But when cities and states take action to raise wages, they often ignore a pretty obvious problem: across most of the country, employers routinely skirt paying the minimum wage, overtime wages, or contractually promised wages, with little fear of facing consequences.

When the Broken Laws study surveyed 4,387 workers in 2008 across Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York in low-wage industries like hospitality and domestic care, they found that 44 percent had been paid less than the law required within the past year. In 2017, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that employers steal $15 billion annually from workers by paying less than the minimum wage.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Two basic facts add up to create an environment where wage thieves operate with impunity. The first is that most wage thieves will never be caught. Workers often fear retaliation for speaking up or don’t have the resources they’d need to file a complaint or bring a lawsuit. And only a handful of local or state wage theft enforcement agencies have demonstrated an effective strategy for tracking down wage thieves, explaining why in places like Houston, Texas, and Charlotte, North Carolina, a typical year might only bring a single successful wage theft prosecution.

The second is that even when wage thieves are caught, our legal system protects business owners at the expense of workers: wealthy individuals and profitable companies get ample opportunity to claim they just don’t have the money to pay workers what they’re owed. A 15-state investigation by Politico found that workers who won their wage theft lawsuits only ultimately recovered 59 percent of the money that judges or juries had agreed they’d been owed. In New York City, ten delivery workers won a $700,000 wage theft ruling against the restaurant Indus Valley — although these workers started their complaint in 2008 and won their lawsuit before a federal judge in 2014, they say they’ve collected only about 15 percent of what they’re owed.

These are both solvable problems if we’re willing to change a legal and economic system that stacks the deck against working people.

Catching Wage Thieves In the Act

Workers know complaining about unpaid or underpaid hours can mean risking their jobs or getting shunted into a less favorable schedule. According to a 2019 report by the National Employment Law Project, 45 states lack one or more of the provisions of an effective anti-retaliation law.

Undocumented workers are especially vulnerable to retaliation. Speaking about undocumented workers in Houston, Texas, Josef Buenker, a private employment lawyer, said, “I can’t count the number of times workers have told us that that it’s an overt threat used against them, [when bosses say] ‘I’m going to report you to ICE, what are you going to do about it?’” He added, “We regularly meet with people who want to pursue their claim, but then they go home and think about it and decide not to because they’re concerned about their immigration status.” As long as the threat of deportation can be used against workers, wage theft will persist. Aggressive deportation policies undermine labor conditions for both immigrants and for their U.S.-born coworkers, whose bargaining power is undermined by their bosses’ ability to exploit those without papers.

The cost of going to court is another key consideration. Some workers are able to find free legal counsel from a local legal services agency, but these agencies are stretched thin, forced to choose between helping people in poverty avoid eviction, fight wrongful debt collection lawsuits, win wage theft cases, and gain protection from domestic violence. A worker making more than $15,000 per year is often totally ineligible for legal services aid.

Some legal aid organizations lack the funding to take on wage theft cases at all. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, there are two organizations providing civil representation to low-income workers, the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy and Legal Aid of North Carolina, explained Ken Schorr, Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy’s executive director, and he noted that neither organization will represent low-income workers in court for wage theft cases. Schorr explained, “The majority of our funding is grant-based for particular areas.” He added, “We haven’t been able to find funding to do employment law based work such as wage claims.” Our country considers legal representation in civil cases a privilege, not a right — which means many low-wage workers can’t use the court system to hold their employers accountable.

That’s why, as Tallulah Knopp, a staff attorney at Boston’s Volunteer Lawyer Project, points out, it’s so important for states to have clear “fee-shifting” statutes: in many states, when a worker wins a wage theft lawsuit, the employer will have to pay their back wages, but not necessarily their legal fees. A strong “fee-shifting” statute, like Massachusetts’, sets a standard where, if a worker wins their case, their employer pays the legal fees, instead of the worker having to pay the lawyer out of their recovered damages. That encourages private lawyers to come to the table on behalf of workers, Knopp explains. In a state like Texas, where filing fees are $400, and many attorneys bill at $100 per hour or more, there’s no real way to get your wages back if you’re owed just $500. That’s why Knopp and Nick Wertsch, of Texas’ Workers Defense Project, both point to fee-shifting statutes as a critical part of fighting wage theft.

But Jennifer Lee, associate professor at Temple Law School, argues that relying on workers to come forward against their bosses can’t solve wage theft by itself, even in the presence of fee-shifting.

