THE COST OF WORK

Millions of employees also support someone who needs care. Workplace rules determine how much of that responsibility they can carry without losing income.

Analysis | Social Storytellers Collective

Part of SSC’s reporting series examining labor pressure, workplace rules and who absorbs the cost.

An estimated 63 million Americans were family caregivers in 2025, according to AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, a total nearly 50% higher than in 2015. Their report announcement said six in ten caregivers were employed and half of employed caregivers experienced work disruptions, including arriving late or leaving early. The study includes care for adults and children with medical conditions or disabilities, so its total should not be mistaken for a count of eldercare alone. It nevertheless establishes the scale of the overlap: family care is already part of the workforce, whether an employer has designed its policies around that reality or not.

The Other Job Has No Reliable End Time.

For someone supporting an adult relative, care can involve transportation, medication coordination, meals, paperwork and conversations with providers. Some tasks can be planned; others arrive with little warning. An appointment runs late, a care arrangement falls through or a relative’s condition changes. These examples illustrate the demands a caregiver may face rather than describing an interviewed individual. The conflict is practical: the employer expects a worker to remain available during specified hours, while the person receiving care may need help during those same hours. Meeting both expectations can require a complicated chain of backup arrangements.

The household often provides the capacity that makes the arrangement possible. A sibling covers an appointment, a partner takes over a meal or the caregiver moves administrative tasks into the evening. That capacity is finite, and it is not distributed evenly. A worker with money to purchase assistance has options unavailable to someone relying entirely on relatives. An employee with discretion over hours can absorb a disruption differently from someone whose attendance is tightly monitored. The same care responsibility can therefore produce very different employment consequences depending on income, job design and the support available outside the workplace.

A Benefit Must Be Usable in Practice.

Having a supportive policy is only the beginning. Workers also need to understand it, qualify for it and feel able to use it. An employer can offer flexibility while leaving employees uncertain about whether requesting it will affect an evaluation or future opportunity. A manager can approve an absence while keeping deadlines unchanged, effectively relocating the work to the employee’s evening. In either case, the nominal accommodation may leave the underlying conflict unresolved. A usable benefit should change the conditions of work enough to help the employee meet the care need, rather than requiring the household to absorb both obligations in a different order.

Caregiving also complicates the meaning of an attendance problem. Arriving late may reflect a preventable communication failure, but it may also reflect a care system that depends on unpaid family coordination. Employers need a reliable way to understand recurring conflicts without demanding unnecessary personal details. The objective should be to identify what adjustment could make the job workable: predictable hours, a different start time, a defined remote task or temporary redistribution of responsibilities. These are proposals for workplace design, not claims that every occupation can operate remotely or that every request can be accommodated in the same way.

Care Policies Should Reach Beyond Office Workers.

Hourly and customer-facing employees need a place in this discussion. A policy built around working from home may offer little help to someone whose duties require physical presence. Earlier schedules, workable shift exchanges, clear leave procedures and reliable coverage can be more relevant. Employers should ask which workers can actually use the support they advertise. They should also examine whether managers have the resources to implement it. A supervisor expected to maintain service with no backup staffing may struggle to deliver flexibility even when the organization publicly endorses it. Supporting caregivers requires operating capacity as well as sympathetic language.

The care itself does not disappear when a workplace declines to account for it. It moves into unpaid hours, onto another family member or into a decision to reduce employment. That is the central cost question: how much responsibility can households absorb before their ability to keep earning begins to weaken? Organizations should assess care support through practical outcomes, including whether people can remain employed and meet agreed expectations without continually exhausting their alternatives. Family care sustains people who depend on it, and workplace policy helps determine whether the workers providing that care can sustain themselves.