Make Room for Baby

By Stephen Koepp

Corporate nannies watch youngsters for parents on the job

Though Pamela Cortez returned to her secretarial job shortly after giving birth to Daughter Kimberly, her thoughts stayed at home. As a result, her work suffered. Recalls Cortez: "I went through several baby-sitters trying to find a good one. I worried during the workday and found my mind drifting to my child." But now Cortez finds it much easier to concentrate on her job. Each weekday morning Kimberly, 2, rises at 6:30 and accompanies her mother as she drives to work at Wang Laboratories in Lowell, Mass. Near by, in a former grade school leased by Wang, the toddler spends the day learning, playing and napping with 215 other youngsters. Says her mother: "I feel very comforted. Kimberly already knows her ABCs, she sings songs and she's very sociable." Mother and daughter even meet every day at lunchtime.

The Cortez family is taking part in one of the costliest and most studied corporate benefits to emerge in the past few years: child care. Says Dana Friedman, senior research fellow at the Work & Family Information Center: "Corporate-sponsored day care is this decade's hottest new employee perquisite." An estimated 1,000 companies now provide child-care assistance to parents, double the number of two years ago. The need springs from such major social changes as the increase in single parents and the continuing movement of women into the work force. In 1970, two-thirds of U.S. women with preschool-age children stayed at home to watch over them. Today only half do so, according to a report by the Washington-based Bureau of National Affairs. Good professional supervision for children, though, is often hard to find, and the possibility of child abuse is a growing concern. Working parents horrified by a series of sex scandals in day care centers around the country, the most recent involving dozens of children in New York City, prefer company-run programs close to the office, where mothers and fathers can drop by during the day. Indeed, companies that do not provide such facilities can have trouble attracting and keeping talented employees.

Among the first institutions to offer in-house day care were hospitals, which adopted it to help alleviate the nurse shortage. Many other types of firms are following the example. Zale, the jewelry-store chain, last April opened a modernistic, low-slung $300,000 center at its Irving, Texas, headquarters in which a staff of eleven oversees up to 85 children from six weeks to six years of age. At the Matthews, N.C., headquarters of PCA International, an operator of portrait galleries, about 120 children attend a center that costs the company more than $130,000 a year to operate.

Some firms bill their employees for the full cost of day care, but others charge so much less than privately run centers that it constitutes a major bargain. Intermedics, a heart-pacemaker manufacturer in Freeport, Texas, for example, charges its employees $25 a week per child. At its day care centers in Boston and Cambridge, the Stride Rite shoe company bills workers a maximum of $50 a week.

From a youngster's point of view, going to work with Mom or Dad often beats staying home with a babysitter. Children at the First Atlanta banking company's Learning Center take field trips to such places as a dairy farm or an amusement park and go to the movies. Last Christmas a corporate Santa Claus arrived and handed out presents to the youngsters. One child's father, a local law-enforcement officer, arranged for a police helicopter to land in the parking lot for a show-and-tell session.

Despite successes like First Atlanta's, the majority of companies still believe that in-house day care is unnecessary or too expensive. Says Tricia Fox, founder of Fox Day Schools in the Chicago area: "On-site day care is terribly costly. For most companies, it is tantamount to taking on a whole new business." A group of Burbank, Calif., businesses, including Columbia Pictures and Lockheed, have pooled their money to turn a vacant grade school into a cooperative day care center that will open in October. Honeywell, the Minneapolis electronics firm, is experimenting with alternative benefits like flexible work hours to make it easier for parents to tend to their children. Another option offered by such companies as American Express, International Paper and Phillip Morris is a free referral service to help employees find a day care center in the community.

Some companies, though, resist any kind of involvement in day care. Firms in industries, including oil, auto and steel, with low numbers of female workers are inclined to reject the role of corporate nanny. Says Kathleen McDonald, director of employee relations at Exxon, which offers no child-care services: "Managers often oppose it because they see it linked to the women's liberation issue."

Nonetheless, the companies with day care centers consider their programs to be smart investments, not paternalistic handouts. "We feel that every dollar spent on day care is worth two dollars in benefits to the company," says Joan Narron, director of PCA's Child Development Center. When workers have a reliable place to take their children, they are less likely to be absent from work and experience a lower amount of stress.

After pregnancy, says Susan Doctors, personnel manager of the publishing firm Official Airline Guides, "women return to work sooner and happier than they would if they had to drop their baby at a center far from the workplace." The growing number of fathers who take advantage of corporate day care find that they develop a closer bond with their children. Says Marketing Communications Manager Marc Sacher, who takes his daughter Melanie, 5, to work each morning at Connecticut General Life Insurance: "There are precious moments in the day that ] don't have to miss because she's far away." --By Stephen Koepp. Reported by Joyce Leviton/Atlanta and Thomas McCarroll/New York

With reporting by Joyce Leviton/Atlanta, Thomas McCarroll/New York