大流行期间的安全网：儿童保育、带薪休假和收入支持计划（英）

A M E R I C A N E N T E R P R I S E I N S T I T U T E1The Safety Net During the Pandemic: Childcare, Paid Leave, and Income-Support Programs June 2022As the US starts returning to a post-pandemic nor-mal, it is useful to assess how workers and families fared during the COVID-19 pandemic to help inform future policies and crisis response. To address these questions, the nonpartisan research organization NORC at the University of Chicago fielded a longitudinal survey of working-age adults for AEI shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The survey is unique because it follows the same individuals over 18 months, asking them questions about their household employment, use of childcare and paid leave, participation in safety-net pro-grams, and attitudes about government.The original Employment and Safety Net survey included 3,518 working-age adult respondents (age 18– 64), with an oversample of 1,938 parents of children under age 18, recruited from a panel administered by NORC.1 We selected the original sample to represent the US population of working-age adults as a whole and weighted the results to reflect this population. The first wave of data collection occurred from July 23 to August 7, 2020. In February 2021, NORC contacted the original survey respondents to complete a second wave of the survey, and 2,852 responded. AEI has released various reports summarizing the data from the first two waves of the survey.2 In September 2021, NORC recontacted survey respondents to complete a third wave of the survey, and 2,466 responded for a 70 percent retention rate. This Angela RachidiKey Points • A new longitudinal survey suggests that the full-time employment rate for all working-age adults declined in the first few months after the pandemic hit but largely recovered by September 2021. However, women experienced a more dramatic drop in full-time employ-ment than did men overall.• Survey results also suggest that the limited supply of childcare did not drive these employ-ment declines, but rather, parental job loss and fears over COVID-19 reduced the demand for childcare services among parents.• The percentage of workers from our sample with access to paid leave increased from 44 to 55 percent throughout the pandemic. Leave-taking during the past six months also increased throughout the pandemic, from 16 to 32 percent; however, a sizable percentage reported an unmet need for leave in the previous six months, and this group increased from 15 to 32 percent throughout the pandemic.• The existing safety net (including Congress’s expansions) proved an important resource to many households in our sample throughout the pandemic. Results suggested that a notable share of participants were new to programs, especially recipients of unemployment insurance.A M E R I C A N E N T E R P R I S E I N S T I T U T E2report summarizes the results from the respondents who completed all three waves of the survey (“the sam-ple”), offering a unique picture of the chan