Can Corporate America Win Over Stay At Home Moms?

I was sitting at a local diner. The kind that has regulars that have been coming for years. I love going to places like that diner as it’s always fun to sit and listen to the customers and staff interact like they are neighbors or family, which in many cases they are in small town diners. As the chit chat progressed something I overheard caused me to zero in on one of the conversations. Specifically, the owner of the diner was expressing disgust at a recent interaction she had with a young mother who wasn’t currently working outside the home, but had worked in the past. The young mom was commenting that she had zero intention of going back to a regular job if she was able to continue getting a government subsidy. The hard working owner of the diner was beyond annoyed at the attitude expressed by the stay-at-home parent. She communicated very clearly and plainly that the young mother in question was lazy and needed to get off the dole and get her butt to work. What I found most interesting, although not at all surprising, was that the head of the diner had it all wrong. As I’m writing this there are constant news stories on all the media outlets reporting about how tight the labor market is. Often the pundits are blaming the lingering subsidies that were created to fight the potential economic collapse during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the media the pundits and talking heads are arguing that the labor shortage can be blamed on government payments and lazy individuals who “just don’t want to work”. Their comments mirrored those of the diner owner, or maybe the diner owner was echoing the conservative media of the day. Interestingly I think the diner owner’s experience with the young mother was closer to the mark. I say this because of a recent conversation I had with a recruiter whose business is to find people for lower wage manufacturing jobs. He told me that the labor market’s problem sits squarely on the shoulders of the now stay-at-home moms, but in a twist he blames the manufacturers. In his opinion, he believes that a massive population of lower income parents stopped paying daycare bills, but also stopped working and realized in a very real way that their quality of life was no different. My recruiter friend put it a bit more directly. In his words, “they looked at their bank account when they were working and paying daycare, and then they looked at it when they weren’t working and weren’t paying daycare, and it was about the same.” So my recruiter friend, who is close enough to this population to be more right than wrong, told me, they all came to the same conclusion “If all it takes is a small government subsidy to not work and have a great quality of life, then why come back into the workforce if i’m getting the subsidy?” I believe this to be true, but there is another point that’s not being taken into consideration. Parenting, even “lazy parenting” of daycare age kids isn’t easy. It’s a hard job with long hours. <a href="https://pelusopresents.medium.com/can-corporate-america-win-over-stay-at-home-moms-522e2cd8df2f">Click Here</a>