It’s Time to Take the Kids to Work
Every weekday, beginning around 7 a.m., Linda Larson does the working mom hustle: Hustle yourself into a business suit. Hustle some breakfast into the kids. Hustle the kids off to day care. Hustle to finish your work before the day-care center shuts down at 6 p.m.
It would be an understatement to say that Larson is not alone. But unlike most of the South Bay’s working parents, she soon will have a shot at a slightly less harried life.
Last week, under a candy-striped canopy decked with pink and baby-blue balloons, Larson’s employer, TRW Space & Defense Sector in Redondo Beach, broke ground on an on-site corporate day-care center. The Launching Pad, as the center has been dubbed, will have room for 200 preschoolers when it opens late next year. Its infant-care unit will be among the nation’s largest and, most important to Larson, a deputy manager of information services, it will be a convenient 100 yards from her desk.
The worst part of placing a child in day care, Larson notes, is the uncertainty: Can you trust the day-care provider? Will he or she share your values? If your child becomes ill, will there be prompt treatment?
“A TRW (day-care) center would just take one of the questions away,” she said. “It’s right there. You know the people.” And if her little girls, now 2 and 3, were to have an emergency, she says, Mommy would be just seconds away.
Only a handful of South Bay employers offer on-site child care, but the numbers of such programs have been mushrooming in the past few years, locally and nationally, child-care experts say.
“Two years ago, there were about 1,000 on-site day-care centers nationwide,” said Sandra Burud, a Pasadena-based child-care benefits consultant. “Now I would estimate there are at least 1,250. And that’s real conservative.”
Child-care referral agencies in the South Bay continue to report a tremendous shortage of all types of day care. But Laura Peterson of the Santa Monica-based Cornerstone child-care consulting firm, said the South Bay--once noted for the McMartin Pre-School, site of the biggest day-care scandal in U.S. history--is now distinguishing itself as a leader in corporate day-care programs.
“Of all the communities I work in, the South Bay is the most active” in developing employer-provided day care, Peterson said.
The high price of South Bay property discourages non-corporate day-care vendors, Peterson said, because “the parents couldn’t afford to pay the kind of tuition it would take to cover the lease payments on their land.”
Since 1982, when Centinela Hospital in Inglewood opened its pioneer day-care center, on-site programs have been initiated at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center near Torrance. Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance contracted in 1988 with a nearby preschool to create space for the infant and preschool children of its employees. The city of Torrance has for the past two years been seeking a corporate partner to share a day-care center with government employees at the city’s Greenwood Park.
Los Angeles International Airport has leased a closed El Segundo school and plans to renovate it for an employee day-care center. And at least three other large employers in the area have on-site and near-site day-care programs in the works, Peterson said.
TRW is the region’s first aerospace company to offer on-site day care, but Burud predicts the Launching Pad will force TRW’s competitors to follow suit. She noted that on-site child care has become an increasingly popular recruitment tool for highly competitive industries in need of a skilled work force.
“TRW will get the strongest recruitment benefits from this,” she said, “but this means the rest of the aerospace industry is going to have to do something about corporate child care--and they know it.”
Jeffrey Wilkens, TRW Space & Defense Sector vice president for human relations, acknowledged that the Launching Pad “will give us a competitive advantage over our aerospace brethren in the L.A. area.”
But, he noted, the center also is a logical extension of TRW’s overall benefits plan. The giant aerospace and defense contractor, which employs 16,000 people at its Space Park complex in Redondo Beach, already offers a number of child-care benefits, including after-school programs and referrals.
Despite these services, a recent survey of company employees indicated that child care was a prime concern of TRW’s employees, he said. Because TRW has so many workers in one place and because of Space Park’s campus-like layout and location--right next to a soon-to-be renovated recreational complex on the site of the now defunct Aviation High School campus--on-site day care made sense, he said.
There were other reasons as well.
In 1987, a report done for the U.S. Department of Labor projected significant labor shortages throughout the economy and predicted that by the year 2000 only about 15% of the people entering the work force will be white males. Wilkens said TRW’s research bore out the demographic shift: Between 1980 and 1989, the proportion of women and minorities among the company’s college-educated new hires rose from 37% to more than half.
Meanwhile, in 1988, the state Legislature enacted a tax credit that gives employers a direct credit equal to 30% of their costs for subsidizing employee child care. The credit is limited to $50,000 a year, but businesses can continue to take that $50,000 year after year until that 30% is used up, Burud said.
Burud said changing demographics and the tax credit--which Gov. George Deukmejian signed after having vetoed it two years in a row--have prompted a number of corporations to look more generously on what were once regarded as “women’s benefits.”
But Burud said on-site day care may be even better for management than it is for parents because management is likely to get a payoff in productivity and worker retention.
Burud said that of 85,200 working parents surveyed for various clients by her firm during the past five years, 80% had problems arranging child care, 70% were stressed out by those problems, 58% said they had trouble being as productive as they once were, 27% had to leave their children unattended occasionally and 23% had considered quitting because their child-care situation was so untenable.
In the South Bay, those concerns were aggravated by the McMartin Pre-School scandal, experts and parents said, even though all the defendants in the case were cleared.
“Oh, yeah,” parent Larson recalled, “McMartin was on my mind big-time. Whether or not it was true, what they say happened at the school, it’s really scary to give your kid to someone you don’t know.”
Corporations, too, were spooked by the accusations that children had been molested at the now-defunct Manhattan Beach nursery school. The fear of corporate liability cut short more than a few attempts to initiate on-site day care, Burud said.
Existing programs, however, have undermined that argument, she maintained.
“The average claim rate on child-care programs, overall, is only $1,000 per claim,” Burud said. “And there has never been a successful liability case, to my knowledge, against an employer child-care program.”
TRW Vice President Wilkens agreed that his firm’s researchers found liability to be “a red herring.” By contracting the day-care program to an outside vendor--the way many corporations contract out to food-service vendors when they build a company cafeteria--TRW eliminated any risk not covered already by the corporation’s insurance, he said.
Burud and others say the down side of on-site day care lies more in the quality and cost of the programs. Generally, they say, the low bidders on such projects tend to be large child-care chains that rely for their profit on a young, low-paid staff. Consequently, turnover is often high.
A corporation can offer a better vendor by having employees share the cost, but day care becomes very expensive very quickly, “and if the fees are too high, the (on-site) center won’t be used because parents won’t be able to afford it,” Burud said.
TRW’s vendor, Children’s Discovery Centers, is the fifth-largest in the United States, but was chosen because “they took a customized, non-cookie-cutter approach,” Wilkens said.
Other than providing the building and infrastructure, he said, TRW will not subsidize the cost of the program. The tentative fee schedule, he said, will range from $125 a week for infants to $90 for older preschool children.
Wilkens said TRW is most concerned about accommodating demand: About 1,350 parents have expressed interest in the center, which will be able to accommodate only 200 children.
The corporation will hold a lottery to determine who will get a spot in the Launching Pad.
