Work-Related Child-Care Centres in Canada - 2001 : Chapter I

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Work-Related Child Care: A General Overview

The establishment of work-related child-care services can involve both advantages and disadvantages. The first section of this chapter examines some of these benefits and potential drawbacks, from the point of view of employers and employees.

This chapter also provides a general overview of the child-care centres that took part in this study, and the companies and organizations that sponsor them.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Work-Related Child Care

Child care provided in work-related child-care centres has advantages and disadvantages for both employers and employees.

Employer’s Perspective

Work-related child care can produce certain benefits for the employer:

• It can improve the retention of employees and serve as a key recruitment tool, whether on its own or as part of a larger work-family or work-life program.
• Employee tardiness and absenteeism can be decreased.
• The reintegration of employees who are returning to work from maternity and/or parental leave can be facilitated.
• It can enhance employees’ morale, commitment, motivation and job satisfaction, while reducing stress and stress-related disorders in the workplace.
• It can help in developing a good corporate image and in building relations with the rest of the community, especially if community children also have access to the child-care centre.
• The workplace can be humanized through the presence of children (applies to on-site centres only).
• An employer can control the hours of operation of the child-care centre to some degree.

However, work-related child care may also have some disadvantages for the employer:

• It may potentially represent a legal liability, while creating additional financial obligations.
• Any problems associated with the child-care centre can have a detrimental effect on the employer’s corporate image.
• It can distract employees when children are playing outside; some parents may want to spend too much time with their children during working hours.

Employee’s Perspective

For employees, work-related child care can have many advantages, including the following:

• It can greatly decrease the travel time between work and the child-care centre and reduce potential delays (i.e., from heavy traffic, inclement weather or unreliable public transportation) when dropping off or picking up a child at the beginning or the end of the working day.
• Knowing that their children are nearby adds to parents’ peace of mind.
• Parents can respond quickly in case of an emergency.
• It can allow working mothers to breast-feed their infant children.
• Parents can participate in the centre’s activities and special events.
• Parents are able to spend some time with their child during work breaks or the lunch period.
• The probability of obtaining a space for a child in areas where community and family child care is in short supply is increased.
• The needs of parents are better-met when a child-care centre’s hours of operation reflect those of the employer.

However, there are also certain disadvantages:

• Employees who depend on a work-related child-care centre can find themselves tied to their job, which reduces their mobility.
• The presence of a workplace centre - particularly if it provides extended hours and emergency care - may conceivably be used by an employer to justify longer working hours (e.g., through overtime) and more "flexible" shift scheduling.
• Employees’ children who are registered in a workplace centre may have only limited contact with other children in their own neighbourhood.
• Some work environments may not be ideal for children, particularly if there are problems with noise, pollution, space and the attractiveness of the surroundings (e.g., downtown areas and industrial parks).

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Work-Related Child-Care Centres: An Overview

In the context of this study, interviews were conducted with 51 work-related child-care centres — representing about one in seven work-related centres in Canada. This section provides a brief overview of these centres in terms of their numbers, location, capacity, fee structure, hours of operation, the industries and sectors in which they operate and the characteristics of their clientele. It should be remembered that the numbers and statistics provided are for illustrative purposes only. They apply to the child-care centres for which interviews were carried out, rather than to all work-related child-care centres across Canada.

Number of Centres

The number of work-related child-care centres in Canada has nearly doubled between 1991 and 2000. The most marked increase in absolute terms occurred in Quebec, where more than half of Canada’s work-related centres are located. Substantial increases, at least in relative terms, can also be noted in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia.

Location

Of the work-related child-care centres that contributed to this study, 70% are located on-site. Of the 30% situated off-site, most are nearby — within a few blocks or across the street from the work site. Only two are located at a substantial distance from the workplace. The centre furthest from the work site provides services to Montréal-Dorval Airport employees and is 5 to 10 minutes away by car.

Year of Creation

About one tenth of these centres were created during the 1970s and one third in the 1980s. More than 50% were established between 1990 and 1999, which is generally consistent with the evolution of work-related centres in Canada.

A number of the older centres have either expanded their facilities or relocated since they were created.

