In my state, a single childcare worker can watch up to 6 children. If they are infants I belive the number goes down to 4.
That is not a lot to work with.
If there wasn't any overhead, the childcare worker with one infant would pay 1/4 of their wages on childcare, which doesn't leave a lot for housing, food, transportation, student loans, etc. They are only infants so long however...
Actually there is overhead, the child care center has to pay for a building, administrators, marketing, and possibly taxes.
Contrast that to the auto worker, who probably gets a new car relatively often, let's say it works out like a $300 a month, or $3600 a year.
I think auto workers are relatively well paid, so the cost of that car is 5% of their wages as opposed to 20% or more.
Your acting like this is new, the poor have always been crapped on. It was common for wet nurses babies to die in the 18th and 19th century. A mother can make enough milk for 2 babies, but the wealthy who hired wet nurses didn't want poor babies around their precious rich babies.
Heartbreaking: https://daily.jstor.org/lifesaving-horrifying-history-wet-nu...
edit (typo)
What is DQN?
https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-...
Henry Ford realized that the automobile was not going to change the world unless auto workers were so productive that they could easily afford the cars they made.
That kind of productivity increase is not possible w/ Childcare. I remember a Z Magazine cartoon more than 20 years ago where two women were pondering the mystery of why a child care worker can't afford child care and the unspoken punch line was that it was the perversity of capitalism but, no, it's not that economically efficient to pay somebody else to watch your kid for you. It makes money for the day care center, it makes money for your employer if you go to work, you pay taxes on the money you earn -- it makes money for a whole lot of people who aren't you.
You, not so much.
Universal child care is currently reeling from the discovery that recipients of universal child care in Montreal have turned into DQN adolescents. Maybe "the kids will be alright" in the end, but it is not looking like a program that pays for itself like Head Start.