Value Recognized : Day Care Spreading in Industry
Kathy Zweber had this problem.
She and her husband, Tim, wanted to have kids. The time was right. The marriage was on solid ground. They were both professionals, she an accountant, he a financial appraiser. With both of them working, they could afford to begin raising a family.
The problem was child care.
Kathy Zweber didn’t want to be away from her children all day, didn’t like the idea of dropping them off at a day-care center far from the office. She had to work, like most mothers today, but she didn’t want to go through the day knowing little or nothing about the care her children were receiving.
So, with her yet-unborn family members in mind, she applied for a job with the Zale Corp., the giant of the jewelry industry. The Zale Corp. operated a day-care center only a few steps from the front doors of the main office. That was the lure.
Two Children in Center
She got the job three years ago. And now, she takes time off from work each day to nurse her 5-month-old daughter, Zara, at the center, while her 2-year-old son, Zack, plays with other toddlers in a room across the hall.
“My life just wouldn’t be the same,” at another company, Zweber said. “Here, I can come over during the day. I can be with Zara at this age. That is an essential thing an infant misses out on when the mother works.
“I had some other offers--one with a lot more money than I accepted here,” she said. “But I knew the priority had to be with the children.”
A few miles away, Tom Ford dropped by the next morning to look in on his two children, Joshua, 5, and Marissa, 2, at the Lomas & Nettleton School. The school was part of the blueprint when Lomas & Nettleton, the world’s largest independent mortgage banker, built a new service center two years ago to handle its 700,000 accounts.
Lunch With Children
Originally, the facility had places for 75 preschoolers, but the waiting list grew so long that more space was added last month to allow for 50 more children. Parents can eat lunch with their youngsters in the company cafeteria just across the courtyard from the school. From windows of the otherwise businesslike service center, employees can watch them cavort on the outdoor playground. All of the teachers have degrees in some form of child care.
This makes Ford, an information systems specialist, a true company man, with the kind of loyalty that is hard to come by in large corporations.
“In regular day-care centers, they watch children, they don’t work with them,” he said. Talking about his own children in an interview at the school, he said: “I see them during the day. I know their schedules. Tomorrow my son is having a birthday party, so I will be down here. You can’t put a value to this school system here. They could double what they charge me ($65 per week per child) and I would pay it happily. They could change a lot of things about my job that I wouldn’t like, but I wouldn’t leave this company.”
Zweber and Ford are two of the lucky ones. Their companies, and a handful of others, have come to view child care as an important issue. Zale, a relatively early convert to the idea that proper child care makes for a better workplace, began its center in 1979. Michael Romaine, the Zale vice president for community relations who set up the center, said Zweber’s case is not an isolated one.
‘A Retention Device’
“The type of people you normally have to recruit are walking in,” said Romaine, who is a child psychologist. “I just wish more companies would do it. We get a recruiting advantage. We get a morale-builder which we extend to the rest of the employee group here. It’s a retention device. A person who has a child in that center would have to think long and hard before leaving. And, it’s the right thing to do.”
Not to mention, he conceded, a boon to the corporate image.
Of the 6 million employers in the United States, only about 600 have day-care centers on or near the business site, and 400 of those employers are hospitals. Only an estimated 3,000 businesses offer child-care assistance of any kind.
Nevertheless, as child care becomes more of an issue in the workplace, those numbers are growing. In 1978, only 110 employers in the country offered some form of child-care aid. And advocates of corporate assistance are quick to point out that while there may be 6 million businesses nationwide, only 44,000 of them have more than 100 employees.
‘It Is Growing’
“There is and has been a steady growth,” in company child-care facilities, said Pat Ward, a senior associate of the New York-based Catalyst Inc., a nonprofit organization that monitors and encourages corporate child care. “There isn’t the kind of growth those involved in it would like to see, or parents would like to see, but it is growing.”
That they will see more is virtually certain, given the increasing number of women with children going to work and the gradual demise of traditional family roles, in which the father earned the salary while the mother stayed home with the children. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for 1985 show that in only 19.6% of all families in the country was the husband the sole wage earner.
According to a survey conducted by Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), chairman of the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, nearly half of all mothers with children less than a year old are in the work force and 60% of all mothers with preschool children are working.
Although the need for child care is on the increase, the federal government has trimmed 25% from its funds for child-care assistance since 1980. The widening gap is a problem for both the poor and middle class, and is made more serious as the number of single-parent households continues to grow. Miller predicts that one child in four under the age of 10 will live in a single-parent household by 1990.
To Fill the Void
A number of child-care experts interviewed said they expect private industry increasingly to enter the field to fill the void left by government.
“There’s no indication the vast majority of businesses are stampeding to provide child care for their employees,” Miller said. “But more and more are realizing this is a necessary service they are going to have to provide and it does improve their productivity. This is not a drag on their bottom line.”
But winning over businesses, getting them involved in child care issues, has been a slow process.