Industries and Sectors

Work-related child-care centres can be found in a variety of sectors and industries. The centres analysed in this study are associated with employers that operate in a cross-section of economic sectors:

• air, train, and public transportation;
• mining;
• property development and management;
• aeronautics;
• energy (hydro-electricity);
• communications;
• manufacturing (e.g., automobile, garment);
• pharmaceutical;
• micro-technology;
• retailing;
• banking;
• insurance;
• broadcasting;
• culture;
• entertainment (e.g., horse racing);
• health care;
• education;
• community organizations; and
• federal, provincial and municipal government.

In total, 55% of these child-care centres are sponsored by public sector employers, 41% by private sector employers, and 4% are private/public ventures.

Size of Employer’s Workforce

More than 80% of the work-related child-care centres that participated in this study were sponsored by a large employer (i.e., with more than 500 employees). The remaining were sponsored by medium-size employers (100-499 employees) and, in one case, by an employer with fewer than 100 employees.

In some cases, child-care centres operated as consortium centres, being sponsored by more than one employer. Examples include the Douglas E. Light Child Care Centre - sponsored by the University Health Network³, Mount Sinai Hospital, and the Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences - and Tupper Tots - Les tout-petits de Tupper, a centre that provides care to the children of Canada Post and Canada Customs and Revenue Agency employees.

Gender Distribution of the Employer’s Workforce

Work-related child-care services are not provided only by employers with a female-dominated workforce. Perhaps surprisingly, roughly one third of centres were established by employers or unions in organizations with a predominantly male workforce. The Canadian Auto Workers’ Community Child Care and Developmental Services is a case in point: some 85% of workers in the automobile manufacturing industry are male. Another one third of the centres were created to provide services for a workforce relatively evenly split between male and female employees. Although women still tend to bear the primary responsibility for child-care arrangements, many respondents noted that fathers are becoming increasingly involved in the activities of child-care centres, in addition to dropping off and picking up their children.

Status of Employees (Eligibility)

About two thirds of the employers sponsoring work-related child-care centres employ mainly regular full-time workers. But most employers, with rare exceptions, also hire part-time employees and contract workers. Seasonal employees - students, quite often - are also present in almost half of the cases in this study. Access to child-care services is normally, albeit not always, open to all employees of a sponsoring business or organization, regardless of their occupation or employment status. However, priority may sometimes be given to full-time permanent employees. Moreover, the lack of part-time or occasional-care options in some centres may constitute a barrier to part-time employees. Long waiting lists can also restrict access for seasonal and temporary workers.

Capacity of Centres: Number of Licensed Spaces; Number of Registered Children

The child-care centres that are part of this study have, on average, 59 licensed spaces; the number for each centre ranges from 32 to 145⁴. The average number of children actually registered is 72, ranging from 28 to 205, depending on the centre. It should be noted that it is not unusual for registrations to exceed the number of licensed spaces in child-care centres where part-time and occasional care is provided: two or three children registered for one or two days per week can, for example, "share" one licensed space. Similarly, child-care centres offering both day and evening care can ostensibly increase the number of children registered, according to when they need care.

The number of licensed spaces for each category of children — infants, toddlers, pre-school, kindergarten and school-age — tends to vary greatly. In many cases, only care for children aged two to five years old is provided, due to the costly nature of infant care⁵. Providing care for school-age children can also be expensive, if government subsidies are lacking, while before- and after-school care can be difficult to manage.

Registration Options

All of the work-related child-care centres in this study offer full-time child care, and most (about 85%) also have a part-time care option available. Some centres provide emergency care. However, it is often limited either to children whom the centre already knows (e.g., children formerly registered at the centre), or to cases referred by a children’s aid organization. The availability of emergency care can also depend on whether a space is vacant.

A few centres offer casual, occasional and after-school care, but this is relatively uncommon, at least among the centres in the study. However, the Quebec and British Columbia governments’ commitment to implement before- and after-school care programs, at affordable rates for parents, may increase this type of care in the future.