As Lee explains, the information barriers and risks for workers to report their own wage theft remain high, even when states try to protect workers from retaliation. “The number of workers who are suffering violations versus the number of people who come forward is miniscule,” says Lee.

After investigating 141 state and local anti-wage-theft laws, she concluded that we can’t rely on workers to file complaints or lawsuits: while a worker’s “private right of action” can be part of the solution, we also need strong wage theft enforcement agencies that don’t just react to workers’ complaints, but are on the lookout for abuse.

Funding is part of the problem in some cities and states, says Lee, but she also points to cities whose enforcement agencies are dramatically underutilized. Many agencies, Lee says, wait for workers to file complaints, rather than entering the community to inform workers of their rights, and to find bad actors.

The most promising approach, says Lee, is collaboration between government agencies and workers’ centers. Although workers in the industries susceptible to wage theft often aren’t unionized, many are organized through local worker’s centers like the Domestic Worker & Day Laborer Center of Chicago and Houston’s Fe y Justicia. “Agencies aren’t always in the best position to identify which workplaces have issues or to build trust with workers,” says Lee, adding that worker’s centers are often more embedded in the community. The cooperation of worker’s centers gathers useful information about labor conditions and can encourage more workers to come forward. Lee pointed to Seattle as an example of a city that has effectively partnered with local community groups — their Office of Labor Standards selected ten community organizations to receive $1 million contracts to provide education and outreach to workers. Reporting by the Philadelphia Enquirer found that, in 2018, Seattle’s Office of Labor Standards received 10 times the number of wage theft questions and complaints than Philadelphia received, a larger city that lacked such a strategy.

Making Them Pay the Bill 

But even once wage theft is brought to light, workers don’t always get paid. Across the country, nominally “successful” wage theft lawsuits often result in empty judgments: just because a judge or jury agreed that a worker experienced wage theft, it doesn’t always mean that the worker will be able to collect her back wages.

A report by the National Center for Law and Economic Justice found at least $125 million in unpaid wage theft judgments and orders within New York City alone. Carmela Huang, a supervising attorney at New York City’s Legal Aid Society, says “it’s just far too easy for employers to transfer their assets.” As an example, Huang explains, a restaurant owner faced with a high-dollar wage theft lawsuit will recruit a friend to create a new corporation and transfer the restaurant to the new corporation. That makes the original corporation facing the lawsuit nominally unable to pay its wage debts. “For more than a decade employer-side attorneys have been advising clients on how to hide their assets — it is definitely a part of the practice to advise clients on how to make themselves judgment-proof,” says Huang. That’s why the Legal Aid Society called on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign the SWEAT Act, which would have allowed workers to place a lien on their employers’ assets while wage theft litigation was ongoing, stopping bad companies from using suspicious transfers to hide assets. Cuomo vetoed the SWEAT Act on January 2.

Our country arrests 1.5 million people for burglary and larceny per year — but workers facing stolen wages are routinely deprived of justice. Businesses can dial 911 and expect the cops to show up to arrest a shoplifter, while millions of Americans work for poverty wages, as victims of theft from their employers, with little hope of recourse. To end wage theft, we should lift the threat of deportation, guarantee workers access to the legal system, build strong wage theft enforcement agencies, and close the loopholes that allow employers to shirk responsibility to pay owed wages.

“I just wanted a job that paid more,” Powell explained. First Premier offered him $16 an hour in base pay, which could rise with incentive pay to $18 to $20 an hour depending on Powell’s success in collecting debts.

In a country where middle-class wages are hard to come by without a college degree, the comparatively good pay of debt collection can be a big draw. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly pay in 2018 for debt collectors was $17.32, a big step-up in pay from other lines of work such as retail sales ($12.75) or fast food ($10.89).

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

71 million U.S. adults have fallen behind on a bill and now have debt in collections. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, U.S. household debt is at an all-time high — and behind our system of easy credit are roughly 300,000 debt collectors, working for both lenders and 3rd-party collection agencies, whose job it is to recover money from American families.

These debt collectors may not match your expectations of slick-talking hucksters willing to do whatever it takes to get paid. Like many of the debtors they collect from, the collectors are often low-income themselves. While most have a high-school diploma or equivalent, some, like Powell, are teenagers. 69 percent of debt collectors are female.

