Companies Back Network of Small Day-Care Centers
Forty Ventura County business leaders took a step Monday toward jointly assisting with day care for the children of employees.
Participants in a symposium sponsored by the city of Ventura and several companies said day care is much sought and is in short supply.
Sixty-five businesses were represented at the meeting at the Ventura Holiday Inn. After speeches and discussions, about 40 signed up for a planning session in three weeks.
The ideas put forth included starting a network of small centers for businesses close together and having a consultant on day care with a salary shared by all.
Participants said the county lacks day-care programs and that in the face of a countywide labor shortage, child care will become an increasingly necessary benefit to attract good workers.
Besides recruiting, the business owners and managers said, day care affects morale, productivity, tardiness, absenteeism and efficiency.
“The availability isn’t here, the quality isn’t here,” said Tracy Miller, an employee benefits coordinator for Ventura County National Bank. She said many of her company’s 200 employees are single parents.
“People miss days just researching to find a new provider if they lose their sitter or their child gets too old” for some day-care programs, Miller said. “People take off early and come in late because they want to see the home or the day-care center. . . . I’ve heard horror stories about people who have to pay $1 for every minute they’re late picking up their child.”
For small businesses, the loss in productivity of parents worried about child care “may be even more devastating,” said Clyde Reynolds, a board member of the Ventura Downtown Business Assn., a group of about 100 businesses, property owners and professional services. Reynolds was also representing Turning Point, a drug rehabilitation program that also offers emergency child care. “The resources just aren’t there, or the resources are not as great.”
William Bussiere, chief financial officer of Lost Arrow Corp., which includes the Ventura sports clothing manufacturing company, Patagonia Inc., said his company “finds it extremely difficult to hire people in Ventura County because of the labor shortage.”
Patagonia’s on-site day-care center has been named one of the best in the country. It is one of the company’s major recruitment attractions, Bussiere said. It saved Patagonia about $500,000 last year because the company did not have to recruit and retrain new employees to replace parents who may otherwise have left because of child-care problems.
But on-site programs like Patagonia’s are expensive and may not be for everyone, particularly smaller companies, participants said.
Forming a consortium would allow smaller companies to share costs and resources, said Wahneta Poteet, senior vice-president of the Bank of A. Levy.
Individual companies should also consider introducing flexible work schedules, increasing sick days and subsidizing child-care costs, employers said.
Keynote speaker Charles J. Buchta, an executive vice president of First Interstate Bank of California, recommended that every business hire a full-time child-care consultant or specialist in child care.
“Businesses will start competing by virtue of the quality of child care they can provide,” Buchta said. “We’ve got rules in place that do not fit the 1990s and beyond.”
The next meeting will be on April 25. Ellen Coleman, coordinator of the city-run Ventura Child Care Project, said it will be open to the public.