Hours of operation

Most of the work-related child-care centres open between 6:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. and close somewhere between 5:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Normally, they operate for 10 to 11 hours per day, five days a week. Very few centres offer evening or weekend care. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions:

• The C.A.W. Community Child Care and Developmental Services in Windsor operate for 20 hours per day and allow a rotating schedule of care for children (e.g., two weeks of care in the morning, followed by two weeks in the afternoon) to meet the needs of shift workers and employees working overtime.
• The Downs Children Centre, located on a race track in Winnipeg, provides extended care, seven days a week, during the racing season. It opens at 5:30 a.m. every day and can close as late as midnight, three times per week.
• The Souris Valley Child Care Corporation in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, offers care from Monday to Saturday, until 9:00 p.m.
• L’éveil des chérubins Childcare Centre, in the regional hospital centre in Rimouski, is open 363 days per year. Although the standard hours of operation are from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., it can remain open until half past midnight at the request of a parent, provided it receives notice 24 hours in advance.
• Some child-care centres, such as The Copper House, can accommodate the needs of parents who need care for their children before or after regular hours (7:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. in this case)⁶.

It should be noted, however, that child-care centres, particularly if they are on-site, do not always have full control over their hours of operation. Indeed, extended hours may be impossible to provide if a centre is located in a building with restricted access in the evening, at night, or during weekends.

Access for Community Children

Work-related child-care centres generally reserve spaces for, or give priority to, children of either the employees of the sponsoring employer, or the members of the sponsoring union. However, community children also often have access. This is the case at 85% of the child-care centres involved in this study. Among those, the percentage of spaces occupied by community children can vary greatly, ranging from 2% to 100%, with an average of approximately 45%.

Opening an on-site or off-site child-care centre to the community may be necessary to ensure that the facility remains economically feasible in the long term. Community access allows a centre to operate at full capacity where demand from employees is insufficient to fill all spaces, or where demand fluctuates from year to year.

Nevertheless, some child-care centres are exclusively reserved for employees because of security concerns, as in the case of the Micropuces Childcare Centre (Matrox), or because there is already a shortage of spaces for the children of employees. Frequently, sponsoring employers, as a condition for their financial support, insist that a work-related child-care centre provide services only for their employees’ children.

Child-Care Fees for Parents

All work-related child-care centres require parents to pay fees, whether employees of the sponsoring organization or members of the community. Although relatively uncommon, separate rate structures may be set. For example, community rates are $25-$50 higher (depending on the child-care option) than the rate for employees at the Fashion District Day Care centre and the Douglas E. Light Child Care Centre in Toronto; the difference ranges from $100 to $200 at The Department of Future Childcare Centre, which is associated with The Body Shop. Employers may also provide subsidies for their employees to help defray the cost of child care.

With the notable exception of Quebec (where the substantial subsidies granted by the government as part of its $5-per-day child-care policy have considerably reduced child-care expenses for parents)⁷, fees in work-related centres can be relatively expensive for employees. Rates for the centres involved in the study, excluding those in Quebec, tend to vary significantly. Monthly fees are assessed on the basis of a child’s age:

• infants: from $400 to $1070;
• toddlers: from $368 to $960;
• pre-school children: from $350 to $830; and
• kindergarten children: from $192 to $650.

This general overview reveals the diversity of work-related child-care centres in Canada. Not only are they sponsored by employers operating in different sectors, with a varied workforce, but the child-care centres analysed can also vary significantly in terms of their location relative to the workplace, the year they were created, the services they offer and the fees they charge.

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¹ Source of 1991 data: Jane Beach, Martha Friendly, and Lori Schmidt, Work-Related Child Care in Context: A Study of Work-Related Child Care in Canada. Occasional Paper No. 3. Toronto: University of Toronto, Centre for Urban and Community Studies, Childcare Resource and Research Unit, 1993, p. 6. resume
² Data compiled during Spring 2000. Estimates based on information provided by provincial/territorial governments and child-care associations. resume
³ The University Health Network (formerly The Toronto Hospital) is comprised of the Toronto General Hospital, the Toronto Western Hospital, the Princess Margaret Hospital and the Toronto Medical Laboratories. resume
⁴ In the months following the collection of the data, La voûte enchantée Childcare Centre increased its capacity to 190 spaces, including 20 in home child care. resume
⁵ Infant care is more expensive because it requires more physical space and a lower ratio of children per child-care worker than other types of child care. resume
⁶ Further information on the hours of operation of some of these child care centres can be found in Chapter III of this study. resume
⁷ Information on the Quebec policy regarding child care can be found in this study in the section Three Provincial Policies. resume