Parents are struggling to find sitters amid a shortage of workers since the start of the pandemic, and those that are available have jacked up their prices. On child-care website UrbanSitter, the sitters are charging 11% more than in 2021, averaging $20.57 an hour for one child, and $23.25 for two children. The two-child hourly rate is more like $24 to $27 in New York and San Francisco, according to Chief Executive Officer Lynn Perkins. The worker shortage is particularly acute for part-time gigs, she said.
“There’s just no one available,” Perkins said. “It’s crazy. We're talking about unprecedented numbers.” Perkins herself recently struggled to hire a $30-per-hour afternoon sitter for one child.
More at a Bloomberg story about comedians choosing to babysit as a side gig.
To comedians, lucrative child-care gigs are more attractive than restaurant work, which can be an inflexible grind, and conveniently require no certification beyond child CPR and first aid training. And the hours fit nicely with their nocturnal regular jobs... Parents concur, thrilled to find educated, intelligent, personable caretakers interested in gig work.“Kids are inherently hilarious. They provide a different perspective, which is always good for comedic material.”..The kids, for their part, have some skills that help the comedians, too. Mabson finds that her kid gigs often help her cope with the professional rejection inherent in stand up. “I’ll feel down after a crappy audition, and a cute little human is like, ‘You’re the BEST EVER!’ And I’m like, ‘Maybe I am great.’”
I used to charge fifty cents an hour. Of course that was in 1973, and I was deliberately undercutting the market. Most baby-sitters charged a dollar an hour back then. Also I was 13, so it's not like I was paying rent.
ReplyDeleteYep. A buck an hour in the ‘80’s even, when I was in high school.
DeleteI think I'd rather pet sit. When you walk a dog they have plenty to distract them from annoying you. Of course they will take off after a squirrel but so will a kid.
ReplyDeletexoxoxoBruce
I was astonished at how many babysitting jobs my daughter could wrangle when she was home from from college during January. These were mostly not pre-existing relationships, but instead arranged through third-party websites.
ReplyDeleteSo, do we want the underclass to make more money or not? If you can afford a babysitter you are rich, so pay up without complaining about whether it's $12 or $25 an hour.
ReplyDeleteI personally take offense at your use of the term "underclass" to describe babysitters - or any other nonprofessional or manual labor employment. That kind of demarcation of labor (or humanity) into "classes" is elitist and derogatory.
DeleteI apologize for offending you. However, I think underclass is a legitimate and widely used word, and appropriate to describe someone working what has traditionally been one of the most poorly paid jobs in America. We may both wish that classes, economic, social, and otherwise did not exist in our society. However, pretending they don't exist is, in my opinion, hurtful rather than helpful to the issue.
Deletehttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/underclass
"so pay up without complaining about whether it's $12 or $25 an hour."
DeleteI don't see comments here nor in the Bloomberg article that indicate people are complaining.
Wages rose 4.6% for hourly workers in 2022, which did not keep up with the 6.5% inflation rate for 2022. The 11% rise in compensation for babysitters in 2022 certainly reflects supply and demand at work.
I know two families that pay babysitters. Neither would consider themselves "rich" by any measure.
It's not only rich people who use babysitters. I expect that there are some parents who need to pay a babysitter to be able to go to work at times. That $25 per hour rate is probably more than they are able to earn, so they either lose money or stay out of the labor force because it doesn't make financial sense.
DeleteI trust that these child care workers are reporting all of this income to the IRS.
ReplyDeleteI never did, but on the other hand people aren't required to file taxes until they make a certain amount -- used to be $10,000/year, but I think it's more now.
Delete$12,950 for 2022 tax year if you are filing single. If you are married filing separately, the minimum is $5.
DeleteSo like if a married couple makes $11000 between them do they still file?
DeleteA married couple filing jointly pay taxes if they earn over $25,900. The filing threshold for married filing separately is $5. So a married couple filing separately with total income of $11,000 would have to file assuming they each earned more than $5? Sounds weird. I am not a tax guy, so I don't know what the explanation for that is. Of course, one would wonder why they would file separately...
DeleteI found some explanations for this MFS threshold. It dates back to 2018 and a rule made by the IRS. The document below seems to explain this, but I think it just confused me more. A change was proposed last year that makes more sense, but no change was enacted.
Deletehttps://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ARC21_PurpleBook_02_ImproveFiling_9.pdf
From what I've seen, the majority of people complaining about this are the same people that think capitalism is the best system ever. This is simple supply and demand economics; a certain skill is in demand, with limited supply, and the prices go up. Good for these people to demand what they're worth.
ReplyDeleteI could not read the Bloomberg article, but I do not see anyone complaining in the original post nor in the comments. I think people are well aware of supply and demand, on both ends of the transaction.
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