Should employers step up on child care?

Vox

26-02-2025

Every morning, when Trudi and Ben Shertzer head to their jobs at the Pittsburgh International Airport, they drop their son Hunter off at a brightly colored child care facility located in a converted flight terminal just a few minutes from the main entrance. Teachers at the child care center take care of their 2-year-old while Trudi works as an airport operations manager handling all things safety and Ben manages wildlife around the 8,000-acre airline property, from removing roadkill on runways to taking care of the dozens of honeybee colonies on the grounds.
'We were trying to find day cares prior to the airport center's opening and I think the closest one we could possibly get into was at least another six-month wait,' Ben said. 'We were on the waiting list for three other facilities and the panic really started to set in.'
From the outside, the day care, which opened in late 2023 and offers discounted rates, feels like any other. Teachers crawl around on rugs with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers — reading books, singing songs, and doing crafts. But subtle reminders of its unique location are everywhere. The center gets visits from the 'PIT Paws' therapy dogs that normally help anxious travelers relax before their flights. Out back, a small playground offers a clear view of airplanes taking off and landing. And alongside their traditional ABCs, the children here learn a different alphabet: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie — the language of aviation.
The airport is located about 20 miles from downtown, and the Shertzers love knowing they can easily say hi during the day or assist their son if needed. 'We're not driving 15–20 minutes out of our way to and from day care, we're not worrying about traffic or leaving work at the exact right time,' Ben said. 'It really does make everything a lot simpler.'
Seventy percent of children under age 6 have both parents in the workforce, and roughly one-third of Americans are raising kids. Yet only 12 percent of American workers have access to any child care assistance through their employer. Even fewer have access to on-site child care like the Shertzers, with most employers fearing liability or judging the cost of building and managing a facility to be too expensive.
Across red and blue states, leaders from a growing movement have been working to change that, arguing that investing in child care is a sound business decision, and often the missing piece to making a workplace functional. But the idea of expanding employer child care has divided advocates, some of whom worry it will push the US further toward being a country of haves and have-nots while abandoning the broader fight for universal support.
For decades, employer-provided child care was viewed largely as a C-Suite perk — more comparable to fertility treatment than health insurance. This perception existed partly because federal tax incentives for child care benefits were so inadequate that only the largest, wealthiest companies could offer them.
But this 'nice-to-have' mindset fundamentally shifted in the pandemic, when school closures forced frontline workers into impossible choices between their jobs and their kids. It's now the health care and hospitality industries, retail and manufacturing sectors, public safety agencies and airports like Pittsburgh International that are forging the way on employer child care. After Covid-19, leaders in these fields are more clear-eyed that their businesses simply can't operate in the same way as remote workplaces.
Put differently, for some employers, addressing child care has become a business imperative. 'We don't run an airport from your living room, the people who work here work physically on-site, whether it's the baggage handlers or wheelchair runners or any of our food and beverage and retail partners,' said Christina Cassotis, the CEO of the Pittsburgh airport.
Cassotis and other business leaders have found that child care costs can directly impact their ability to hire. Bill Stritzler, the managing director of Smugglers' Notch ski resort in Vermont, says his company was having trouble recruiting staff and the lack of affordable child care was a recurring issue that job applicants brought up. 'The numbers were pretty clear to us,' he told Vox. 'If we are talking about typically $20–$22 an hour jobs, and if child care is $15 an hour, by the time you paid that, you didn't have enough money to drive to work.'
When Smugglers' Notch started offering free child care on-site in 2022, leaders were initially concerned that employees without children might feel resentful. 'Turns out we didn't need to worry about that,' Stritzler said. 'The managers who are now able to actually hire people were delighted, and we also got feedback from those who couldn't take advantage that they appreciated working for a company that was willing to provide this kind of benefit.'
Not all employer-sponsored child care means having a space for kids right on the premises.
'I think part of the change is really breaking the myth that child care benefits means on-site or nothing,' said Sadie Funk, the director of the Best Place for Working Parents, a national network that advocates for pro-family business policies. 'There are other ways to provide the kind of flexibility and predictability that helps working parents get their needs met.' One increasingly popular route is through subsidies for backup care, meaning emergency coverage when an employee's usual arrangement falls through.
