The benefits and drawbacks of employer-sponsored child care
The benefits and drawbacks of employer-sponsored child care
Research from the consulting firm BCG finds that just 12% of all U.S. workers get child care benefits through their employers. Companies that offer it may have a leg up over the competition.
Policy correspondent Rachel Cohen has been writing about this for Vox and she spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Sabri Ben-Achour: So there’s obviously a big benefit to employees when their employers offer child care, but what do the employers actually gain?
Rachel Cohen: You know, for a long time, employer child care, it was really seen as this sort of nice-to-have perk. Most companies didn’t provide it. I mean, most companies still don’t provide it, but that’s really started to change as employers started to realize this is actually a really important thing we need to get people to be able to show up at work, and pay attention at work, and recruit people to come to our cities and work at our companies. And that really sort of crystallized during the pandemic, when all these people had to make really hard choices between “Do I stay home with my kid as their school is closed?” or “Do I go to my job?”
Ben-Achour: Yeah. There’s a lot of experimentation right now, as you write with different states trying different things to figure out how to make employer-sponsored [child] care happen more. What are they trying and is it working?
Cohen: Yeah, a really popular one that’s emerged over the last couple of years is called Tri-Share in Michigan, and it’s drawn a lot of attention because it just sounds simple. It targets these workers in the middle class who otherwise aren’t eligible for subsidies. The idea is that employers, the state and employees will each pay a third of the cost of child care. The average cost for families dropped from $716 a month to $252 a month, and so that’s a big difference. And we’re seeing states like Kentucky and North Carolina and Indiana, they’re all taking note of this Tri-Share model and pushing versions of their own.
The problem is that it’s still really modest. It still only covers a small fraction of the people who need it, and even the eligibility for that program is relatively limited. But you are seeing many more states just thinking in terms of this Tri-Share responsibility, idea that everyone kind of has a role and a stake to play in financing this benefit, this access of care.
Ben-Achour: There is actually quite a bit of disagreement about whether employer-provided child care is even actually a good idea. What are the downsides or the objections people might have?
Cohen: Employers are not going to necessarily be prioritizing what’s best for kids; they’re going to always have their bottom line as their top priority. There’s also, I would say, just a real concern that this could create more of a divide between people who have access to certain things and people who don’t, and so there’s fear that it moves further away from the idea of universal child care.
Ben-Achour: Having reported on this, I mean, if you had to guess if 10 years from now we’re going to see more employers providing child care, what would you guess?
Cohen: There’s definitely a shift now, especially as we are seeing more companies and their remote work flexibility, so a lot more workers are returning to the office, which is putting the question of child care front and center.
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