At relatively low wages, debt collectors are expected to engage in what University of Brighton psychologist Carl Walker has called “mental warfare” in order to collect; the industry can leave behind scars for both the borrowers and the collectors. It’s a grueling job. In a 2016 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau survey, debt collection agencies with more than 250 employees reported an average turnover rate of 75 percent to 100 percent.

If you were born into the middle class, you’ve probably never heard of Powell’s former employer, First Premier, but it’s a major player in America’s system of subprime credit. At one point, it accounted for as much as 47 percent of all subprime credit card solicitations sent out in the United States, and now it’s the nation’s 12th biggest issuer of Mastercard credit cards.

First Premier credit cards often come with eye-popping fees. One, for example, has a $300 credit limit, a $95 one-time “program fee,” $75 in total monthly and annual fees in the first year, $120 in monthly and annual fees in all subsequent years, and a 36 percent APR. Those exorbitant prices draw in only those consumers with few other options for credit.

As Powell explained, if the borrower couldn’t pay on the spot, the collections agents at First Premier would ask for a “promise to pay.” There was folk wisdom about what different promises to pay meant: a $20 money order on the 3rd of the month meant the customer was on disability, and if it was coming on the first of the month, it meant the customer was a senior collecting Social Security. Getting a customer’s checking account credentials was ideal — it let First Premier automatically debit the customer’s bank account on the specified date — but debit and credit card payments, payments by Western Union, or money orders were all fair game as well. A lot of customers were surprised or angry about how much they owed.

The job “definitely broke you down,” said Powell. “At a certain point, you felt like you weren’t doing the right thing.” Powell “no-called, no-showed” — e.g. got fired after failing to show up to work — a little more than a year after he started. “The lion’s share [of customers] probably would have been better off if they had never opened the card,” he said.

When Chaz Fertal went in for his job interview at Checkmate in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2010, he was originally afraid he was getting duped in a Craigslist scam. Fertal showed up to an office that appeared deserted, with blacked-out windows, only to find out the building had been intentionally obscured; Checkmate was concerned that angry customers would try to track the debt collectors down. Fertal’s base pay at Checkmate was around $2,000 per month, but offered the possibility of big commission checks. Fertal says his biggest was around $4,400, meaning your pay could more than double if you were good at getting borrowers to make payments.

A current Checkmate employee confirmed over the phone that the company’s current interest rates in Arizona were as high as 180 percent per year. As Fertal explained, a customer wouldn’t actually have to make progress on paying down their debt for the Checkmate collector to earn his commission. If customers fell behind and went into collections, Fertal said he would earn commission whether he convinced them to pay the full balance or if he convinced the borrower to pay off outstanding interest while taking out a new loan. For the purposes of commission, taking on a new loan counted as “paying off” the old one.

Fertal said the incentive scheme encouraged agents to push borrowers into these loan “rollovers.” “You’d talk to a customer on the phone who after four or five months would still owe the whole amount” and they’d be outraged, Fertal said, when they realized the payments they’d made had done nothing to pay down their debt.

For Fertal, there was a clear day, he said, when he realized he didn’t want to work at Checkmate anymore. When Checkmate customers applied for loans, they typically gave Checkmate a bank account routing and account number, giving Checkmate the right to withdraw payments; if a customer went past due, the loan entered default, and, Fertal says, Checkmate would attempt to withdraw the whole outstanding loan balance from the customer’s checking account. If Checkmate wasn’t successful at withdrawing the full amount, they’d break the balance into smaller amounts and try again — Fertal said the company’s practice was to make three attempts per day, starting at 4:30 in the morning, just after any direct deposits would have landed in the borrower’s account overnight. The only way, Fertal says, a borrower could stop the process, was by making a promise to pay and providing a credit card number or debit card number to do so.

Fertal remembers one borrower well. Overnight, Fertal says, Checkmate had taken the woman’s “entire paycheck, I think it was a thousand dollars,” he says. “She had two or three kids. She told me, ‘I have nothing to feed my kids, our refrigerator is empty, they took everything.’ I went to the ACH department and they couldn’t reverse it. She told me, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, the only thing I can think of is killing myself’ — and I knew it wasn’t a lie, you could hear the loss in her voice. I remember telling her, ‘your kids need you more than anything right now, and that that’s not the answer.’ I was trying to see if there was anything we could do, even taking out a new loan, but she still had a balance on her existing loan.”

