an hour. It’s one of the worst-paying career tracks in the country. A preschool teacher with a postgraduate degree and years of experience can make $30,000 a year. You need certification in this country to be a butcher, a barber or a manicurist, but only 12 states require any training to take care of children. Only three require comprehensive background checks. In Iowa, there are 591 child care programs to every one inspector. California inspects child care centers once every five years.
“You have a work force that makes $8.78 an hour. They have no training. They have not been background checked, and we’ve put them in with children who don’t have the verbal skills to even tell somebody that they’re being treated badly,” said Linda Smith, the executive director of Naccrra. “What is wrong with a country that thinks that’s O.K.?”
We aren’t going to solve the problem during this presidential contest, but it is absolutely nuts that it isn’t a topic of discussion — or even election-year pandering. The Democratic candidates for president happily come together to tell organized labor about their unquenchable desire to have a union member as secretary of labor. The Republican candidates flock to assure the National Rifle Association about their dedication to Americans’ constitutional right to carry concealed weapons in churches. But you do not see anybody racing off to romance child care advocates.
The only candidate who talks about child care all the time is Chris Dodd of Connecticut. He has been the issue’s champion of the Senate forever. People who work in the field know he’s their guy, but it’s hard to see what good it does him out on the campaign trail. “They aren’t inclined to be the kind of people who engage in the political process,” he admitted. “They don’t have the money.”
This is Hillary Clinton’s Women’s Week. On Tuesday, she gave a major speech on working mothers in New Hampshire, with stories about her struggles when Chelsea was a baby, a grab-bag of Clintonian mini-ideas (encourage telecommuting, give awards to family-friendly businesses) and a middle-sized proposal to expand family leave. Yesterday, she was in the company of some adorable 2- and 3-year-olds, speaking out for a bill on child care workers that has little chance of passage and would make almost no difference even if it did. Clinton most certainly gets it, but she wasn’t prepared to get any closer to the problems of working parents than a plan to help them stay home from work.
At least she mentioned the subject.
Here’s Mr. Cohen:
Not only is Christine Lagarde France’s finance minister, ready to forsake her native tongue, she is, she says, “happier doing this in English.” With that, right off the bat, she declares in ringing Anglo-Saxon: “We are trying to change the psyche of the French people in relation to work.”
A hopeless task, some might say. Deep in the Gallic soul resides the notion that work is exploitation, a ruse concocted by American robber barons, best regulated and minimized and offset by hours of idleness. The demise of the Soviet Union left France leading the counter-capitalist school.
But Lagarde, 51, tall and striking, is not known as “the American” for nothing. Think of her as the face of a new France ditching its cold-war hangover. The sobriquet reflects her linguistic skills, her background as a highflying executive for the Baker & McKenzie law firm and her Chicago-cultivated candor.
In an interview, Lagarde says that more than two decades at a U.S. corporation taught her: “The more hours you worked, the more hours you billed, the more profit you could generate for yourself and your firm. That was the mantra.”
The equivalent mantra in the French bureaucracy might be: the fewer hours you work, the more vacation you take, the more time you have to grumble about the state of the universe and the smarter you feel, especially compared to workaholic dingbats across the Atlantic with no time for boules.
So Lagarde, appointed four months ago by President Nicolas Sarkozy, is aware that she faces a big challenge: “What was really striking to me when I came back from Chicago in 2005 was that the law on the 35-hour week had passed and been internalized by individuals and, I think, had produced disastrous effects.”
What effects? “People did not really talk about their work. They talked about their long weekends.”
Lagarde’s goal, she says, is to slash France’s chronically highly unemployment — now about 8 percent — to 5 percent by 2012 and increase the proportion of the total population in jobs to 70 percent from 63 percent. Rehabilitating work is central to this ambition.
Tax cuts, the termination of unemployment benefits for those refusing two valid job offers, later retirement, incentives for those working more than 35 hours, a slashing of the bureaucracy associated with job-seeking and improved professional training are among measures enacted or envisaged. Legislation to reverse the 35-hour week is possible.
“I think we have to go around it,” Lagarde says of the law. “To demonstrate that it’s not a holy principle and it can be modified, varied, mitigated and possibly reversed.”
Not without a fight, however. French workers are expected to take to the streets today in what will likely be one of many big strikes against the Sarkozy-Lagarde reforms. Former governments have caved as Bastille-storming specters rose.
Not this time, insists Lagarde. “We certainly have the resolve to see reforms through,” she says. “A significant majority voted in support of a reform program that was completely advocated, advertised, trumpeted.”
France, she suggests, is changing in the image of a president whose approach “is not being constrained by rules, principles, protocol, straitjackets.”
The country, long hung up in a left-bank bubble filled with quaint notions of reversing globalization, now wants “to take advantage of a globalized world, rather than be defensive.”
To which I say: hallelujah. Without a dynamic France, Europe cannot be revitalized, and a Europe in a Gallic funk is bad for everyone. If an overbearing America has been a problem, an underperforming Europe has been its complement.
Better European performance, Lagarde thinks, is linked to exchange rates. “There is a competitive disadvantage in having a strong euro versus a relatively weak yen, a deliberately weak yuan and a low dollar,” she says ahead of a G-7 meeting tomorrow.
Another problem Lagarde faces is with a potential insider trading scandal at the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, the partly state-owned parent of Airbus whose stock plunged after delays in the A-380 superjumbo jet. She insisted there had been no government wrongdoing.
Still, small shareholder losses incurred as executives cashed in, and the impression of a cozy relationship between private and state capital, will not help Lagarde in her revolutionary efforts.
This revolution, she insists, must begin in the French head. Lagarde has become the anti-Descartes by declaring the French should think less to work more.
“What has escaped my critics,” she says with a smile, “is that clearly before action, there must be thinking. But we have been splitting hairs and talking about the sex of angels for long enough. We know the solutions to all our evils. So let’s roll up our sleeves.”
Hallelujah — and as we Anglo-Saxons say, Vive la France!