Dan Figurski, president of KinderCare for Employers, said many companies want to offer hybrid options, with a mix of on-site care for those days spent in-office and back-up babysitters and access to child care programs when working remotely. Today, KinderCare works with 700 businesses, up from 400 in 2019.
'This isn't charitable, this is about making our business better and stronger,' Josh Silverman, of the popular craft website Etsy, declared last June, at the first national Child Care Innovation Summit, hosted jointly by the US Commerce Department and the US Chamber of Commerce. (Etsy gives its workers up to $4,000 annually for backup child care.)
At the summit, one after another, employers shared how providing child care has benefited their bottom line. They spoke about various solutions without making sharp distinctions between full-time and backup options. UPS's executive vice president Nando Cesarone reported that their backup child care pilot program cut employee turnover from 36 percent to 4 percent. Shari Eaton, from the Greek yogurt giant Chobani, stressed that providing child care subsidies that employees could use at day cares or to pay their own family members gave her team essential flexibility.
While these companies remain exceptions in corporate America, interest in employer-provided child care is growing. According to a 2023 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, nearly one-third (32 percent) of companies now offer backup child care — a significant increase from 26 percent in 2019. In January, SMART, the national organization representing sheet metal workers, became the country's first building trades union to start helping members access child care.
There is considerable political interest, too. Joe Biden endorsed employer-sponsored child care while president, and required semiconductor manufacturers to outline child care strategies as a condition of receiving federal aid.
Now, supporters see the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, set to expire in December, as the biggest opportunity in years for new federal child care funding. While some Republicans have proposed cutting worker perks broadly to fund Donald Trump's trillion-dollar tax cuts, Vice President JD Vance has advocated for increased federal child care investment. In this era of Republican-controlled government, employer-led solutions appear more viable than the costly universal public program Democrats failed to pass during the pandemic. States are increasingly supporting employer solutions as well, with at least 17 now offering tax credits to companies that operate or contract child care for their employees.
For most American families, child care represents a significant financial burden. Middle-class households typically earn too much to qualify for the scant government subsidies that do exist, yet also earn too little to comfortably afford care, which can cost as much as college tuition in many areas. Most families must navigate a fragmented system of private day cares, nannies, and informal arrangements.
As policymakers search for solutions, Michigan's 'tri-share' program has gained attention. The model, launched in three communities back in 2021, splits child care costs evenly between employers, the state government, and middle-class employees. An encouraging evaluation of the pilot in 2022 found that families' average monthly child care expenses dropped from $716 (15 percent of their income) to $252 (roughly 5 percent of their income).
The pilot has since expanded across Michigan, encompassing roughly 220 employers and 900 children, according to the state's Early Education deputy director, Emily Laidlaw. Michigan hopes to serve 7,500 kids (from 5,000 families) under 'tri-share' by 2028. But reaching that goal would cost $40 million annually — far more than the few million lawmakers put toward the program last year. Still, the cost-sharing simplicity has attracted national attention; it was one of the buzziest ideas highlighted at the Child Care Innovation Summit and states including Kentucky, North Carolina, and Indiana are now pursuing their own versions of the model.
Not everyone's sold on the idea. Only Michigan families making between $62,400 and $101,400 can participate, and even if the state hits its 2028 goals, that would still only help just a small slice of families who struggle to afford child care. Plus, as Laidlaw confirmed to me, if an employee loses their job, they'd also lose their child care aid in one fell swoop.
Many Michigan employers have also been reluctant to join, seeing the prospect of managing child care options for their workers as too complicated. That's why Sheri Penney from the Iowa Women's Foundation believes her state's simpler model, where employer contributions are pooled with government funds, will catch on faster.
'The piece that's falling flat on their tri-share [model] is the businesses saying it's taking so much time and energy to keep track of what every employee is doing,' Penney told Vox. 'Michigan companies feel like they need to create a full-time position to manage all this, and we want to just make it easier so that employers can go to write a check.'
