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Child care should be a standard benefit provided by companies due to the number of working parents. It can come in various forms, such as on-site daycare or vouchers for external daycare centers. The high cost of child care affects families and can lead to absences and lateness at work. Offering child care benefits can decrease absences, turnover, and increase productivity. However, there are legal challenges and costs associated with providing on-site child care. Companies can offer financial aid or recommendations for daycare centers instead. Having children in the workplace could cause distractions and concerns for parents. Despite the challenges, the benefits of offering child care outweigh the risks. It can improve employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention. The option of an on-site daycare can provide convenience and peace of mind for parents. Overall, providing child care benefits can benefit both employees and businesses. For our section, we chose child care. With the amount of parents working in the United States today, child care should be a standard benefit that companies provide to their employees. To defend this, we have said, with so many working parents, employees are always looking for better child care options. Some businesses offer child care as a benefit to their employees. This benefit comes in many forms. This can be an on-site daycare, but it could be a lot more than that. This could be discounts to a daycare chain, vouchers to a daycare of their employees choice, referrals to the children care, or even sick child centers to care for children who are mildly sick. An article written by Alessandra Lozma of the San Diego Business Journal says, the average price of child care consumes 40 percent of monthly budget for a family with two children. It also goes on to explain how the amount of family spends on child care can be more expensive than sending that child to college. This is a huge expense for families and parents. Parents are giving thousands of dollars every year to child care. If a company offers child care as a benefit, this could be a huge incentive to get people to apply there. The article then states, the average parent is absent from work 9-13 days each year due to child care issues. In addition, 65 percent of all parents are late to work or must leave early because of challenges with their child care. This might not seem like a lot, but it is. To put this in perspective, a company with 100 employees who are parents, which many companies have, then there will be anywhere from 900 to 1,300 days of absences per year. If each of those employees is working an eight-hour shift, then a business is missing out on 7,200 to 10,400 labor hours every year. Many companies have thousands of people employed. This can really affect the productivity of a company. It can cause work to slow down or some work will get passed on to other people increasing their workload. This can cause burnout and possibly higher turnover. Alexandra then goes on to say, for 72 percent of workforce parents, lack of child care is a barrier to achieving their professional goals. Eighty-three percent say they would quit to join a company with more family-friendly benefits. These are huge percentage of the workforce and companies should realize how important this is to their employees. The US Chamber of Commerce Foundation found companies that provide child care assistance decreased absences by 30 percent. Job turnover by 60 percent while increasing productivity more than 30 percent and recruiting efforts by 80 percent. By giving employees child care benefits, companies can improve turnover rates and decrease absences significantly. This will cause employees to be more reliable and businesses can run more efficiently. Alicia Sessom Modestino, Jamie J. Lodge, and Addie Schwartz and Alyssa Lincoln wrote an article called Child Care is a Business Issue. They conducted a national panel survey of 2,500 working parents. The data and the article is based on that national survey. One of the third US workforce or estimated 50 million workers has a child under 14 in their household. Going back to the first article, if on average a parent misses nine to 13 days a year due to their children, then across the United States there are 450 million to 650 million absences. A year when the numbers are told to see how child care affects the whole country. Then you can see why companies would want to offer some sort of child care benefit to their employees. They go on to write, in our national panel survey of 2,500 working parents, we found that nearly 20 percent of working parents had to leave work or reduce their work hours solely due to lack of child care. Only 30 percent of all working parents have any form of backup child care. Again, this has a huge impact on the business and their productivity. They continue by saying of those who lost a job or reduced hours due to child care, 40 percent of parents said that the factors for deciding who would be responsible for taking care of the children came down to which parent worked more hours or had a less flexible schedule. This means that businesses are missing out on value employees due to them staying home to watch their children. The article says, in our survey, 26 percent of women who became unemployed during the pandemic said it was due to lack of child care. This shows how much of an impact child care has on employees as well as how they can affect employers. By offering child care each day, some of the sort of financial aid businesses report more productive, keeping valuable employees and improve their turnover. Talked about child care. Child care in the workforce is more than just a place where parents can drop off their children while they go to work. Some different ways companies can show their support for working parents are discount or a voucher to their employees towards a preferred child care facility. Businesses can also provide employees with referrals to the best child care in the area. To defend this statement, we have said, child care benefit helps not only the parent, but also the company as well as the child. Child care takes the stress off the parent and can relieve the financial burden of paying for child care, which can be very expensive. In cases where there is an on-site daycare, it is more convenient for the parent as they do not have to worry about dropping off and picking up their child. They can just bring them to work. For many parents, a child care benefit is enough to get them to leave a company and go to the one that offers better services. It can be a deciding factor in choosing between two job offers. Child care benefits also help the businesses that is offering