Their claim should be rejected, but the government may have painted itself into a corner with this. The justification for increasing the pay of child care workers is the benefit of children being educated at a young age, because the younger a person is the greater their capacity for learning, so if it's a case of the earlier you start the better there's a social and economic utility to making child care a place of education. It's the transformation from baby sitting to educating that rationalises the pay increase. While it's undoubtedly desirable to improve the quality of aged care, there's not the same economic utility to justify the abnormal pay rise. Good luck to any politician trying to tell what I just wrote to aggrieved aged care workers....
