Connecticut’s labor force — the portion of the adult population employed or looking for work — contracted sharply at the beginning of the pandemic and has failed to recover to its pre-COVID scale. Economists have attributed much of the persistent workforce deficit to a child care shortage.
The need for investment has only grown more acute over the last two years. About one in four working households in Connecticut have children under the age of 6, and the state was already short 50,000 infant and toddler care slots before the pandemic.
That deficiency has since gotten worse.
CT Mirror’s economic development reporter Erica Phillips tells host Ebong Udoma what’s being done to look for a fix to this foundational problem for Connecticut’s economy.
You can read Erica’s story here.