When your kid gets sick, your daycare provider breaks a leg, or there’s a snow day, finding a backup provider can be difficult if not impossible. So, it’s understandable that a group of Amazon employees, who call themselves “Momazonians” want Amazon to step in and provide a backup childcare perk.
There are lots of good reasons for a business to do this–it makes your workforce more stable, it can help you attract women (more about that later), and may ultimately help the bottom line.
Bezos says no. Should he reconsider? Maybe.
To keep reading, click here: Amazon Women Battle for Daycare. Bezos Says No.
Bezos is the richest person in the World, at least until the property division in his pending divorce. Why should he worry about the welfare of his employees?
I have to admit that the phrase, “Amazon Women Battle…” had me anticipating an entirely different conflict.
Something along the lines of Wonder Woman or Theseus and Hippolyta. Alas, Bezos is a poor stand-in for Theseus…
Ha! That would have been a much better article.
I’ll go right back to this: “If you’re good enough to work at Amazon, you’re good enough to work someplace else that might care more about balancing parenthood and jobs.” It is the employee’s choice where they work. If they don’t like the benefits, they can go elsewhere. Amazon isn’t the only large employer who doesn’t provide childcare centers. Amazon’s job is to provide a profit for its shareholders. In the meantime, they provide solid employment for a huge number of people world-wide.
Amazon could choose to be a leader, could choose to invest in their employees. Instead they choose to race to the bottom, and measure success in dollars. Same reasoning that sweatshops use in not updating their fire extinguishers / alarmsystems, same reasoning that Walmart uses in limiting full time positions while adovating that ft employees donate food for part time employeees who can’t afford thanksgiving/holiday meals. Only the “investors “ and c-suite execs get the dollars. Employees are just debt burdens whose work give so the company value, but the workers have no value.
What the article is really pointing out is the total lack of options available for parents for good certified childcare programs in the USA. Amazon, yes, as a big corporation could easily do this and so could Walmart, but on-site childcare programs aren’t something offered to us lower level workers. That’s an option only offered to high-level income employees.
Regular ordinary workers, including people who work at Amazon, etc. have to fend for themselves to find appropriate affordable childcare that doesn’t cost their entire paycheck, plus the program has people who take good care of their children. Most of these programs are funded by some government funds with limited oversight to getting certification.
So, yes, emergency childcare is problematic for most workers, plus the majority of times the finding adequate childcare falls mainly on the women. Yeah, that Amazon job may be negative in helping but maybe those women can’t get a better paying job to accommodate what I call a “Mommy” schedule. Something most men have no idea what that means.
Thank you, EvilHRlady for bringing up this continual problem for women on International Women’s Day. Someday we will have a solution to this for everyone with no cost effect on job.
On-site child-care is not only an extra expense for employers, but potentially an extra source of liability. It’s a great perk, but it definitely has a multi-faceted risk/cost factor associated with it. That’s also the reason cars haven’t yet come equipped with “don’t forget your child in the backseat” technology. The liability associated with a product failure far outweights any benefit (for the car company) in braving forward to offer such a feature.