Our colleague Nancy Fraser recently sat down with Slate’s Haley Swenson to discuss the deepening crisis of care in American life.
For Fraser, this crisis comes down to “the time crunch: the fact that households have to contribute many more hours to paid work to make ends meet and don’t have secure, well-paying jobs to the degree they used to in the past. So you’ve got all these jobs in the gig economy and lots of people running around working more than one job, and as a result, there’s the whole question of what happens on the homefront.” This lack of time leads low-income, middle class, and wealthy Americans alike to “make all kinds of ad hoc arrangements. You know, bartering care: “You take my kids today; I’ll take your son tomorrow.” People experience it as a personal problem, but it’s actually a structural, society wide problem due in part to changes in the structure of work and the structure of compensation.”
To read the full article, visit Slate Magazine here.