Creative Day Care

With day care emerging as a prime issue for the late 1980s, a pilot program conducted by the Los Angeles City Department of Water and Power bears watching. Its origins show that the issue affects men as well as women. Its results, which reflect what some companies in Southern California are doing, could show what government agencies or other companies can do to increase worker productivity while giving employees peace of mind about their children.

For Water and Power, it began a few years ago when United Way surveyed workers in the Civic Center area on a variety of work-related issues. The department asked only its women employees about day-care needs. Beverly King, DWP’s director of human resources, said she then got many phone calls from men saying that they, too, had child-care needs.

The department then conducted its own employee survey, focusing questions on the single issue of of child-care needs. It hired a private consultant with experience in such surveys and in establishing day-care programs, a step King considers critical to success. The departmental survey, conducted in November, 1985, revealed that more than one-third of the people who responded had children under 13. Of those, 60% used some form of child care, with which most had serious problems.

Employees estimated that they missed, in the aggregate, more than 7,300 work days because of child-care problems, days that accounted for $1 million in salary and benefits. It seemed clear to the department that meeting some child-care needs would benefit both employer and employees.

As a result, the department, whose work force is about 80% male, took several steps. It:

--Contracted with a downtown child-care program, the California Pediatric Center, to provide care for 30 children and with the child-care program at Good Samaritan Hospital for another five children. The pediatric center’s hours are longer than those at most centers so that parents can drop off and pick up their children before and after normal working hours.

--Started a program under which parents can take mildly ill children for separate care at the pediatric center, making it possible for parents to work, knowing that their youngsters are getting medical care.

--Established a referral service to help fill special needs for day care. For example, it is possible for parents to enroll children in a racially integrated program or in programs where they can get necessary medication or other special help. In its first three months of operation, that service placed 150 children.

--Subsidizes some of its employees’ child-care expenses.

Next spring the department will begin allowing workers to earmark a portion of their salaries for child care so that the money is not taxed.

“We want well babies and well mothers,” said King. “Our other goal is having productive employees. If you have career employees who leave after 10 years because of child-care problems, that is a tremendous loss in terms of experience.”

The department expects to save money, especially on absenteeism that occurs when workers’ children are ill. It will conduct a full assessment of its program next summer. While it’s too early to judge yet, it sounds as though the department has made a good investment, in people as well as productivity.