Companies Lend Parents a Hand

CHICAGO — With a company spinoff just days away and work mounting, Kim Walter-Huffman couldn’t stay home when her 14-month-old son’s regular baby sitter fell through.

“We tried our backup and our backup backup, and no one was available,” she said.

She turned to her employer for help.

Baxter International is one of a growing number of companies that offer baby sitters or day care, allow parents to work from home or even stagger their shifts so they can come to work once the other parent has come home.

More employers are paying attention to findings such as the following:

-- About 70 percent of working parents missed at least one day in the past year because of child-related problems, according to Work Family Directions of Boston, a company that advises firms on how to improve work and family programs.

-- U.S. businesses lose $3 billion a year because of child-care-related absences, according to a 1991 estimate by the Child Care Action Committee, a national childcare advocacy group.

More companies are developing programs to keep working families happy because good employees are just as scarce as good jobs, said John Challenger, executive vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a placement company in Chicago.

“The social contract today is no longer ‘I provide you a job for life’ but a social contract that ‘if you come to work here, I will pay you a good wage, I will provide you a good work environment,”’ he said.

Deerfield, Ill.-based Baxter’s emergency sitter program began Sept. 1 and is open to all its 7,000 northern Illinois employees -- from upper level managers to assembly-line workers. The company is one of the world’s largest makers of health-care products.

An employee may call a 24-hour telephone number and have someone available within two hours. The sitters charge $11.90 an hour, of which employees pay $3 an hour. Employees may use the program eight times a year.

And that’s not all companies are doing:

-- Barnett Banks Inc. of Jacksonville, Fla., has opened a $1.2 million facility that provides child care and child rearing information to company employees and the local community.

-- Johnson & Johnson of New Brunswick, N.J., has four on-site childcare centers and is planning two more in New Jersey. In addition, the medical products company negotiated discounted rates with three childcare chains located in more than 45 states.

-- Merck & Co., of Whitehouse Station, N.J., offers on-site day care, emergency backup care and a summer camp program. It also provides an online database so employees may make confidential searches for potential job-sharing partners.

-- Patagonia Inc., of Ventura, Calif., subsidizes its on-site day care centers and allows five days off with pay for parents to spend at their child’s school.

-- Xerox Corp., of Stamford, Conn., provides up to $1,750 annually in child care subsidies to workers who earn less than $50,000. Employees may also receive up to $2,000 to help purchase a home.

More workers are admitting to their employers that the time they need off is for personal reasons -- such as for tending to a sick child -- as opposed to a year ago when more people said they were ill. That’s according to a study by CCH Inc., a Riverwoods, Ill., publisher of materials for human resources workers.

An explanation for that trend may be that companies now lump all of an employee’s time off together instead of divvying it into sick leave, personal days or vacation categories, said Ellen Bankert of Boston University’s Center on Work and Family.

Not everyone takes advantage of the new flexibility.

Fel-Pro Inc., a gasket manufacturer in Skokie, Ill., has offered subsidized emergency dependent care to its workers since 1985. But only about 2 percent have used the program.

Scott Mies, Fel-Pro’s director of work and life benefits, attributes that to fears some employees may have about leaving their children and homes in the care of a stranger.

But Mies says that if privately held Fel-Pro, with its 2,500 employees, can have day care programs, summer camps and emergency care, so can many other businesses.

He has advice for companies that aren’t considering their employees’ personal needs:

“Get on this bandwagon, because if you don’t, you will lose out.”