Caring Network for the Young and Old
It comes as long overdue but nonetheless welcome news that a consortium of firms, led by International Business Machines, has recognized that good workers--male and female--also need good child-care and often good care as well for their aging parents.
The consortium, known as the American Business Collaboration for Quality Dependent Care, or ABC, hopes to enlist up to 80 companies to raise as much money as possible in order to build and expand child and elderly care facilities across the country. That could mean up to 30 new facilities spread among Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle, Denver and other cities.
This initiative represents an unprecedented recognition by the business community of the magnitude of the shortage of quality care for children and the elderly. It speaks as well to the private sector’s growing understanding of the contribution of such programs to employee productivity, retention and recruitment. U.S. companies lose as much as $3 billion annually because of family-related absences. ABC’s innovative approach could point the way for other companies anxious to accommodate their employees’ dependent-care needs but stalled by concerns about liability exposure, uncertainty over future steady demand for such facilities and the need for substantial investments of capital and staff. If the ABC plan works, it should serve as a model for other firms to pool resources and spread the cost of investing in new facilities and expanding existing ones.
Surely the need is by now self-evident. About 60% of all women with children under 6 now work outside the home; in 1950 only 12% of women with children in this age group worked. By 1995 an estimated two-thirds of all preschool children and three-fourths of all school-age children will have a working mother. The elder-care problem is also large and still growing. When IBM surveyed its own employees recently, 30% said they had responsibility for taking care of an elderly relative.
But despite the demand, affordable, reliable and quality child-care is still hard to find, as is care for aging relatives. While an estimated 4,300 employers provided some form of child-care assistance in 1990, up from 600 in 1982, the vast majority of companies still offer no help at all. Moreover, many who do offer little more than access to a referral service--an agency that tries to link employees with existing child-care centers or providers.
The ABC effort, though still in the planning phase, is a major step forward for working parents with small children. But finding care for toddlers and babies is, in some respects, the relatively “easy” part of the child-care puzzle. Allowing working parents sufficient flexibility to monitor the activities of their school-age children after the school bell rings at 3:00 is a tougher problem for business--but no less important.