Fertal quit shortly after that phone call in 2011, and he said he still thinks about that woman and her family.

Fertal and Powell’s experiences show the toll subprime credit and debt collection industries take not only on their customers, but on the front-line agents as well. These debt collection jobs offer Americans a step up in financial security, in exchange for taking on the difficult role as intermediary between high-priced lenders and consumers in dire straits.

“The environment would just be toxic. You’d get a worse and worse impression of people,” said Fertal. “The reality is that you’re not talking with people who are in a great place in their life.”

Editor’s note: Trevor Powell asked that his name be changed for privacy.

This post has been edited to clarify Fertal’s commission earnings.

The hacker, Paige Thompson, gained access to personal information such as income, address, and credit scores for seemingly all recent applicants to Capital One credit cards. For secured card applicants, who tend to be low-income, bank account information was compromised as well.

A secured card normally resembles other subprime credit cards — they still report to the credit bureaus, they still charge interest and late fees, and you can still default on the card if you don’t make your payments. But borrowers need to put down a security deposit in order to obtain one, which requires access to the borrower’s bank account information.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

The fact that bank account credentials were compromised raises the stakes for those consumers: even compared to credit card fraud, resolving checking account fraud is no walk in the park, and the costs here will be borne by people who can’t afford to take a hit.

For consumers who don’t think they can get approved for a normal credit card, secured cards can be appealing. And who are those consumers? They don’t have a lot of money: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia researcher Larry Santucci has found that the median income of secured card customers is $35,000, compared to $50,000 for Americans with unsecured credit cards.

Of course, given that these incomes are self-reported, and that credit card companies aren’t required to validate the income of all credit card applicants, this income data is almost certainly overstated: Plenty of people know they can get declined for a credit card for being too poor.

I worked at Capital One for five years, from 2013 to 2018. For a short stint during that time, I was in charge of the secured card product. I know most secured card customers are in no position to absorb a financial shock — and, unfortunately, having your checking account data leaked puts you in a much more dangerous position than a simple breach of your credit card number, or even your Social Security number.

If you apply for a Capital One secured card and get approved, you’ll initially be assigned a $200 credit limit, contingent on you sending in a security deposit of either $49, $99, or $200. The minimum security deposit you have to make depends on your risk as an applicant.

Think about that for a second: People are putting down a $200 deposit, to get a $200 credit limit, and the product makes money because people then borrow against their own deposit at a 26.99 percent interest rate — one of the highest in the industry — and get hit with late fees up to $39 when they fail to make payments on time. Santucci has found that only one in four secured card customers pays their credit card bill in full every month.

Some secured card customers are “new-to-credit,” but major banks such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Discover have all been known to give out credit cards, at least with small credit limits, to people without credit history. If you’re new-to-credit but you have a checking account, and you also realize that your odds of being approved for an unsecured credit card are pretty high if you walk into a branch of your bank (of course, not everyone realizes this), you’re not likely to find a secured card attractive.

More commonly, secured card customers have low credit scores – the typical customer’s FICO is in the 500s — an obvious indication that they’ve struggled in the past to pay bills and to make ends meet. This condition can be temporary —your credit score might still be low even though your finances have recovered, since missed payments lower your credit score for seven years — but many Americans who struggle financially never achieve the stability they’d need to keep a high credit score. In a country where plenty of people live paycheck-to-paycheck, but only a third have subprime credit scores, secured card holders and applicants tend to be under real financial distress.

Because secured card applicants have to put down a security deposit, they’re not approved until they give Capital One checking or savings account information and their deposit is sent, unlike users of unsecured cards. This is what puts Capital One’s secured card holders at greatest risk after the breach.

To see why, it’s helpful to take a second to think about the exact ways in which a data breach comes back to bite consumers — especially given that you’re usually not on the hook for purchases fraudulently made in your name, whether someone has stolen your credit or debit card, or opened up an account using your identity.

Lose your credit card number, as in the Target or Home Depot breach, and you can usually resolve things with quick phone call to your bank if a fraudster makes purchases on your card. Lose your Social Security number and address, like in the Equifax breach, and someone can open up new accounts in your name, or take over your existing accounts by calling the bank, pretending to be you, and changing the contact information. Proving someone else did this can be anywhere from moderately to extremely time-consuming depending on your circumstances: it took reporter Phil McKenna a few days to clear things up, a typical amount of time for garden-variety identity theft, where you’re usually out time but not money.

