Daycare Provided by Your Place of Employment

Subsidized daycare provided in the workplace is a wonderful idea to help women be part of the work force. In Canada women receive one year of paid mat leave. There are gov't subsidies given for daycare based on family income. Many workplaces have on site daycare, such as universities, colleges, hospitals etc, but they are not free to use. Personally, I would like to see a subsidy for women as an incentive to stay at home with their children.

One if my past jobs owned a daycare so as long as we agreed to a payroll deduction for the cost we could use the daycare for half price. It was a great benefit.

Daycare at work sounds great up until the point where you need daycare for the kids when you are not at work.
If you live and work in locations that are close together it might work.
If you have a long commute you have to question 'do I want to take the kids with me and have them near me or do I want them close to home even though I'm 30min or an hour away from where they are?'.

Subsidized day care - companies generally don't want to get involved with this because it's paying a benefit just for an employee having kids which might not sit well with those who don't.

Somehow in our country business has never reconciled with people having lives outside of work and wanting to have families in their non working hours.
Some other countries do a better job with this regard in that they realize that work is an important piece of a citizens life but it's only one piece and that doesn't mean the other pieces are not important.

My employer doesn't subsidize daycare or have an on-site child care center, but my kids attended daycare centers that were the staff centers for other organizations. One was the staff center for a local hospital - they had X number of slots open for employees at a discounted rate and then Y number open to the community for the full rate. Even without the discount, the rate was competitive with other centers and because the teachers were employees of the hospital with decent salaries and benefits, turnover was low, quality was high, and teachers stayed for years and years. The director and 2 teachers had almost 20 years of tenure there when it was closed due to the sale of the hospital.

After that, I moved my youngest son (who was 3 at the time) to the staff daycare for a local college, which had previously been the staff daycare for a local law firm. Again, the teachers were employees of the college and had good pay and benefits, so they were very highly qualified and stuck around for years.

I really think that bundling daycare with place of employment is the way to go...teachers will have access to better salaries and benefits, overhead can be reduced by modifying existing spaces instead of maintaining a completely separate facility and there are benefits of sharing soft infrastructure such as IT, HR, legal functions and insurance costs.

I think day care is such a touchy subject because, as you say, the burden almost always falls on the woman. It's a lousy state of affairs, you are right. My husband is a very hands-on dad and always worked at home from the time our son was born. He's great with the meals and the dishes and the diapers and he certainly doesn't consider it "babysitting" when a father does child care. However, he's more introverted than I am and isn't as good with names, so when it came to choosing preschools and dealing with other parents, he tended to take a back seat. As we see more same-gender couples with children, there may be more acceptance of this not just being a "women's issue" but I'm not holding my breath.

I disagree fundamentally with the idea that some employees shouldn't have to subsidize day care if they don't use it. They're already paying the women far less in salaries (79% even when equalized for education and years of experience). And they are paying medical costs (in insurance including the copays and prescriptions their employers choose) even if they themselves aren't sick. Younger employees may feel they shouldn't have to contribute to the retirement program because they can't imagine ever using it.

It's like the senior citizens in our town who don't want to pay taxes to subsidize public education because they don't have kids. We ALL benefit from an educated population, and all companies benefit from a compensated workforce. Moreover, MANY companies understand that benefits offered to employees are a HUGE part of why better employees come there and stay there. That decreases recruitment costs for the company as well as training/orientation costs. The less turnover, the better.

Also, benefits are not taxed the way salaries are so there are huge incentives for employees to take some of their compensation in those areas, and the company does not pay employment taxes and workers' compensation fees on that percentage of the employees' packages. So we really have to lose the attitude that "someone's getting something I'm not."

Setting up a day care facility is a huge undertaking - space, equipment, staff, criminal record checks, state regulations by the Office for Children or whatever each state calls the oversight authority, and things like biohazards. So on-site isn't feasible for many many companies. A lot of companies offer a credit. And many offer "cafeteria style" benefits so that employees get a certain percentage of their salaries in benefits but they choose which ones - so employee A might want day care and pediatric dental coverage for an infant and a toddler, while employee B wants a more comprehensive medical plan with a low deductible plus orthodontic coverage for 3 teenagers, and employee C wants more paid vacation and a 401K. It ALL costs somebody something, but it has to be weighed by the company in terms of happier employees, less turnover and retraining (which is very expensive), better working environments. Non-medical benefits is a HUGE field and there are a lot of companies that just specialize in designing programs for employers.

My oldest daughter's friend works at a daycare center for a big pharma company. The center is run by a company separate from the big pharma but uses space in their building to run the center. They are open from 5 am to 7 pm and yes some of the very young children (including a baby that was dropped off at 6 weeks) are there from opening to closing. The big pharma company does not subsidize the cost to the employees but having your child on site makes it easy to drop them off, pick them up, and have lunch with them.

The same company also has a couple onsite centers for a few more big companies in the state. Same set up with everyone although I think the hours might be different depending on when the company's needs are.

How is employer sponsored health care working for everyone? Do you want that to be day care in the future? No one actually comes out ahead with employer perks people just think they do because they don't see how the costs come out of their wages.