Beginning in 2015, Penney's organization started conducting focus groups across Iowa to explore barriers to women's economic advancement. Nine out of 18 communities the Iowa Women's Foundation surveyed identified child care as the primary obstacle to women's financial security. This finding ultimately led to the creation of the Childcare Solutions Fund, which launched last year.
The Iowa model asks employers to voluntarily contribute $150 per worker, with cities, counties, and ideally the state providing matching funds. The money goes toward raising child care worker wages and increasing available slots across a community. Boosted by $3 million in federal pandemic relief money, the pilot's first year resulted in at least 275 new child care openings and the retention or hiring of 1,200 child care staff.
While researchers project that a statewide expansion could create approximately 11,000 new child care slots over 10 years — enabling 5,000 more women to enter the workforce — this still falls far short of Iowa's needs. The same study suggests that up to 150,000 women in the state could join the workforce if child care were available, which would require up to 242,000 new spots.
Penney conceded the Community Solutions Fund would not 'solve the entire problem' but stressed that it helps 'cement the foundation' of public-private investment to increase the workforce and can be combined with other strategies.
Tom Weber, the executive director of the Massachusetts Business Coalition for Early Childhood Education, a statewide coalition that formed in 2021, told me his network has reached the same conclusion as Iowa: that getting employers involved in child care must mean largely reducing the number of child care decisions individual businesses have to make. Collaborative solutions also need to be developed, Weber emphasized, particularly for small companies with only a few employees who might require support.
'There is intrigue among businesses but there is a fairly limited and immature market of opportunities for employers to do this,' he said. Weber's group successfully established a $2.5 million state matching grant for Massachusetts businesses to pilot new care models. One idea is for local employers to collectively fund the early childhood education workforce. 'There are dormant classrooms all over Massachusetts,' Weber said. 'Rather than building a new facility or subsidizing a single family, if employers pool reserves to provide some supplemental resources you could staff those.'
Involving businesses in child care doesn't strike all leaders as a great plan. Some advocates, like Erica Phillips, the executive director at the National Association for Family Child Care, are concerned that employer-based systems will inevitably exclude some home-based child care programs. These businesses can be more complicated to contract with and companies may prefer to partner instead with large corporate chains like KinderCare and Bright Horizons.
'Many of the things that make family child care amazing for families — the small size, the fact that they're working with multiple ages, they work non-traditional hours, they're really spread out location-wise, they speak different languages — also make it very difficult for them to partner directly with employers,' Phillips said on a panel last year.
Some newer child care tech startups like Upwards and TOOTRiS say they're optimistic about linking licensed home-based providers with families and employers, emphasizing that their technology can actually make it easier for small child care businesses to advertise and find new clients.
'Seventy percent of the overall child care availability in the US is in small day cares, but they don't have the time or money to market,' said Jeff McAdam, TOOTRiS's spokesperson. 'There is child care out there — people just don't know how to find it, and these [providers] don't know how to market themselves, so that's where we come in.'
Still, it's not hard to imagine how even the best-intentioned, well-funded employer models could fail to serve the needs of its diverse workforce. At the Pittsburgh International Airport child care center, for example, the hours of operation — 7 am to 6 pm Monday through Friday — still work best for those employees who clock a traditional schedule, rather than, say, staff at the Chick-fil-A or the TSA agent who has a shift starting at 4 am. Cassotis, the airport CEO, acknowledged that they haven't yet been able to provide care to workers with more unconventional hours, though she emphasized she wants to, and that her goal ultimately is to reach 24/7 care.
Operational hurdles aren't the only concern with employer-provided child care. Many employers have already proven to be rather fickle when it comes to providing child care benefits — changing their minds abruptly or when new leadership comes in. Last year Google decided to shutter the child care center at its headquarters, not long after Elon Musk arrived at Twitter and gutted employees' child care allowances.
So why, some advocates ask, would we seek to repeat the dysfunction of America's employer-sponsored health insurance system, and diverge from the more successful universal child care models deployed by other countries?
