It’s Time to Take the Kids to Work

Every weekday, beginning around 7 a.m., Linda Larson does the working mom hustle: Hustle yourself into a business suit. Hustle some breakfast into the kids. Hustle the kids off to day care. Hustle to finish your work before the day-care center shuts down at 6 p.m.

It would be an understatement to say that Larson is not alone. But unlike most of the South Bay’s working parents, she soon will have a shot at a slightly less harried life.

Last week, under a candy-striped canopy decked with pink and baby-blue balloons, Larson’s employer, TRW Space & Defense Sector in Redondo Beach, broke ground on an on-site corporate day-care center. The Launching Pad, as the center has been dubbed, will have room for 200 preschoolers when it opens late next year. Its infant-care unit will be among the nation’s largest and, most important to Larson, a deputy manager of information services, it will be a convenient 100 yards from her desk.

The worst part of placing a child in day care, Larson notes, is the uncertainty: Can you trust the day-care provider? Will he or she share your values? If your child becomes ill, will there be prompt treatment?

“A TRW (day-care) center would just take one of the questions away,� she said. “It’s right there. You know the people.� And if her little girls, now 2 and 3, were to have an emergency, she says, Mommy would be just seconds away.

Only a handful of South Bay employers offer on-site child care, but the numbers of such programs have been mushrooming in the past few years, locally and nationally, child-care experts say.

“Two years ago, there were about 1,000 on-site day-care centers nationwide,� said Sandra Burud, a Pasadena-based child-care benefits consultant. “Now I would estimate there are at least 1,250. And that’s real conservative.�

Child-care referral agencies in the South Bay continue to report a tremendous shortage of all types of day care. But Laura Peterson of the Santa Monica-based Cornerstone child-care consulting firm, said the South Bay--once noted for the McMartin Pre-School, site of the biggest day-care scandal in U.S. history--is now distinguishing itself as a leader in corporate day-care programs.

“Of all the communities I work in, the South Bay is the most active� in developing employer-provided day care, Peterson said.

The high price of South Bay property discourages non-corporate day-care vendors, Peterson said, because “the parents couldn’t afford to pay the kind of tuition it would take to cover the lease payments on their land.�

Since 1982, when Centinela Hospital in Inglewood opened its pioneer day-care center, on-site programs have been initiated at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center near Torrance. Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance contracted in 1988 with a nearby preschool to create space for the infant and preschool children of its employees. The city of Torrance has for the past two years been seeking a corporate partner to share a day-care center with government employees at the city’s Greenwood Park.

Los Angeles International Airport has leased a closed El Segundo school and plans to renovate it for an employee day-care center. And at least three other large employers in the area have on-site and near-site day-care programs in the works, Peterson said.

TRW is the region’s first aerospace company to offer on-site day care, but Burud predicts the Launching Pad will force TRW’s competitors to follow suit. She noted that on-site child care has become an increasingly popular recruitment tool for highly competitive industries in need of a skilled work force.

“TRW will get the strongest recruitment benefits from this,� she said, “but this means the rest of the aerospace industry is going to have to do something about corporate child care--and they know it.�

Jeffrey Wilkens, TRW Space & Defense Sector vice president for human relations, acknowledged that the Launching Pad “will give us a competitive advantage over our aerospace brethren in the L.A. area.�

But, he noted, the center also is a logical extension of TRW’s overall benefits plan. The giant aerospace and defense contractor, which employs 16,000 people at its Space Park complex in Redondo Beach, already offers a number of child-care benefits, including after-school programs and referrals.

Despite these services, a recent survey of company employees indicated that child care was a prime concern of TRW’s employees, he said. Because TRW has so many workers in one place and because of Space Park’s campus-like layout and location--right next to a soon-to-be renovated recreational complex on the site of the now defunct Aviation High School campus--on-site day care made sense, he said.

There were other reasons as well.

In 1987, a report done for the U.S. Department of Labor projected significant labor shortages throughout the economy and predicted that by the year 2000 only about 15% of the people entering the work force will be white males. Wilkens said TRW’s research bore out the demographic shift: Between 1980 and 1989, the proportion of women and minorities among the company’s college-educated new hires rose from 37% to more than half.

Meanwhile, in 1988, the state Legislature enacted a tax credit that gives employers a direct credit equal to 30% of their costs for subsidizing employee child care. The credit is limited to $50,000 a year, but businesses can continue to take that $50,000 year after year until that 30% is used up, Burud said.

Burud said changing demographics and the tax credit--which Gov. George Deukmejian signed after having vetoed it two years in a row--have prompted a number of corporations to look more generously on what were once regarded as “women’s benefits.�

But Burud said on-site day care may be even better for management than it is for parents because management is likely to get a payoff in productivity and worker retention.

Burud said that of 85,200 working parents surveyed for various clients by her firm during the past five years, 80% had problems arranging child care, 70% were stressed out by those problems, 58% said they had trouble being as productive as they once were, 27% had to leave their children unattended occasionally and 23% had considered quitting because their child-care situation was so untenable.

In the South Bay, those concerns were aggravated by the McMartin Pre-School scandal, experts and parents said, even though all the defendants in the case were cleared.

“Oh, yeah,� parent Larson recalled, “McMartin was on my mind big-time. Whether or not it was true, what they say happened at the school, it’s really scary to give your kid to someone you don’t know.�

Corporations, too, were spooked by the accusations that children had been molested at the now-defunct Manhattan Beach nursery school. The fear of corporate liability cut short more than a few attempts to initiate on-site day care, Burud said.

Existing programs, however, have undermined that argument, she maintained.

“The average claim rate on child-care programs, overall, is only $1,000 per claim,� Burud said. “And there has never been a successful liability case, to my knowledge, against an employer child-care program.�

TRW Vice President Wilkens agreed that his firm’s researchers found liability to be “a red herring.� By contracting the day-care program to an outside vendor--the way many corporations contract out to food-service vendors when they build a company cafeteria--TRW eliminated any risk not covered already by the corporation’s insurance, he said.

Burud and others say the down side of on-site day care lies more in the quality and cost of the programs. Generally, they say, the low bidders on such projects tend to be large child-care chains that rely for their profit on a young, low-paid staff. Consequently, turnover is often high.

A corporation can offer a better vendor by having employees share the cost, but day care becomes very expensive very quickly, “and if the fees are too high, the (on-site) center won’t be used because parents won’t be able to afford it,� Burud said.

TRW’s vendor, Children’s Discovery Centers, is the fifth-largest in the United States, but was chosen because “they took a customized, non-cookie-cutter approach,� Wilkens said.

Other than providing the building and infrastructure, he said, TRW will not subsidize the cost of the program. The tentative fee schedule, he said, will range from $125 a week for infants to $90 for older preschool children.

Wilkens said TRW is most concerned about accommodating demand: About 1,350 parents have expressed interest in the center, which will be able to accommodate only 200 children.

The corporation will hold a lottery to determine who will get a spot in the Launching Pad.