As millions of Americans fired up their grills this Labor Day, an invisible army of 53 million unpaid caregivers remained on duty. These are the workers we don’t celebrate — the daughters juggling careers while caring for aging parents, the husbands learning to be nurses overnight, the granddaughters putting dreams on hold to tend to grandparents with dementia. They’re the backbone of our care infrastructure, and they’re in crisis.
Let’s start with a staggering number: $600 billion. That’s the annual economic value of unpaid caregiving in America, according to AARP. To put that in perspective, it’s more than the combined 2022 revenues of Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Yet unlike the tech giants, this massive economic engine runs without recognition, without overtime, without so much as a paycheck.