it. Employees will have to leave the work much less child care issues since they are given a reliable service right from the start. This means that companies can dial in scheduling since employees are more reliable. You can save the company money by not spending money on unnecessary labor costs covering employees that are absent due to their children. Reliable child care also affects the child in a positive way. Children will have a consistent child care provider and will not have to worry about where or if they will be taken care of that day. When a child goes to the same child care provider every day, they will get the opportunity to make friends and improve their social skills, which can help them as they get ready to go to school. Businesses offer a child care benefit should be common as if it benefits the company, the parents, and the child. There is always a struggle with money for parents when it comes to child care. Cheaper benefits are very helpful. Without that cheaper option, some parents are not able to work or can lose their job due to payments or expensive child care. Some may get a new position or change of jobs that require the full-time working, therefore having easier access to child care facilities helpful. So, as said above, receiving a voucher or help from their job with referrals is an upside option. New work companies are a bit more expensive than child care business that has been around for a while. Only low percentage of families in Michigan can afford child care. Child care isn't necessarily available for low-wage workers, which is a big issue because the majority of low-wage workers are the ones who need child care the most. For providing cheaper costs for their children, child is beneficial. An option for early childhood care should be mandatory, such as free health care, a child allowance for each month, and a free spot in a public and child care center. Companies should provide an at-home child care option as well. Transportation can be a big factor in child care too. Families that live further from work having to bring their children the opposite way costs a lot with gas and that's more money being taken out from their income. That money can help with the child care costs. Only if the prices were lower for that specific company, it would be less money being wasted. While philosophical assumptions, it is assumed that employees' children need to be cared for and that having child care provided will take the stress off of them. Same it, we have put in a link to a YouTube video. As our claims, we have stated, although child care can be a huge benefit for parents in the workplace, along with even helping out the business, there are some significant legal reasons that justify business not supplying on-site child care to their employees. The possibility of a lawsuit is something that is very prominent when it comes to things like child care, which are heavily monitored and regulated. Any slip-ups in these rules, even if it is undercutted, can lead to serious issues for a company that could have all been avoided had they not opened a child care center before they could even begin operating their child care center. A license or permit is required, which can be difficult to obtain and depending on the proximity of their children to hazardous materials such as chemical factories, it can be outright impossible to maintain one of these licenses. The process to open a child care center can become even more daunting after the proper licensing is maintained. According to an article published by HG Legal Resources titled The Legal Reasons Why Some Employers Don't Offer On-Site Day Care, the total cost to open a workplace day care could be upwards of $30,000 and beyond after staffing, purchasing the necessary resources such as food, toys, and learning materials, any potential construction projects that may need to be done in order to get the day care up to regulation. All of this needs to be done for some time as little as 100 children or less, and the cost is only the beginning of setbacks for the company. The article also says that staffing day care centers is one of the hardest things to do and is not done very thoroughly. This can lead to more legal issues. In order to hire someone in a child welfare, extensive background checks are necessary, and if an employee were to slip through the cracks during this process only to be laid or surfaced, it can mean a very large lawsuit against the company. In Michigan, the Division of Child Welfare licensing does annual inspections on child care centers, and there are dozens of requirements that is not fulfilled. This can be a reason for temporary closure of the center or plethora of fines. It is an off-site child care center. It's closed down for a period of time. This brings back the original problem of parents not being able to find a place for the children, leading to time off of work for many employees as the company and decreased productivity. Any of the many potential problems that occur leading to a lawsuit or a fine, the company will most likely need to spend more money on a lawyer who specializes in this area. It also may be smart if opening an on-site day care is to hire a lawyer during the opening process in order to make sure the requirements are met, but this is just done at an expense that creates little to no profits within the business. An injury to a child while unfortunate is also a possibility, and if not, varied details in an outline of the contract could lead to a lawsuit from the parents where even if won, will lose money and potentially employees from the company. Also in an article from We Care, one of the top networks of child care centers and day care across the nation, titled The Pros and Cons of On-Site Child Care Centers, Employee Child Care Benefits 101. Capacity of shortages in the day care can be a problem for HR, having to deal with wait-listed employees who have no other viable options for their family's child care. They also say that another issue with on-site child care centers is that they usually have one single curriculum, not allowing child to thrive as well as they could be, which isn't the environment most parents are searching for. Non-site child care also does nothing for the company's remote employees. They may need day care options as well, and it is not fair to those working from home who can reach the benefits of the on-site day care center. They also may only cater to younger children, such as toddlers and infants, completely ignoring the needs of parents who have school-aged children. On-site child care centers are just limited to the environment. They can offer the child care and parents, making them non-viable options for many people. That combined with a huge cost and liability for the