You do understand the economy.
It's just not nice.
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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It’s called my parents never used the government for anything but free handouts and false wars.
We should have had so many more markets regulated but tHeFreEMARket or some bullshit.
My xgf was working at Terwilliger in Portland and they charged like $22 per hour for the residents and paid out $11 to people who had the most insane CNA job. 24 hour shifts by YOURSELF? She had to lift people 3 times her size in some cases. Residents paid $10k per month at the time. That was minimum. This was Portland of all places. Where are the worker protections? Why is that place making money hand over fist with bare minimum staffing? Portland isn’t all that progressive when it comes to workers rights and protections unless that’s changed over the past 14 years.
The assisted living facilities around here still suck pretty hardcore, I picked up at a couple when doing agency as a CNA2. I made agency $ doing that but talking to the girls working there as staff, they made dogshit $ and were from other countries who didn’t have the certs to get the better paying jobs yet and were obviously being exploited due to their ignorance (of which I happily provided the information they were being denied by the employers).
CNAs working skilled/LTC facilities are almost all unionised with SEIU which comes with its political bs but pays considerably well for those jobs—on an experience scale, but I was making just under $29 as staff with decent enough heath insurance through the Essential Worker Trust Fund, paid for through union dues primarily. But you still have to deal with all the crap that comes from working in those shitholes with stupidass ratios and patients presenting with even more extreme behavioural issues.
Now I work for Providence which is miles ahead for employees regarding safe working conditions and ratios vs nursing homes, and pay is comparable with a wider range of benefits without excessive restrictions (i.e., don’t have to wait a year before qualifying for education benefits, 100% employer paid education, health insurance, etc).
Most employers have strict no tolerance policies against bullying and discrimination, focus on DEI has been expanding at break-neck speed for better or worse, lots of focus on union organising, and (at least in my industry of healthcare) lax policies around self-expression and encouragement to be one’s authentic self. I don’t know all the details at the moment but there’s been plenty of legislation on anti-discriminatory measures on the state level.
So I guess it has gotten better overall in the last decade or so on those topics, but the cost of living is still pretty high so healthcare especially has to pay out higher wages or else lose us all and then have the weight of the healthcare authority come down on them.
Cheaper to hire a daycare staff member for your home instead?
I actually did the math on a nanny vs daycare and if it wasn't for subsidies it's actually pretty close in cost. And that's for one kid.
I did some quick math to see how overexagirated prices were for preeschool.
Average pay here is (in EUR gross) 2400 + 200 lunch/transportation cost. So the average worker costs a company ~3000 (so called gross-gross as each company has to contribute taxes per worker).
Given an adult/child ratio of 1 : 8 and a school of 80 kids. The teachers would cost 30k EUR in salaries alone. This comes to 375 EUR per child. Add 80 for food and its 455 eur. No maintenance costs or room for profit here. Lets round it to 500 EUR for that.
If the ratio is 1 : 10. Its 75 EUR cheaper.
As mentioned the average sallary is 2400 gross, this comes down to 1500 net. 500 EUR is one third of 1500 EUR. I obviously didnt use real teacher wages and used the average, didnt account for maintenance workers, heating, accounting or anything else. The prices actually sound reasonable but are a little lower due to subsidies.
You forgot the actual cost for the building.
I know a couple of daycare owners. Profit margins aren't great and you still very much have a "we do it because we love kids" mentality.
I wonder about the cost of insurance. I would imagine it’s a significant part of the tuition.
Probably not, it's going to be a fraction of salary costs.
Unionize.
For daycare:
My local area costs $600-1000 per month, depending on the age of the child ($1k for infants, $600 for pre-school). If we assume 8 hours/day, 21 days/week on average (~250 working days per year). So each child costs $3.5-6/hr. Recommended staff to child ratio is one per 3-8 children, depending on age. If it's only infants, maximum possible wage (assuming everything else is free) is $18/hr (3 * $6/hr). If it's only pre-school age, the maximum possible wage is $28/hr (8 * $3.50/hr). Preschoolers will need more space than infants, so I imagine a large share of that difference in cost is for space, food, and activities.
So my guess is that people providing childcare make $10-15/hr, maybe a little more if they are overseeing a newer caregiver. This cost is already high for workers, so I really don't think salaries can go much higher without a fundamental change in how care is provided.
I can't speak to nursing homes though, because anything touching medical care is incredibly hard to find numbers for.
Ours was $120 / day for the older kids.
About 10 kids to a staff member
What city do you live in? That makes a big difference in terms of overhead.
Anywhere in Australia really
Last time this same post was posted in a different context, like three days ago, I pointed out that nursing homes and daycare are both industries in which the government subsidizes demand and artificially constricts supply.
Anyone who’s taken macroeconomics will know this produces exactly the kind of problem OP is describing.