DESERET NEWS: “Perspective: The case for child care at work,” by Patrick T. Brown
Deseret News, January 16, 2023
The post-Covid landscape for work and office life is still unsettled. In major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., it seems like a major shift has happened in favor of permanently higher rates of working from home. In other metro areas, life has largely returned to normal. All the while, firms are still heavily competing for workers, if not quite so frantically as last year.
For many working parents, child care needs have complicated a return to work. The number of parents who say they are not working due to child care problems is higher than it was pre-pandemic, though not the tsunami some media reports have suggested.
In an environment where businesses are seeking to attract employees, companies could stand out in a crowded marketplace by emphasizing their family friendliness. Eleven percent of workers in private industry already receive some form of child care benefits through their employer, such as through a dependent care savings account; that number should be far higher in a post-COVID world.
As a new report I contributed to for the Social Capital Campaign reminds us, there are few institutions that capture more hours of our waking time than the workplace.
Marco Ambrosio, Chris Bullivant, Patrick Brown, Jane Oates, Peyton Roth
December, 2022
How work can better build social capital in America today.