business, it makes it an impractical benefit to offer their employees. To most parents, their children are their whole world. They love, nourish, and provide for them as much as they can. Most parents work a full-time job and sometimes have no one to watch over their children but themselves. The complex between taking care of your children and upholding responsibilities as your job sparks an idea for the business to provide child care to employees that is convenient and time-saving for them. If the business offers child care, the child care could be in the same building or on the same campus as employees, as that would be the most convenient for them. With children in the same building as the parents, it could lead to concerning outcomes of the children becoming a distraction. One reason parents sometimes have to stay home from work is because their child is sick and they need to care for them, also because they are concerned for their health. They watch for the employee's child while they work, and that doesn't mean the parent's concern for the children's health goes away. The parents worry they may leave their work to go check on to make sure everything is okay. Another way, having the children so close by could boost distraction in new parents. It is known that new parents have a harder time leaving their babies and experience an increased level of anxiety for the wellness of their babies. The daycare could be more beneficial for new parents who really have no other option, but they could still feel uncomfortable with strangers watching their children, so they could say they are going to the bathroom or to get water, but actually going to check on their newborn. Another instance where child care could be a distraction is if a child is problematic or gets in trouble and the employee's parents need to go handle that in the middle of a busy workday. So having employees in the same building as their children has a big responsibility of causing a distraction. This distraction decreased the company's productivity and cost the company money since employees would be using their paid time at work for their personal wants and needs. There are many legal challenges that a company would have to overcome to have a daycare at the workplace. There are extremely strict guidelines when it comes to running a daycare and rules and regulations must be monitored very closely. There might be cases where businesses cannot offer child care at their location due to chemicals or other things that would make child care unsafe. However, a majority of companies will not have this issue. There are many daycare centers that are thriving. All these daycare centers have to get to the necessary permits and have the same rules and regulations. If the child care centers can work through all these challenges, then so can larger companies. Large companies have access to larger amounts of money, which means they would have no issue getting the correct permits. Yes, there might be some risk in opening an on-site daycare, but the rewards and benefits definitely outweigh the risks. If a business decides that they do not want to take on the risk of an on-site daycare, and that does not mean that there are not other options when it comes to a child care benefit, businesses can offer financial aid to parents or recommendations on good daycare centers in the area. A common argument about opening up a daycare center is the startup cost. It takes thousands of dollars to lease a space, buy equipment, and staff the center before you can even get it running. There are also operating costs to continue paying for staffing, replacing broken or damaged equipment, and buying other equipment. It is hard to justify these costs when you are not charging employees for child care. While this is a valid argument, what also needs to be considered is the money saved for employee time off and covering employees who are missing work due to their children. Companies will also see a boost in productivity. Companies will also have the challenges of hiring good employees. There are extensive background checks that have to be completed. If someone is hired and is working at a daycare and is not qualified or should have failed a background check, then the daycare could be shut down. This leaves the company with the same problem as before. While this is true, there are ways to overcome these challenges. Large companies will have human resources departments that are very experienced in hiring and background checks more than the brand new daycare. If a business is still not sure this is something they would want to tackle, then they can also offer a daycare benefit in the form of a stipend to help with the cost of daycare in the area. Another argument is that the child care benefit does not affect all employees with kids, only parents with young children. Yes, businesses want to offer this benefit to help parents who work there, but they also use this to help the business itself. One benefit for the company is that it might be the difference between an employee working there or at another company. Also helps boost productivity, they can also employ turnover. While offering this benefit might not completely solve the problem of child care, it definitely makes a difference both for the employees as well as businesses. Employees having their children at the workplace may cause employees to worry about distraction. In reality, it will allow the parents to know where their child is during the day to know they are safe. Some parents have always been on the edge of having their children at daycare or school since a child's well-being is put into strangers' hands. Now with the new rise of violence in schools and public places, it has brought up upon a whole new fear for parents. So for parents, knowing that this is an incident, does it occur that they're just a few floors away and can get to their child as needed. It allows them not to focus on their children during the day but on their work. Also with parents and children in the same building, there's a concern that parents will go to visit or check on their children during the workday. A solution to that possible problem could be a company of child care setting up specific times other than pick up or drop off where the parent they really want to can visit with the child. There will be some obstacles companies will run into if they choose to provide child care to their employees, but the outcome the company will see will be worth it. By offering a service to your employees and making their daily lives easier, it's shown that this is a company that not only wants to be successful, but also wants to take care of people who are working for them, and in return, businesses will see employees work harder and respect them more.