If an employer is having trouble finding qualified employees they may offer perks like "free" in house day care, but when they do that they are not offering a higher wage. So how would you feel being the single guy or someone with older kids. You end up paying for other people's daycare.

Everyone I know who has employers that offer in house day care it costs just a little less than going somewhere else. The perk is your kids are on site so you can see them at lunch if you want. It is a really nice perk but hard to pull off in small offices like mine. There are 200 employees here but only two have day care needs. This number includes the men in our office.

My company does subsidized care through Bright Horizons. I don't take advantage of it due to the fact that it is offered in a location farther away from house that is inconvenient. But we have used them for emergency care when we needed it.

And I agree with you. For me, and most of the moms I know, things like figuring out childcare, schedules, doctors, etc... falls on the mom to deal with. My husband is clueless when it comes to anything like that, and if I need to leave him in charge for a day or two, he needs detailed instructions about what the normal process is.
It's really aggravating.

I know of local companies that offer it. To me the real advantage is having them so close... So the parents I know who have it seem to like it. But totally agree on your last point and have to laugh. If you really want to laugh, try to watch this week's episode of Blackish on ABC. First half is about that point in a way and it's really funny. Or sad... ;)

It'd be nice to have in house daycare but I am not sure about subsidizing it. Subsidizing seems to create slippery slope situations faster than providing solutions. At any rate I have never had the luxury of either option. I did hear about a tech company in the South which provided both an on site daycare and a doctor's office which sounded like a terrific idea to me. Employees do have lives outside the office as shocking as that may seem to employers.

I hear you about husbands. More often than not they are shockingly lazy where their families are concerned. They can bother to hop on for the ride but they fail to ride the horse to the finish line. Tsk tsk. My husband is very involved, though. He instigated the first round of daycare searching but I took over on the next round. We felt like I dug under the rocks better than he did during the preliminary search. However, during the actual tours he took back over because he asked better questions. My mildness does me no good me at times.

I have learned people have all sorts of funny dynamics in their marriage which wouldn't work for me. I was smart and/or lucky enough to get a 50/50 (60/40) man. Bless him.

In response to the last part of your post, I get why you find that annoying, because of course there are men concerned about finding quality daycare, but let's face it, how many men do you know that actually do? Every single working mother I have ever known has ALWAYS been the one researching and finding childcare, figuring out logistics, getting the kids to and from, etc. Even the women with the most supportive husbands take on this task/burden, at least that's been my experience (and I'm talking about highly educated, professional women.) The husbands may "help" with the driving, drop off/pick up but they are never the ones initially seeking it out. So, yes, I still see this as a "women's" issue (hopefully one that changes over time!)

I think it depends on the type of business. Years ago, I was going thru negotiations with the UAW. One of their demands was an on-site daycare center. Never mind that the average age of the worker was 49. I was assigned the task of gathering all the information together and presenting it.

My conclusion: it was very very expensive to implement, our site had chemicals near the location we had designated for the daycare so those would have to be moved which was not possible because of the process of the manufacturing, and the overall risk. It just wasn't feasible.

Do I think it's a good idea? You bet! Would have made my life easier. BUT there needs to be equity for those that DON'T have children. However, then if you pay someone more because they aren't using the daycare are you discriminating against the ones who do? What you have then is a great idea but a slippery slope.

DH's office did not provide it for free, but there was one on site. We ultimately did not go with them because he didn't like them as much as the other daycare and I would not be able to easily drop her off because it was inside the facility where he worked if he was sick and I still needed to take her in so I could work. I would rather a company offer quality care or assistance with my choice of care (it is not always ideal to have it at one person's job site) than freeze my eggs so I could put off a family.

I like the idea of a la carte offers so that people can select up to a certain benefit value what they need. We appreciated being able to use dental care coverage for orthodontia x2 but a friend would have liked more PTO to care for her aging parents (they were still at home, but she would take time off to drive them to appointments). Or maybe I get a child care credit and you get your train ticket paid for. I will admit one reason we did not use an overpriced daycare was because they offered two kinds of formula only and you didn't get any break if you didn't use it.

I don't know if it is necessarily free, but I know several companies that have daycares for their employees. When my cousin worked for Best Buy Corporation they did. My BIL works for Travelers Insurance and they do. My husband works for Mayo Clinic. They have backup day care for employees to use if their regular daycare is closed. They get a certain number of backup days per year. They also have daycare for sick kids.

Mine doesn't offer daycare, transport, before care or aftercare. It does however heavily subsidize ocassional/ emergency care. You can get a full day of childcare 12 hours, for $10 a day. I think employees and their spouses can make use of it, and it is up to 15 work days a year.

This won't stand in the stead of child care, but it does help with the gaps between school and summer camp, winter break, taking a doctor's appointment, getting your taxes done etc.

Best,
F. B.

No none of our employees have offered in house child care. ,. I am going to guess they meant "employees". I have heard that these companies offer this to all of their employees with children. so yes, even if it is a man, his children would be included.

Here is an article about the egg freezing they are offering $20,000 towards the freezing procedure and storing of female employees eggs as a perk.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/14/facebook-and-apple-offer...