If Social Security Treated Caregiving as Work...
Our retirement safety net doesn't value the people who provide support to others
Other Feminisms turns one year old this weekend! I’ll have some special posts coming up to celebrate and reflect a little on the past year and the year to come. This week, I want to return to one of the earliest topics we discussed: how does the pay we set for different kinds of work reflect what we value?
Stephanie H. Murray has an excellent piece up at The Atlantic on how the formula for Social Security benefits systemically shortchanges women and all caregivers.
When you retire, the amount you receive in Social Security each month is a percentage of your average income during your 35 highest-earning years. Those with meager work histories may be entitled to a spousal benefit equivalent to, at most, half of what their current or former spouse receives each month. By design, this system penalizes anyone who, at any point in their life, works part-time; chooses a lower-paying, family-friendly job; or stays home to care for their children. Because women are more likely to do all those things, they inevitably receive smaller payouts than men. The average retirement benefit for men is about $1,600 a month, roughly $300 more than the average woman receives. My mom’s spousal benefit will amount to about $650 a month if she waits until she’s 67 to claim it, compared with my father’s $1,300. The fact that women enter retirement with fewer resources and are entitled to fewer retirement benefits puts single, widowed, and divorced mothers at a particularly high risk of poverty in old age.
As she points out, Social Security depends on two sources of income to be able to pay out benefits:
The money paid in by current workers.
The existence of future workers, who will themselves pay in to support the people supporting today’s retirees.
Americans are rewarded for contributing to (1) but not to (2). Your benefits increase with the amount you earned (and thus, the amount you paid in through your taxes), but parents don’t receive any additional bonus for helping to stabilize the system by having kids. Instead, they get a double whammy—making less in the present as they step back from work, and receiving less in the future when their benefits are scaled to their diminished earnings.
There may not be a complete solution to this problem, but Murray suggests a pretty doable improvement. Many European countries offer “caregiver credits” as part of their public pension programs. Women’s time spent mothering is rewarded as valuable work—work we all depend upon—and they are pensioned accordingly.
This kind of credits program could be expanded beyond caregiving, to fold in volunteer work or other kinds of work where the pay is lower than the value of the work. We’d be pricing the positive externalities of care back into our safety net.
Before I get an economics objection here, I think there’s a common class of work where the pay cannot approach the value provided: when you provide something desperately needed to people who cannot afford it.
This might be providing medical care or legal aid to indigent clients or helping someone navigate a complicated bureaucracy to get the benefits they’re entitled to. The work is worth doing, but the “customer” is too cash poor to pay for that value. Someone else has to step in to subsidize the work, whether it’s a religious order, a non-profit, or the government.
In some ways, this is what programs like the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program are meant to do—to provide a big subsidy to people who choose to forgo a heftier paycheck in order to provide more urgently needed service.
Unfortunately, the PSLFP has been administered disastrously, making promises to undergraduates with so many caveats and secret hurdles that very few of the people who had reason to believe they were enrolled have actually had their loans forgiven.
That makes me think that a just response might be a wider use of “social good” Social Security credits for unpaid or poorly paid work, but the achievable response might be to offer several years of credits to parents who spend time out of the workforce. The easier it is to determine who qualifies, the less paperwork and fewer barriers there are for the people who need the benefit most.
I've had quite a bit more experience in issues of elder care and support since you wrote the last post on rewarding caregivers a year ago, and I wish I had better things to say. Instead, I'm left with the impression that it's almost futile to start thinking about better ways of materially supporting older people before we can figure out how to, as a culture, make needing help something that doesn't spawn shame and avoidance, even to the point of intense harm.
Last year I was living in a house that had been converted into two apartments. My downstairs neighbor was an older man with no children. One day I found some notes on my door asking for help buying cigarettes and groceries because he was unable to walk. He also wanted me to post a letter for him, which I opened by mistake (thinking it was another note to me) and found evidence that he'd been victim to a financial scam. I called Adult Protective Services and they opened some kind of file on him. A few days later, his requests to me had intensified and became more and more nonsensical--he wanted me to drive him to a bank in the middle of an intense snowstorm and couldn't understand when I said no, he asked for blankets in the same snowstorm because he was too cold, while his windows were wide open. After hearing him fall and rushing down the stairs thinking he was dead, I called APS again and told them to send someone in the next hour or I would call 911. They found that the situation was much worse than even I had realized--he probably would have died of dehydration in the next few days had I not called--and he was eventually taken to a nursing home after a psychiatric hold. The last time I spoke to him he said "I know I'm being difficult, but I can't go die in a nursing home." As tragic as that was, it also made me really angry. He had clearly never thought about the fact that he would eventually decline and die. What did he want, for me to fulfil his list of demands and then one day find his dead body??????
