Child Care At Work Now Common

More companies that once thought they couldn’t care for employees’ children at work are finding little people traipsing through their halls, the author of a study on work-site child care says.

Moreover, the companies have discovered that taking care of workers’ children makes good business sense, Sandra Burud, the head of Burud & Associates, said Wednesday.

Her firm is the consulting division for Bright Horizons, a Cambridge, Mass., company that manages 140 child care facilities for U.S. companies.

Companies are spending money on child care “just like they would do on any other equipment because it makes employees work better,” Burud told a group of corporate human resources officials.

Burud authored a similar study of employee-supported child care in 1982, when she found 405 such facilities in the United States, with 204 at the work site. Today, there are about 1,800 work-site centers, she said.

Her recently completed follow-up study sampled 205 work-site centers in 40 states. Of those, 57 were managed by Bright Horizons.

“Work-site child care centers seem to have gone from being an unusual ‘phenomenon’ to becoming much more a part of the common thread of the American workplace,” the report concluded.

Among its findings:

Whereas child care once was offered only by larger companies, it now can be found in firms ranging from 15 to 100,000 employees. Many smaller companies pool efforts with other firms or community groups to provide care.

The typical company studied has about 2,100 employees and a work-site child care center with a capacity of 105 children.

Nearly every company’s child care center is full, and four out of five have waiting lists. Most centers run 65 hours a week, usually from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Health care, high-tech and manufacturing industries lead in providing child care, but programs are found in a variety of industries, including insurance, financial, entertainment and retail.