In Wisconsin, Trump announces $13 billion in farm aid

By Steve Holland and P.J. Huffstutter

MOSINEE, Wis. (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump announced a new round of pandemic assistance to farmers of about $13 billion at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Thursday night, delivering aid to an important sector in a crucial battleground state.

“Starting next week my administration is committing an additional … $13 billion in relief to help farmers recover from the China virus, including Wisconsin’s incredible dairy, cranberry and ginseng farmers who got hurt badly,” Trump said, referring to the novel coronavirus virus.

Wisconsin is known for its milk and cheese industries, which have been hard hit by both the White House’s trade policies and the COVID-19 pandemic – but the amount of assistance to farmers weeks before the vote was unexpected.

Trump spoke in Mosinee, a rural town in the central part of Wisconsin, as state officials reported 2,034 new coronavirus cases, a record one-day increase.

The new aid program – which the agriculture department is expected to release details about on Friday – is tapping into the $14 billion in additional Commodity Credit Corporation funds that Congress agreed to prepay as part of the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, according to four sources familiar with the matter.

Farmers are expected to be allowed to start applying for the new program on Monday, the sources said.

How much certain crops will receive is not known, but the program is set to make direct payments to producers of meat, dairy, grain, vegetables and other products, the sources said.

The payments will be designed similarly to an earlier aid package: calculated based on yields of crops and the impact the coronavirus pandemic had on the price of the commodities.

Trump in April announced a $19 billion relief program to help U.S. farmers cope with the impact of the virus, including $16 billion in direct payments to producers and mass purchases of meat, dairy, vegetables and other products.

That came on the heels of $28 billion in trade aid given to the farm sector over 2018 and 2019. A government watchdog agency said on Monday the 2019 aid favored farmers from the U.S. Southeast, primarily those growing crops like cotton or sorghum, over those in other parts of the country.

China’s demand for U.S. corn and soybeans has been strong in recent weeks, boosting prices, and it is also importing more meat amid a potential food supply gap.

(Reporting by Steve Holland and P.J. Huffstutter; Writing by Andy Sullivan and Eric Beech; Editing by Tom Brown and Aurora Ellis)

Coronavirus child care pinch in U.S. poses threat to economic gains of working women

By Jonnelle Marte and Rachel Dissell

CLEVELAND (Reuters) – Most days, Zora Pannell works from her dining room table, sitting in front of her computer, turning off the video on Zoom calls to nurse her one-year-old daughter, Savannah.

Pannell has balanced working from home and caring for her daughter and son Timothy, aged 2, since March when she started a new job as a manager for a language services company the same week that Ohio issued a “stay at home” order to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Working from home is an exhausting daily juggle but she’s more worried about being told it’s time to return to the office. Her husband cannot watch the children during the day because he has a job at a local steel mill and the couple have been unable to find a daycare center they deemed safe and affordable close to their Shaker Heights apartment on the eastern fringe of Cleveland.

“I’ve already felt penalized for being a working mother,” said Pannell, 30, who is worried she would have to quit if she is not allowed to keep working from home. “Now it’s like I’m in purgatory.”

The pandemic upended child care plans for many parents in the United States, forcing them – particularly mothers – to grapple with tough choices that are only becoming more difficult as states push return-to-work policies to try to revive the battered economy.

Do they hunt for expensive and hard-to-find child care that could expose their families to COVID-19, which is still raging across much of the country? Or do they scale back on work, or even quit, threatening their financial stability?

The barriers risk stalling or reversing the economic gains of recent years made by working women, who are more likely to take a career hit than men when they are unable to find child care, studies show.

A survey by Northeastern University between May 10-June 22 found that 13% of working parents had to resign or reduce their work hours because of a lack of child care during the health crisis, with women impacted significantly more than men. In all, of those who said they had lost a job due to child care problems, 60% were women, the survey found.

“If women don’t have child care, they can’t go back to work,” said Karen Schulman, Child Care and Early Learning Research Director for the National Women’s Law Center. If that doesn’t happen, “you end up creating a system that is going to result in vast gender inequities”.

Prior to the pandemic, the labor force participation rate for women aged 25-54 touched 77% in February, rising from 73% in September 2015 and close to the peak reached in 2000, when the share of women in the labor force began to plateau, in part because of challenges accessing affordable child care, experts say.

LIMITED OPTIONS

Pressure looks certain to mount on families in the coming weeks, as various aid programs and protections that offered relief to jobless parents expire, including enhanced unemployment benefits, eviction moratoriums and a freeze on student loan payments.

“There’s this fragile, invisible thread holding the lives of our moms, holding the lives of our economy together,” said Chastity Lord, president and chief executive of the Jeremiah Program, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit organization that supports single mothers and their children.