I had the same experience after my grandmother's death a few months later, where my grandad just would not accept that he was unable to live independently without her help. We didn't have power of attorney over him, so all we could do is hire someone to come help him for an hour a day. We were finally able to get him into an assisted living facility recently, and all I can feel is relief that I'm no longer waiting for a call saying that he died because he stopped taking his medications, or fell and there was no one around.
The silver lining of this whole experience has been that my dad and I have had some more frank conversations about my parents' plan on aging, and he's planning to turn over power of attorney to me before any inevitable mental decline. We've also discussed the fact that retiring in some idyllic location is probably not going to be an option--they will have to retire close to me or one of my siblings.
But, I guess all of this is to say, it's hard for me to even think about material support for aging right now when the more salient concern seems to be--how can we encourage people to be comfortable even just talking about, and planning for, their eventual decline and death?
No way! This past week, while keeping up with our household finances and bills and such, I fell down a rabbit hole and was literally reading the Social Security Administration's retirement benefits website, for the first time suddenly curious about how such rules might apply to me in particular. (I had a very modest salary for ten years, and have not earned income for the past six; my spouse's federal salary and pension support our family and have become the basis of how we plan to meet current and future needs.) I admit I was taken aback to realize precisely how that gap in income-earning time factors into the formula for benefits received. So I come to this post energized and a bit indignant!
Three other notes from this week which seem pertinent:
1) After cruising the SSA site, I felt compelled to tally up the economic value of the administrative skill and leadership I've been donating to a nonprofit organization in recent years, after choosing as a parent of (then newly two and now busily three) young children to say farewell to that full-time paycheck. To my surprise, I average out to a consistent 0.25 FTE over more than six years. Had I been paid at the same rate as other part-time and quarter-time folks on staff, it would be an equivalent of >$10K/year or $2,500/quarter. That's a modest amount and nothing to stake a retirement decade or two or three on, but it's certainly enough to qualify for Social Security benefits. So even taken separately from my caregiving role of parenting going on at the same time, that's 24 quarters of opportunity cost in the SS tally, in order to offer those skills freely for free as a volunteer gift in kind. Huh. It seems to speak to both sides of your "just vs achievable" conundrum, because I have worked consistently, unpaid, for the common good, in an institution where others DO earn income/SS credit when officially on the payroll; and I have also been investing my time and energy as a parent of young children. None of that is on the radar for federal retirement benefits. (And all of it I embrace with warmth and energy; but it's human capital that disappears entirely from the "market".)
2) As it's the 15th of the month, today the IRS direct-deposited the latest installment of the advance child tax credit into our checking account. (I joke with my spouse that this amazing $800 is the *children's* paycheck, their "UBI from Uncle Joe".) What I like about the advance CTC is that there is nothing extra involved-- just being a child in the United States is enough to qualify (being a child of parents with an income below a certain range anyway). The implication is that children have unique needs which are inherently worth meeting. In a discussion about vulnerability and caregiving and interdependence, it is notable that this now provides a mechanism (temporarily anyway) for getting resources to a population whose needs are deemed both unique and urgent compared to working-age adults, without the need for them to have ever been the one working. If children are one such population, are elders another? How might dipping our toe into this experiment of supporting children open up other avenues for more equitably serving elders, decoupled from their (our) employment history?
3) Today I received yet another jury duty summons in the mail. It occurs to me that my county courthouse might be the only government entity which has record of (or which has made a meaningful distinction between) my having children and *caring* for them personally, and having children and *providing* for them economically-- because the county court is who I had to talk to in years past when I was summoned as a nursing mother of newborns. The county court granted that my babies changed my essential functions in the moment, but they did not change my essential civic value. Yet, the potential retirement/elder benefits that I hold in common with other citizens seem to center only on my economic input/output value.