Are Workplace Benefits a Viable Solution to the Child Care Crisis?
Situated at the base of the Great Smoky Mountains, surrounded by outdated nation shops and taffy outlets, is a theme park that, for the workers who work there, operates like a self-contained group.
Dollywood Parks and Resorts is a vacation spot for households — “guests,” as they’re higher recognized by workers — to play, rejoice and be charmed by the Southern hospitality that the park’s namesake, entertainer and icon Dolly Parton, grew up on and has come to embody.
But somebody has to do all that charming, and never everybody has the magic contact, explains Tim Berry, vice chairman of human assets for the Dollywood Company. To entice the absolute best “hosts,” as resort workers are referred to as, the firm should be a excellent spot to work, with wonderful advantages and an setting the place folks really feel comfy and supported bringing their full selves.
“We have to be more to them than just a job,” Berry says, noting that the Dollywood Company views its workers as its “differentiator.”
For years, Dollywood has been constructing out a suite of benefits for its workers, which incorporates an on-site household well being heart, a park chaplain, and full tuition coverage for anybody inquisitive about furthering their training by means of the firm’s associate program GROW U.
Those choices have additionally, in recent times, expanded to embrace baby care advantages.
During the pandemic, firm officers started listening to of the heightened challenges workers have been going through discovering baby care. Many famous in worker surveys that the baby care applications of their space have been full, and it was impeding their capability to work. (Nationwide, an estimated 16,000 baby care applications closed completely in the first two years of the pandemic, representing a lack of about 9 % of all licensed applications in the U.S.)
“Child care was one of those aspects of life that we know people have a need for, and we needed to figure out a way to address,” explains Berry.
The firm had thought-about providing a baby care profit for its hosts in the previous, together with an on-site baby care heart the place they may drop off their youngsters at the begin of their shift and decide them up at the finish. But the Dollywood Company has a headcount of about 3,800, and never all of these workers are workin’ 9 to 5.
Though some workers, equivalent to these in advertising and accounting roles, work conventional enterprise hours, many who work in visitor providers and assist park operations are engaged on weekends, in the evenings and over holidays.
“Our need for child care [runs the] full gamut,” Berry says, “from traditional hours to odd, customized, unique needs for when people work.”
To make an on-site baby care program out there to all workers, Berry provides, the firm would have to function it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That wasn’t possible or sensible.
Instead, as the want for a baby care answer grew to become larger, Dollywood discovered another choice in WeeCare, a community of kid care suppliers.
In summer season 2021, Dollywood announced a partnership with WeeCare, describing it as an “unparalleled child care benefit for hosts working at the Smoky Mountains theme park.” WeeCare’s cost is to match Dollywood workers in want of kid care with one among the suppliers in its huge community, which CEO Jessica Chang says contains greater than 65,000 baby care professionals, about 6,000 of that are licensed in-home suppliers. To boot, the Dollywood Company supplies workers a month-to-month stipend towards the value of care: $100 for every worker’s first baby and $50 for each extra baby.
That month-to-month contribution seemingly covers someplace round 10 to 15 % of Dollywood workers’ baby care prices. In different elements of the nation, although, it wouldn’t go nearly as far.
In Sevier County, Tennessee, the place Dollywood is positioned, the median value for toddler care is between $650 and $900 per 30 days, in accordance to 2022 estimates present in the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Database of Child Care Prices. Toddler care, which tends to be barely cheaper, ranges from $590 to $715 per 30 days in the space. The common month-to-month value for a WeeCare supplier in Tennessee, the firm says, is between $650 and $700.
Just shy of two years in, Berry says the uptake of the program has been gradual however is rising.
Last yr, workers retention for the Dollywood Company elevated by 11 %. Berry can’t say for certain whether or not that’s from the baby care profit — the firm is continually making adjustments to nudge up that charge — however he acknowledges it’s a vital enchancment.
“It’s a real need,” Berry says, “and we’re going to do our best to keep it going, and hopefully other businesses will do the same.”
In reality, a variety of different companies are doing the identical.
On the heels of the pandemic, which elevated consciousness amongst the American public about how troublesome it’s for households to find and afford child care and the way important the procurement of that baby care is to business operations and growth, many firms are exploring their choices, questioning how they may assist their workers with baby care in trade for — the hope goes — much less attrition and extra targeted, happy, productive workers.
That gradual, natural pattern accelerated earlier this yr. In February, about six months after the CHIPS and Science Act was handed to strengthen analysis and manufacturing of semiconductors and different applied sciences in the U.S., the Biden administration announced it will be requiring recipients of the $39 billion in federal subsidies from CHIPS to provide baby care to all workers. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, semiconductor producers making use of for greater than $150 million in federal funding should submit plans for offering care that’s “affordable, accessible, reliable and high quality.”
The announcement was met with fierce rebuke and animated reward alike.
Some see it as wrongheaded — a distraction from the actual aim of getting the U.S. to deal with and fund early care and training like a public good, in a lot the identical method Okay-12 is.
“If you leave it to employers to essentially figure out child care for their employees, I think that’s not going to get us where we want to be as a country,” says Laura Bornfreund, senior fellow and advisor on early and elementary training with the Education Policy program at New America, a Washington-based assume tank.
“I see the appeal of this as a short-term way to expand offerings for families,” Bornfreund provides, “but to me, it could take us down what I see as the wrong path for a long-term fix, becoming more of an employer-led benefit than the public investment we need.”
For others, it’s a intelligent workaround by an administration that noticed its priorities for baby care and preschool entry largely left on the reducing room ground throughout congressional talks in 2021. And even when it’s not “the” answer, it’s “a” answer to the disaster that continues to escalate in the early care and training sector.
“At the end of the day, through something like the CHIPS announcement, we have more employers who are going to care even more about child care,” notes Anne Hedgepeth, chief of coverage and advocacy at Child Care Aware of America, a nationwide nonprofit that promotes high quality, accessible baby care. “Momentum there is really important. Employers who have to experience and navigate the challenges of child care become employers who want to see a better system.”
When it comes to employer involvement in baby care, the satan is in the particulars. Interviews with a dozen early care and training suppliers, coverage specialists, advocates and employers reveal simply how advanced and contentious this problem is.
The actuality is there are a variety of present and rising fashions for employer participation in baby care, every with various levels of success and scalability.
What’s clear, although, is that office baby care advantages aren’t some summary concept being floated by companies or the U.S. authorities for some far-off future. They’re already right here, and workers are already profiting from them.
When most individuals hear “employer-sponsored child care,” as this profit is greatest recognized, they’re seemingly considering of on-site baby care. In this mannequin, applications are established in the locations the place workers work — in an workplace constructing or different co-located premises — and sometimes in partnership with an outdoor baby care supplier or community, equivalent to Bright Horizons or KinderCare.
