Make room for the children - company-supported day care

Nation's Business, Oct, 1989 by Nancy Thomas-Cote

Make Room For The Children

Our growing company has been in business for 18 years, producing and marketing indicator tags designed to make businesses' recordkeeping more efficient (Medi-Tags for hospitals, Redi-Tags for general office proposes). The firm, Barbara Thomas Enterprises Inc., in Huntington Beach, Calif., was founded by my mother, Barbara J. Thomas, who developed the color-coded tags while she was director of medical records for a hospital. She now is chairman of the board of our company, and I have been president since last year. The company has 15 full-time employees, 10 of whom are women.

In September 1988 and January 1989, two of those valuable women employees left the company because of childcare difficulties. One of the women lived an hour away from the company, and family members were taking care of her child while she worked. She found that the time she spent commuting added too much to her time away from her child, so she got a job closer to her home. The second woman, anxious about day care for her newborn second child, felt day-care costs for both children would outweigh the benefits of her salary.

After the first woman left, I started to think about her and the other good employees who had quit over the years for similar reasons. I believed that we would have kept them if we had had an on-site day-care center. The woman who commuted two hours, for example, could have spent that time with her child.

As a woman, I may be more sensitive to the day-care issue than most male executives are. Many male executives are less concerned about this problem because their salaries enable their wives to stay home to take care of the children. A mother who works outside the home typically does so out of economic need.

Working mothers are not a passing trend. They make up the future of the work force. If employers want to keep employees, I thought, they must do something about day care. So I decided to practice what I preach. In the fall of 1988, I began my research into the possibility of an on-site day-care center for our company.

An average business person might think that with 15 employees, we can't afford an on-site day-care center. But I think we may not be able to afford not to have one.

I first talked to my insurance agent to see if the liability insurance would price the idea out of reach. The agent told me that for up to seven children, the annual premium would be approximately $2,500. That didn't seem too expensive. My insurance agent recommended a local day-care consultant, who laid out the details.

Under California law, I learned, for two infants and four toddlers in an on-site day-care center, we would need two care givers. Our company would not have to accommodate that many children right away, so I spoke with nearby companies about whether some of their employees might be interested in placing their children in a day-care center on our premises for a time--at least a year. Many companies jumped at the chance to offer their employees close-by day care.

My plan was to convert my office into the day-care center and build a new office for myself within our oversized lobby. Moreover, just outside the office where the day-care center would be installed was a grassy area that was the right size for an outdoor play space, as required by state law. We would have to build a fence to separate it from the parking lot, and we would buy play equipment for the children.

Of course, we also would have to equip the day-care center with cots, cupboards, books, bookshelves, tables, chairs, cribs, and other items. The estimate for the indoor and out-door equipment was $10,000 to $12,000. The remodeling estimate was $20,000. The major portion of the remodeling expense would be for installation of plumbing for a toilet and a sink.

I estimated the annual cost per child, not including the remodeling or equipment costs, would be $5,000 for each infant and $4,125 for each toddler. The average day-care fee in this area was $3,120 per infant and $2,600 per toddler. I had always known that the company would have to subsidize the cost, based on the total family income of the employees, but these figures were coming out higher than I expected. I decided to re-examine the idea.

But our landlord quickly changed my plans. He said we could not build the day-care center for liability reasons. Across the parking lot from where the children would be playing outdoors is a testing laboratory that is licensed to handle toxic chemicals. The laboratory was concerned that it might be held liable if a parent blamed a child's illness on the lab's proximity to the outdoor area.

So it was an unexpected type of liability problem that killed our on-site center. My management team and I still feel that a nearby day-care center is a good idea, so we are thinking of renting a house that would be only two or three minutes' drive away.

I am still disappointed that we can't have the on-site center. My employees and I felt that it would be a fantastic boost for morale and productivity if the parents here could take part in it. Our off-site day-care center will be great, but second-best.