But let’s consider what it will look like if someone uses the checking account information from a Capital One secured card customer to commit ACH (Automated Clearing House) fraud – using the customer’s checking account routing numbers and account numbers to set up unauthorized withdrawals, write counterfeit checks, or even pay off the fraudster’s own credit card.

If you’re a Capital One secured card customer, your checking account could be emptied. If you don’t notice what happened, you might try to make purchases and get hit with overdraft fees expecting money to be available that’s gone. Odds are very high you’re living paycheck to paycheck. Your Capital One secured card may have a limit as low as $200, and, across the industry, the typical secured card customer has only one credit card. If that happens, how are you supposed to buy groceries, bus fare, or diapers?

What’s known as Regulation E requires the bank credit your account within 10 days of when you notify them about fraud, unless further investigation is needed: a Capital One spokesperson told me they try to resolve most cases well under that limit, and said they refund any overdraft fees they determined occurred because of the fraud, whether it was the fraudulent transaction or a subsequent legitimate transaction took the account to a below $0 balance.

Everything depends on how quickly the customer notices something was wrong, how comfortable she is advocating for herself, and how equipped she is to go up to 10 days with nothing in the bank. Nearly 40 percent of Americans couldn’t cover a $400 emergency expense without borrowing money, even without having their checking account drained unexpectedly by fraud, and the typical secured card customer has no other credit cards.

Now, it’s completely possible that no actual fraud will occur as a result of the Capital One breach: in a statement, Capital One said that, based on the analysis they’ve done so far, they consider it “unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual.” If they’re wrong, the consequences for secured card customers will be severe.

In this moment of crisis, it’s worth taking a step back to ask a broader question: are secured cards more helpful or more harmful to the low-credit score consumers they’re designed to serve? These products are often touted as a way to help people improve their credit scores, but there is weak evidence that they work for the typical customer. Santucci’s research shows that the median customer with a secured card sees only a 11-point increase in their FICO after two years, a number that’s dragged down by the 20 percent of customers who close or default on their cards within 24 months. 11 points is not a particularly impressive increase, especially given that if you wait and do nothing other than paying any existing bills on time, your low credit score typically goes up on its own as negative information on your credit report ages off.

Banks can tout that secured cards are free for customers who pay their bills in full every month, but the three-quarters of customers who carry a revolving balance are paying a high price for the privilege of borrowing against their own money, and would arguably be better off using their security deposit as an emergency fund. I’m sympathetic to what can feel like a double-bind to the banks: given that you need to charge higher prices to low-income customers to break even, is it better to be accused of ignoring them, or is better to be accused of exploiting them? If companies like Capital One can’t find better ways of serving low-income Americans, it won’t just be a breach of data: it will a breach of trust.

Families below the poverty line in Iowa are eligible to receive support for the majority of their child care, a benefit that can be worth more than $11,000 per year. Families are still eligible for the most of the credit — about $8,000 per year — until their incomes reach 145 percent of the poverty line, or about $25,000 for a single parent with one child. But if that parent’s income is just one percentage point higher, they aren’t eligible for support at all.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

That steep and dramatic cut-off point for assistance is combined with one of the lowest income thresholds in the country; neighboring states such as Kansas and Minnesota both set their cut-offs above 180 percent of the poverty line.

These programs are paid for by the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), which has provided money to all U.S. states and territories for the purpose of helping low-income working parents afford child care since 1990. However, the program was chronically underfunded for decades, and by 2015 served the fewest children in the program’s history. In 2018, Congress increased discretionary CCDBG funding by about 80 percent for fiscal years 2018 and 2019, to help make up for some of the shortage. While this money was intended to make sure more children would receive care, Iowa’s eligibility ceiling has remained capped at 145 percent, where it has been for more than 10 years.

The 2018 increase in CCDBG funding means Iowa has $13 million more from the federal government to spend on child care assistance. While the Iowa legislature appropriated $3 million of the new CCDBG funding to increase reimbursement rates for child care providers, the rest of the funding increase hasn’t yet been allocated by Iowa’s legislature. At least 70 percent of the increase must be spent on direct services like expanding the number of families eligible for child care assistance or improving the quality and safety of child care in the state.

