🧸 The nanny state

Plus: Rise of bossware | Monday, September 26, 2022

Open in app View in browser   Presented By Hands Off My Rewards   Axios Markets By Emily Peck and Matt Phillips · Sep 26, 2022 Welcome back. Let's be honest, who knows what this week has in store? Let's get to it. Today's newsletter is 1,100 words, a 4.5-minute read.     1 big thing: The nanny factor Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios   The pandemic shook most industries — and child care is no exception, Emily writes. The big picture: In-home care is ascendant, while fewer child care centers are operating now than in 2019. Better-paying nanny jobs are luring workers away from child care centers and even preschools. Why it matters: The shift in the market away from traditional centers might work well for individual families, especially the more affluent ones. But it could be exacerbating an overall shortage of more affordable center-based care. That shortage serves to keep some parents, especially mothers, out of the workforce at a time when the U.S. is facing a labor shortage more broadly. What they're saying: "There's been a real fundamental shift to more in-home care," says Natalie Mayslich, president, consumer, at Care.com, which manages a network of providers. The change is good for workers in an industry where wages are historically very low, she adds. Zoom out: Many licensed child care businesses shut down during the pandemic, pushing families to find other arrangements. The number of licensed child care locations is still lower now than it was in 2019, according to data from ChildCare Aware. (It's more difficult to track unlicensed, informal arrangements.) Other families left centers over COVID fears, with some forming nanny shares — where multiple families pool money to pay for one sitter who can make a real living wage. That's a trend that's stuck around. Case study: Last year, Michael Grady and his wife pulled their daughter, who is now 20 months old, out of a child care center and joined a nanny share with one other family. The Philadelphia couple was anxious about their unvaccinated daughter being exposed to COVID. Day care was $1,200 a month. They now pay $2,000. "It's definitely a luxury," Grady tells Axios. They plan on sticking with the arrangement until it's time for public pre-K. By the numbers: Demand for in-home care drove up pay. The average weekly cost of a nanny on Care.com last year was $694, up 22% from 2019, according to data from the company. Meanwhile, the cost of care in a center rose just 5% to $226, according to Care.com. When it comes to worker wages, the national average in 2021 for nannies on Care.com was $17.34 per hour. Day care workers averaged $12.40 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Worth noting: For in-home workers, there's still a trade-off. In-home care isn't well regulated, and nannies leave behind the safety and security of a job with benefits and structure to work in a home, often for people who have never before employed an individual, says Emily Dills, who owns a nanny network in Seattle.     2. Catch up quick 💰Russia's invasion of Ukraine will cost the global economy an estimated $2.8 trillion in lost output by the end of 2023. (WSJ) 📉 Global stocks and bonds fall, in a volatile start to the week amid recession fears. (NYT) 📱Apple to manufacture iPhone 14 in India, in shift away from China. (Reuters)     3. You're being watched Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios   Critics call it bossware. Technology used to surveil workers, already widely adopted in lower-wage industries, is growing popular in the white-collar world — managers track keystrokes, mouse clicks and even take screenshots of monitors, Emily writes. Why it matters: The uptick in monitoring happened as more workers went remote, and managers increasingly worried that they weren't working. "Productivity paranoia," is what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called it in a Bloomberg Television interview last week. What's happening: The number of employers who use some kind of worker surveillance doubled since the pandemic, the vice president of HR research at Gartner tells the WSJ. Two-thirds of medium-to-large companies now do this, up from one-third, he says. In some cases, workers say monitoring cheats them out of pay. A finance executive told the NYT that if she stepped away to use the bathroom, her computer would go idle and the time wouldn't be counted toward her hourly rate. State of play: There isn't clear data showing that this kind of monitoring actually increases productivity, as Christopher Mims reports in the WSJ. Studies do show that monitoring increases worker stress, and absenteeism — perhaps not the desired impact during a labor shortage and at a time of increased worker unrest. Workers also game these systems — some buying "mouse jigglers," to make it seem like they're working while away from the desk, doing something crazy, like making coffee. Zoom out: Working from home is inherently different from working in the office. Folks work on weekends or later in the night. Sometimes the lines between personal and professional are more mixed up. "It behooves companies to respect worker privacy as people shift quickly from personal to employment-related activities and back during the course of the day," notes Brookings senior fellow Darrell West in a recent blog post. If employers decide to forge ahead with close monitoring anyway, human resource group SHRM advises "being transparent" about it. The bottom line: Trust is a key ingredient in the relationship between boss and worker. Obsessive monitoring does not typically foster that connection.     A message from Hands Off My Rewards Congress, take your hands off my rewards     Despite record profits, mega-retailers and merchant groups are trying to trick Congress into passing harmful credit card routing mandates that will end popular rewards programs. What you need to know: Lawmakers must oppose the Credit Card Competition Act. Learn more.     4. Eyes on the drought Data: FactSet; Chart: Axios Visuals Drought-related cutbacks in forecasts for U.S. agricultural products have helped propel futures prices higher for staples such as wheat, corn, eggs and butter this month, Matt writes. Why it matters: Situations like this remind us that short-term drivers of some prices are far beyond the control of the Federal Reserve. The Fed's rate hiking campaign — it jacked up rates yet again last week in its bid to bring inflation down — won't stop the kind of idiosyncratic price spikes that always occur in different parts of the economy. Energy prices, which fluctuate based on political, logistical and commercial reasons — like drillers deciding how much oil they'll pump to max out profits — are another area where Fed has only modest control over, at least in the short term. Between the lines: The volatility we're seeing in food prices explains why the Fed's preferred gauge of price growth — known as "core" inflation — excludes food and energy prices. Food and energy are prone to the kind of short-term ups and downs that have little to do with the central bank's core business of making borrowed money more or less expensive. The bottom line: The Fed is less concerned with any one individual price than it is with the overall price level of the economy. Fed chair Jerome Powell has said the central bank believes the economy remains out of balance, with people wanting to buy far more goods and services than the economy can currently supply. In other words, expect the rate hikes to continue.     A message from Hands Off My Rewards Congress, take your hands off my rewards     Despite record profits, mega-retailers and merchant groups are trying to trick Congress into passing harmful credit card routing mandates that will end popular rewards programs. What you need to know: Lawmakers must oppose the Credit Card Competition Act. Learn more.   Was this forwarded to you? Sign up here! Today's newsletter was edited by Kate Marino and copy edited by Mickey Meece. Why stop here? Let's go Pro. Join the thousands of professionals using Axios Pro to keep up with the companies, deals and trends changing their industries.   Axios thanks our partners for supporting our newsletters. If you're interested in advertising, learn more here. 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