Finding a way to broaden access to child care will be pivotal to helping the U.S. labor market heal from the economic devastation caused by the pandemic, with latest data showing the economy contracting an annualized 32.9% in the second quarter of 2020 and approximately one out of five workers claiming unemployment insurance in the week ending July 11.

Child care was already scarce before the coronavirus led to the shuttering of thousands of centers. More than half of all Americans lived in a child care “desert” as of 2018, defined by the Center for American Progress, a liberal nonprofit group in Washington, as an area with no licensed child care providers or less than one slot for every three children under five.

Now, in many states, care centers accept only limited numbers of children to prevent the virus from spreading. Additionally, families that relied on grandparents or other older relatives or neighbors must weigh up the risks of asking for their help again and perhaps exposing them to a disease that has proved especially deadly for the elderly.

Chantel Springer, 24, worked at Starbucks in Manhattan during the early months of the pandemic but has been on furlough since June, when the store cut back on staff to adjust to lower demand and social distancing requirements. Now that her unemployment benefits could shrink as low as $325 a week, Springer is making arrangements to get back to her job as a shift manager.

“I feel like I have to work,” said Springer, explaining that the reduced benefits would not be enough to cover the rent, food, diapers and other costs.

This month, Springer transferred to a store in Brooklyn so she could be closer to her apartment and her two-year-old. But finding someone to babysit her son is a challenge. Springer can no longer leave the toddler with her mother, who recently moved to take care of a disabled sister whose husband died from Covid-19. For now, she is looking to coordinate schedules with her son’s father, who has also returned to work at a retail store.

HOME ALONE

Under the CARES Act passed in late March, parents who lost access to child care because of the pandemic became eligible for unemployment benefits. But the process of qualifying for the program, which varies from state to state, became less clear cut as the school year ended and some day care centers began to re-open with limited capacity.

The Labor Department sought to clarify with guidance that parents should resort to their typical summer child care plans.

Many states, including New York, Missouri and Louisiana, allow parents to self-certify each week, under penalty of perjury, that their child care center was closed and that they met the requirements to continue receiving benefits. Other states, like California and Texas, make such decisions on a “case-by-case” basis.

While child care places are hard to find for toddlers, they are even scarcer for school-age children and many summer programs for this age-group went online, leaving parents facing a quandary.

Sarah Sapp is hatching plans to rig up an old cell phone for her 11-year-old son, Avery.

The 37-year-old waitress from North Olmsted, a western suburb of Cleveland, fears her son, who sometimes struggles to pay attention to instructions, isn’t quite mature enough to be left home alone while she serves food and drinks at a high-end tavern. But she feels she has little choice.

When Ohio initially ordered restaurants and bars to close in March, Sapp qualified for state unemployment. But when the state told people it was safe to return to work in May, she was informed that she would no longer be eligible. Sapp tried to sign her son up for a day camp at her local recreation center but it got canceled.

More problems are piling up on the horizon. Sapp’s school district has told parents they must choose between all online lessons or a hybrid of two days shortened days in school and three days at home when classes resume in September. Neither of these options would allow her to work her lunchtime shift.

“I feel stuck,” Sapp said. “There doesn’t seem to be a right choice no matter how I look at things.”

(Rachel Dissell is a contributing reporter with The Fuller Project, a global nonprofit newsroom reporting on issues that impact women.; Jonnelle Marte reported for this story from New York; Editing by Heather Timmons and Crispian Balmer)

Mnuchin says no payroll tax cut in coronavirus relief bill

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on Thursday the White House is interested in getting a trillion-dollar coronavirus relief bill out quickly and will not include the payroll tax cut long sought by President Donald Trump.

Mnuchin also said the White House was working with Senate Republicans to hammer out language on extending enhanced unemployment benefits that expire on July 31.

Asked whether a payroll tax cut would be included in the proposal being put forth by Senate Republicans, Mnuchin said, “Not in this, but we’re going to come back. You know there might be a CARES 5.0.”

Mnuchin said he and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows would be going to Capitol Hill again on Thursday morning to meet with Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“One of the problems with the payroll tax cut is it takes time, so we are much more focused right now on the direct payments,” Mnuchin told reporters outside the White House.

“The unemployment insurance – we’re going back up to see the new language and work through that, he said. “We’re not going to pay people more to stay home than to work. So we’re looking at something that looks like a 70% wage replacement and working on the mechanics.”

The Treasury secretary told reporters the proposal being worked out by Senate Republicans will include $16 billion in new funding for coronavirus testing, for a total of $25 billion.

“We’re focused on putting another trillion in quickly, that’ll be CARES 4.0. If we’ve got to come back for CARES 5.0, for more money, the president will consider that the time,” Mnuchin said in an interview earlier with CNBC.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Alex Richardson and Jonathan Oatis)