'I don't think every idea is necessarily a solution,' Katie Albitz, a New York-based child care advocate, told Vox. Last year Albitz distributed a briefing document outlining why child care supporters should unite against employer-based care.
'There has been relatively little concerted effort to push back against those who assert that child care becoming an employee benefit is a step in the right direction, or even a stopgap on the way to a public good,' Albitz wrote. '[...]Pursu[ing] this path could derail progress towards systemic solutions for decades to come in favor of a cheap, palatable fix that shifts the burden of action from government back to individuals.'
Among her arguments were that employer-based care will inherently prioritize profits for businesses over the needs of children, that it will ultimately reduce family autonomy over care decisions, and that it could fuel faster entrenchment of private equity in child care. Private equity-backed child care chains, Albitz and other critics note, have acknowledged in their Securities and Exchange Commission filings that increased government funding could hurt their businesses.
The fear that focusing on employer solutions will only let lawmakers off the hook from subsidizing care isn't wholly hypothetical: Last year, the top Republican lawmaker in Indiana's House of Representatives told companies that businesses should not look to the government to solve their child care problems.
'If you think you have child care needs that are preventing you from having the workforce capacity you need, I would suggest you figure out how to do it instead of looking at us to do it for you,' Republican House Speaker Todd Huston told them. Huston told Vox that he and his colleagues are working to 'streamline and reduce regulations' to make it easier and cheaper to provide child care 'but we need our business community to lean in and offer innovative solutions as well.'
Other liberal leaders worry that employer-sponsored child care could leave caregivers and families vulnerable. Anna Lovejoy, the director of early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress, told the Hechinger Report that she wasn't convinced incentivizing businesses to offer child care benefits would help with the sector's supply challenges, and she worried about what would happen to parents who were unemployed, or lose their job, or need to take a break from work.
Elliot Haspel, a national child care policy analyst, has also been outspoken about the pitfalls of employer-based child care and argues instead for a publicly funded child care system. This could even include some on-site employer child care, Haspel says, pointing to France as an example.
Both Haspel and Albitz believe a better role for employers would be for them to step up as political advocates for more public investment, just as the Massachusetts Business Coalition for Early Childhood Education has done. But it's not lost on them that asking companies to support higher taxes for public goods is a heavy lift, and for many a far-fetched one.
Advocates for employer child care insist that parents and businesses just can't afford to wait. Other proponents see the movement not as a detour from universal care, but as potentially paving the way for it.
'Most of the employers we see developing child care are doing so not only for their employees but also that serves the larger community.' — Nicole Riehl, president of Executives Partnering to Invest in Children
Jessica Chang, the CEO of Upwards, which works with companies like Chobani and JC Penney, thinks that bringing in businesses is an important 'catalyst of fact' toward the US actually treating child care as the public good that it is. At the Child Care Innovation Summit in June, Chang emphasized that both employer and government involvement is essential to make care affordable for parents while ensuring providers earn living wages.
Nicole Riehl, the president of a Colorado-based nonprofit, Executives Partnering to Invest in Children, agrees. Her organization explains to companies that investing in child care can help develop local areas and make cities more appealing to workers considering relocating with their families. 'Most of the employers we see developing child care are doing so not only for their employees but also that serves the larger community,' Riehl told Vox.
And Stritzler, from the Smugglers' Notch ski resort, said that his company has managed to provide on-site care while also advocating for statewide child care funding at the legislature. Smugglers' Notch joined a coalition of over 350 Vermont companies that affirmed their support for more public investment in child care, helping pass a first-of-its-kind law in 2023 that adds tens of millions of dollars into the state's starved system. At a campaign event on the Montpelier legislature steps, corporate leaders including Stritzler stood before a sign that declared 'Child Care Is Everyone's Business.' Since the law's passage, over 1,000 new child care spots have been created.
Trudi Shertzer of the Pittsburgh airport knows she got lucky. 'As a woman in the workplace, it took that anxiety off of me,' she said of her employer child care. 'I love my job, but I also love my son more.' Now she can focus on aircraft safety knowing Hunter is well cared for, free from the guilt that once threatened to overshadow her career.
This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.