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The twin pressures of work and parenthood descend on Sara Renihan every weekday at 7:30 a.m when she drops off her daughter Sadie at a local day home. With her two-year-old in safe hands, she races 30 km from her west Toronto neighbourhood to a daily meeting at her workplace north of the city—a hair-raising, rush-hour commute that requires Renihan, a purchasing manager for a commercial bakery, to punch the accelerator at every break in traffic. “I have to be there by 8:30 a.m.,” she says. “At some point every day, I’m going 160 km/h.”
Renihan knows better than to expect sympathy from her employer. In a sector where people routinely work 50-hour weeks, the time-honoured separation of work and family remains an ironclad rule. So when her supervisor raised the topic of child care during her job interview, she knew it wasn’t out of altruism: “The question was whether I had the resources in place to juggle these demands.” Still, with the market for skilled workers at a premium, Renihan wonders at times why better arrangements aren’t available to the growing number of working parents like her.
It’s an enduring curiosity. We’re in the midst of one of the tightest labour markets in Canadian history, while daycare spaces are so scarce the federal government is offering a 25-per-cent tax credit to companies that create new ones. Yet only 19 of the many enlightened employers to make this year’s Top 100 offer some form of child care assistance, financial or otherwise, and only nine boast on-site daycares at which their employees receive priority. A recent survey of employers by the Canadian Payroll Association was even more stark, rating child care dead last among benefits provided, with only two per cent of employers offering it. You could chalk this up to a reluctance among organizations when it comes to involvement in their workers’ home lives. But it’s not as if they haven’t entered the private sphere in other ways, providing everything from crisis counselling to days when employees are allowed to bring pets to work. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were afraid of kids.
This reluctance seems all the stranger when you consider the rewards for lending a helping hand. As far back as the early 1980s, companies like the National Bank of Canada were moving aggressively into child care, setting up what would become a chain of daycares situated around its headquarters in downtown Montreal. Though not in this year’s Top 100, the bank has received laurels in federal government labour reports for its progressive attitude toward the issue, and a few other organizations have followed suit. KPMG, the Toronto-based accounting and management consultancy, provides a general subsidy that employees can use for elder care or child care. L’Oréal, the Montreal-based maker of beauty products, McGill University, Toronto’s University Health Network—all count among the Top 100 organizations that have crossed this apparently forbidding frontier. Most are pleased to tout the benefits of their move in their reports or recruitment literature.
