Our mounting care crisis impacts us all -- here's how we fix it

Let’s just come right out and say it: Care is one of our biggest local and global challenges today. Solving our care challenges would be akin to preserving the air we breathe. Care touches all our lives and our society and economies depend on care.

And I’m not just saying this as Founder and CEO of Care.com, though my observations over the past 10 years since we started the company and now serve over 18 million members in 16 countries has led me understand that care is so central to our lives that the current events, trends and technologies shaping our society, individually divergent as they may seem, all intertwine in the arena of care.

Take politics, Millennials, the gig economy or any polarizing topic of the day. It’d be easy to think these have nothing to do with care. But it’s near impossible to ignore the connection between care and politics, demographic shifts or consumer technology.

When the Milken Institute asked what are the most pressing issues facing my industry today, it was tempting to say everything. Instead, we’ll focus on three – demographic shifts, the gig economy, and policy changes– and look at the cause and effect relationship each has with the way we care for our loved ones. I’ll focus this piece on trends in the U.S., but we see many other countries around the world experiencing similar issues.

1.) Demographics (Millennials and the Elder Boom)

Two dramatic demographic shifts are occurring simultaneously. Millennials are becoming parents and Baby Boomers are entering retirement age. Nine out of 10 new American moms is a Millennial, and 10,000 Boomers turn 65 every day. By the year 2050, a conservative estimate says some 27 million Americans will require some form of care assistance. It’s not simply that our largest two generations are increasingly in need of care, but layer on top of that their world views – Boomers want to remain in their homes as long as possible and Millennials expect both parents will work and share domestic responsibilities. Together, these demographic trends are driving the growing need for care and they are influencing the way society perceives care.

For all of the ways we talk about Millennials impacting the workplace, how employers approach work-family issues could wind up being their lasting legacy. Statistics regularly demonstrate a shifting set of values among and illustrate the need for employers to adapt to the realities of today’s workforce. One powerful recent example is Coco-Cola expanding its paid parental leave policy in response to its Millennial Voices employee group. And there’s something we at Care.com affectionately refer to as the Zuckerberg Effect, referring to the way Mark Zuckerberg’s public displays of dad-ness are empowering a generation of fathers to prioritize caregiving as well as financially supporting their families. At a time when absenteeism, lost productivity and other care-related issues costs American businesses more than $20 billion annually, providing family-care benefits is vital to maintaining our standing as a global economic leader.

2.) Gig Economy (the Future of Work)

When you think of the “gig” economy, what typically comes to mind is consumer technology and urbanites paying a premium for on-demand goods and services. But do you think about the global economic impact? A McKinsey report estimated that online talent platforms could add $2.7 trillion, or 2 percent, to global GDP by 2025, while increasing employment by 72 million full-time-equivalent positions. If you think at all about the workers, it’s likely picturing an anonymous a mass of drivers, errand runners and handymen who find odd-jobs on apps and digital marketplaces. You probably don’t think about nannies, caregivers or devoted senior care providers. But you should. Not only are caregivers the original gig workers, but we believe that they’re one of the largest portions of what I call the Flex Economy. There are more than 8.6 million caregivers on Care.com’s platform alone – we’re the largest online platform for finding and managing care, but that’s only scratching the surface. In fact, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that in-home care is one of the largest, fastest-growing job categories in the U.S.

Not only has technology led to the rise of a sharing, gig or flex economy that changed the way caregivers find work and families find care, but it also presents us with a unique opportunity to address job quality for our caregivers. Domestic workers have long been cobbling together different part-time jobs, their job status leaving them in the shadows of formal workplace protections and benefits. A survey by our friends at the National Domestic Workers Alliance found that 65 percent of domestic workers don’t have health insurance, and only 4 percent have employer-provided insurance coverage while fewer than 9 percent pay into Social Security. This kind of instability is not sustainable as Baby Boomers age, millennials become parents and caregivers need care of their own. Without innovative solutions, such as decoupling benefits from employers, who will cover the costs when the millions of contingent workers who fall outside of our social safety net need care of their own?

3.) Policy (Investing in our Care Infrastructure)

The United States remains the only industrialized nation in the world without a federal policy providing paid leave for new moms after the birth of a child. Currently, only about 12 percent of private sector employees have access to paid parental leave and about 40 percent of Americans are not eligible for the job protections afforded under the Family Medical Leave Act. However, momentum is building in support of a paid family leave as cities, states and employers lead the way. Recently, New York became the fourth state to approve a paid family leave policy and California, which was the first state to adopt a policy more than a decade ago, recently expanded its program to provide more financial support for low-income workers. Leading employers, as we’ve seen with EY and Twitter in recent weeks, have announced expanded and increasingly gender-neutral parental leave policies, believing supporting working caregivers gives them a competitive advantage. Paid leave supports keeping women in the workplace and thus drives organizational performance and overall GDP growth.

In addition to paid family leave, cities and states are realizing the impact of a growing senior care crisis – or what we refer to as the silver tsunami or elder boom, and the growing cost of care for families – and they have taken other significant steps to invest in their care infrastructure. In Hawaii, a long-term care proposal represents an important first step in addressing the rising senior care crisis. New York City recently added caregivers as a protected class under its Human Rights Law. And Illinois is campaigning to become the seventh state to adopt a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which would afford basic labor rights, such as minimum wage, payment for all work hours and rest period, to caregivers and other domestic workers. Indivisible from these policies is the importance of care to our families and to our economy. Momentum is building, but whether we’ll able to reach a critical mass and affect change through national policies remains to be seen.

We say often that care is not simply a woman’s issue, but women do more unpaid care work inside the home than men. Melinda Gates has talked about this in terms of “opportunity cost,” meaning that the time women spend doing unpaid work takes away from the time they could spend doing more work. Here is where we can see the issue of care begin to snowball.

A recent survey of Harvard Business School alumni found that 37 percent of Millennial women who aren’t yet moms expect to interrupt their careers for parenting. We know child care is the single biggest budget item for most families, and a Care.com survey found that 70 percent of working parents say the cost of child care affects their career choices. A majority of Sandwich Generation caregivers are forced to make career adjustments – such as turning down promotions, scaling back hours or even leaving jobs – due to care demands.

Our mounting care crisis affects all of us. We have new mothers dropping out of the workforce, senior caregivers scaling back hours and enterprises losing billions in lost productivity costs, such as absenteeism, presenteeism and turnover.

Here in the United States, we can tie all of the income gains of Middle Class families to increased female labor force participation since the 1970s – what if that goes away? For starters, our economy would shrink by $2 trillion, or about 13.5 percent. Now, if we were able to flip that trend? A McKinsey report recently revealed that if women participated in the workforce at the same level as men, we could boost our global GDP by 26 percent – that’s $26 trillion or, roughly the combined GDP of the United States and China.

Something’s happening, and it’s going to be big. We must find creative, long-range, trans-partisan solutions to solve for these issues, because we simply cannot afford to ignore the rising economic crisis that will touch all of us and is starting in our homes.

Read more of our coverage from Milken Global here.