Ward, of Catalyst Inc., said the people who run corporations now--most of them men--grew up in a traditional environment. The father brought home the paycheck, the mother stayed home with the children--a sort of Ozzie and Harriet approach to living. “The work force changed a long time ago, but the reality hasn’t caught up yet,” she said.
But it is also true that employees have been slow to ask the boss to help them obtain quality child care. Dana Friedman, the child-care expert for the Conference Board in New York, calls that the major hindrance to educating corporate executives who hold the purse strings. She says they might be more helpful if they knew the extent of the problem.
“That is the biggest obstacle,” she said. “Employees are afraid to speak up about it. . . . They are afraid to take the risk.”
Fathers Not Immune
And she also bridles at the notion that child care is essentially a problem of working women. “When fathers take on family responsibilities, they are not immune to the issue of work-family conflict,” she said. “I don’t want it to be called a woman’s issue.”
The increase--such as it is--in child-care assistance among businesses began in 1981, when the federal government made child care a tax-free benefit for employees, like medical and dental insurance.
Now, even the U.S. Senate has a day-care facility, catering to employees that range from chiefs of staff to credit union employees. It was opened in 1984, is self-supporting and has a long waiting list.
“It’s so successful, it’s almost ridiculous,” said Mary Conklin, the president of the board of directors of the Senate center.
On-site day-care centers are one answer, but not the only one, and in fact, they represent the least likely option, given their impracticalities for many businesses.
‘Red-Flag’ Issue
For one thing there is the cost. The Lomas & Nettleton annual budget for its school is about $600,000, which is far more than it recovers in weekly tuition. Liability insurance, which has skyrocketed in the last year, is a “red-flag” issue for employers, Ward said. Russell Young, a Lomas & Nettleton executive, said he did not have an exact figure for the insurance costs but called it a “hefty premium.”
And, unless the employer chooses to subsidize the on-site center, the costs can be prohibitive to an employee, making the center attractive to a company executive but too expensive for his secretary.
Ward also pointed out that on-site centers are often not large enough to accommodate the children of all employees, creating long waiting lists.
As a result, the pitfalls of starting a program outweigh the advantages for many corporations. Some have tried without success.
“A lot of people have jumped into it, failed and gotten out,” said Darla Miller, a Houston child-care expert.
And other businesses just aren’t suited for on-site centers.
Chemical Plants Out
“You wouldn’t want a day-care center at a chemical plant,” said Friedman of the Conference Board. “You wouldn’t want one in downtown Manhattan where you have to take your child on public transportation.”
Other companies are resorting to a variety of methods to assist their employees with day care.
The Southland Corp. of Dallas, parent company of the 7,000 7-Eleven Stores, is using a number of plans to assist its 60,000 employees throughout the nation. Wayne Snyder, Southland’s director of employee services, said the corporation does plan to build a day-care center for up to 150 children on the site of its new headquarters.
For its employees in Vancouver, British Columbia, Southland has a day-care center located in the basement of a church. In Florida, it has an arrangement with the state child-care agency to find good day care and refer employees to it, and the company subsidizes 25% of the cost. And Snyder said the eventual plan is to have what is known as a cafeteria benefits program, allowing employees nationwide to select child-care assistance from a variety of offerings.
Might Offer Choice
For instance, if both spouses work, one might have health insurance that covers the entire family and the other could choose child care instead because two insurance packages would be unnecessary.
The giant Procter & Gamble Corp. of Cincinnati has a program in which a fixed percentage of salary, based on years of service, can be assigned to pay for dependent care, among other things. Procter & Gamble has paid for the renovation of two near-site centers and gets 75% of the openings in return. It has a day-care referral service that can be used by anyone in the city, not just Procter & Gamble employees.
Polaroid Corp., in Cambridge, Mass., has been subsidizing child care for 18 years, helping families with less than a $30,000 income on a sliding scale.
And in Hialeah, Fla., National Partitions & Interiors, which has only 25 employees, opened a child-care facility three years ago as an incentive to mothers who would be willing to work part time if they could find proper child care.
“They can work here without having to pay for child care,” said Sue Hulan, a company supervisor. “It prevents a lot of job hopping,”
San Francisco’s Law
At the other end of the scale is the city of San Francisco, which in 1985 passed an ordinance, the first of its kind, requiring child-care provisions in plans for commercial office space development.
Miller said he believes his fellow members of Congress will be more supportive of child-care issues in the future because the topic spans all geographic and economic bounds.
“This is now a shared experience,” he said. “It makes no difference if you live in the Bronx or Irvine, Tex.”
He said he hopes more federal money will be funneled back into child care, and said that conservatives should support that approach because it could help cut the ever-increasing welfare load. And, he said, he hopes to see new tax incentives that will make it attractive for businesses to become involved and to expand child-care options.
“You really have to make child care user-friendly,” he said. “The big goal is to remove the inconsistency of working and raising a family.”
Also contributing to this report were Times researchers Joanne Harrison in Houston, Lorna Nones in Miami, Wendy Leopold in Chicago and Diana Rector in Atlanta.
