Noah Zatz (‘01), Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, contributed an article to LPE (Law and Political Economy) Blog discussing the dual pandemic problem of school closure and child-care and the devaluing of care underscored by the public health crisis (“Where Is the Care in the CARES Act?” July 27). “Despite its title, the CARES Act takes an excruciatingly indirect route to supporting caregiving. These contortions reflect the deep-seated reluctance to recognize and value caring labor. Instead, the Act reflects the dominant approach … of devoting resources to caregiving only to the extent that can be reframed as achieving some other goal. … The pandemic, however, has engendered a massive additional shift of caregiving work from collective, paid forms to fragmented, unpaid forms performed largely within families and predominantly by women.”
