How the Coronavirus is Killing the Middle Class

Kelly Bates is a forty-one-year-old single mom who lives with her nine-year-old daughter, Danielle Lucky, in Collingdale, Pennsylvania, a middle-income neighborhood of aging red-brick row houses a few miles from the Philadelphia airport. Bates, who is willowy, with large brown eyes, had grown up in South Philadelphia in the seventies and eighties, as part of the city’s burgeoning African-American middle class: her father was a heating contractor, and her mother worked for the Bell Telephone Company. But over the decades crime in the neighborhood increased, and, in 2015, Bates bought a three-bedroom house in Collingdale for seventy thousand dollars, hoping to escape the violence. “I wanted Danielle to go outside and play and not worry about getting shot,” Bates told me recently. Since 2016, Bates has worked as an assistant director at Kinder Academy, a chain of five child-care centers around Philadelphia. Through her work there, she received a grant to earn a bachelor’s degree in early-childhood education, and is about a year away from graduating. “Babies are my passion,” she told me. “I’m part mom, part dad, part therapist, part doctor, and part food-program officer.”

On March 16th, as the coronavirus spread in Pennsylvania, Governor Tom Wolf ordered all nonessential businesses, including child-care centers, to shut down indefinitely. That evening, Leslie Spina, Kinder Academy’s fifty-four-year-old owner, decided that she was going to have to lay off all hundred of her employees. The state had allocated some money to support child-care centers, but Spina didn’t think it would last more than a month or so. She also worried that the longer she waited to let her employees go, the longer the line would be for unemployment. She’d known most of her employees for decades and had helped raise their children at the centers. “The decision almost broke me,” Spina said. “It’s not like other businesses. They are my family.” One of the workers she had to lay off was her own mother, Debby, who is seventy-three.

The day after the centers closed, she met with her employees on Zoom and read them a letter she had written, announcing the layoffs. She didn’t allow her mother on the call, so that she wouldn’t have to break down in front of her. “We’re used to turning to Leslie to fix every problem,” Monica Hernandez, a center director, told me. “Here was a problem she couldn’t fix.” Spina offered to set up one-on-one tutorials with her employees for navigating the state’s arcane unemployment-benefits system. She and her assistant spent days helping employees who didn’t have computers submit claims. Spina’s mother had to apply twice, after an initial application was lost. Continue reading.