At the Iowa minimum wage, which remains frozen at the federal level of $7.25, pulling together the $186 per week it costs on average to pay for child care for one child takes 26 hours of the wages in a 40-hour week. Nearly two in every three Iowan parents working full-time would have to spend more than seven percent of their income to afford a child care center, exceeding the federal benchmark for affordability.

When getting a 20 cent raise means losing nearly the full value of the child care assistance benefit, the pressures on families are so strong that some working parents in Iowa are turning down small pay raises offered by employers to keep their Child Care Assistance (CCA) eligibility. In December of 2018, the federal Office on Child Care issued a citation to Iowa indicating the state wasn’t allowed to terminate benefits if the family initially qualified for CCA and saw only a modest increase in income. While Iowa is required to make this fix, the change is unlikely to help families who hover just above the threshold for eligibility.

Dave Stone, advocacy officer for United Way of Central Iowa, sees cost as the main sticking point for Iowa legislators hesitant to expand eligibility and soften the cliff effect. “Child care is expensive,” says Stone, and Iowa has “not been keeping up the appropriations” as child care costs have risen faster than wages.

The Beasleys are some of the people struggling to get by just above the cut-off for assistance. Katherine Beasley, her husband Dan, and their two kids, Peter (seven) and Noah (one), live in the Oakridge Neighborhood of Des Moines, a community that provides additional services to support their residents. When Noah was born in 2018, Katherine lost her job — in the first few weeks after Noah was born, he was frequently sick, and Katherine’s employer wasn’t happy that she wasn’t working enough hours. With only her husband Dan’s income, the Beasleys quickly drained their savings and fell behind on bills. By the time Katherine got a new job, her family had received their last possible extension from their utility company, and were about to have their electricity shut off. With her first paycheck, her family was just above the cutoff point for assistance.

“It was very stressful. You try not to show it to the kids, but you do feel depressed,” said Katherine. “The most important part was making sure the boys would be fed; sometimes there wasn’t anything left for us after feeding the boys.”

Through Oakridge, Katherine was able to access a program funded primarily by corporate donors that pays all but $50 of Noah’s $220 weekly child care cost. Even still, when Peter finishes elementary school for the summer in a few weeks, she doesn’t know how she’ll find care for him and still make ends meet if her next request for State Pay isn’t approved.

“I was taught that financial problems stay at home, so nobody really knows. I’d been raised not to ask for help, but it comes down to putting your kids first and supporting them,” she said. Struggling to provide for young children can be a stigmatizing experience. Perhaps this is why political interest in child care affordability lags behind higher education, despite the fact that child care is more expensive than college tuition in 28 states.

Without the Oakridge Neighborhood child care assistance, Katherine said she wouldn’t be able to continue her progress towards a nursing degree, a move she hopes will permanently change her family’s financial trajectory. “I’d have to get two jobs. The kids would never have mom or dad at home,” Katherine said, adding that it’s important to her that she has enough time to advocate for the needs of her older son, a special education student.

Helping families like the Beasleys is one reason why United Way of Central Iowa, along with their Skills2Compete Coalition partners including the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, and the Iowa State Education Association, have called on the Iowa state legislature to expand eligibility for CCA to at least 185 percent of the federal poverty line. The United Way of Central Iowa’s proposal would phase out assistance gradually using copays. To Stone, getting rid of the steep “cliff effect” is key. With a gradual phase out, families wouldn’t need to refuse small raises or avoid getting higher-paying jobs to maintain crucial child care assistance.

United Way of Central Iowa estimates implementing its proposal would cost around $22 million per year. On a federal level, the Child Care for Working Families Act, which is co-sponsored by the majority of congressional Democrats, would provide free child care to all families earning less than 75 percent of their state’s median income and cap spending for families earning up to 150 percent of the federal poverty line at 7 percent of their income. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has also proposed her own plan to pay for child care for all families making less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line, and to provide support for families earning more than 200 percent of the federal poverty line who still can’t find child care at less than 7 percent of their income..

“We know support for children is critically important for adults to have success — in work, in certification programs, or in education. And we need to make sure that children get the support they need to enter kindergarten on par with their peers,” said Teree Caldwell-Johnson, CEO of Oakridge Neighborhood Services. If Iowa appropriates enough money for affordable child care, a generation of parents will have the freedom to make a better life for their families, and a generation of children will start their lives on more solid footing.

Editor’s note: The Beasley family requested that their name be changed for privacy.