Welcome to Government Watch, a weekly Restaurant Business column focused on politics, regulation, legislation, and other governmental issues of relevance to the restaurant industry. This week's edition looks at what promises to be a breakthrough for the industry in its once-impossible-sounding goal of bringing child care within reach of more restaurant workers. Here's the inside story.
An ambitious effort to bring child care within reach of more restaurant workers is moving out of the theoretical realm and squarely into the practical.
A cross-industry group led by the Texas Restaurant Association has drafted a detailed plan for reducing the price of the service while also expanding its availability. All 70 of the participating businesses are betting the payoff will ease their labor struggles by enabling more parents to enter the workforce.
They also anticipate a significant drop in callouts, the last-minute shift cancellations that can leave a manager short-handed. The calls routinely come from moms and dads who find themselves with no one to watch the kids.
The group, known as Employers For Childcare, or E4C, spent months questioning child care experts about how to make child care more accessible. They also looked at what worked for programs with similar aims.
The process yielded an immediate lesson: There wasn’t a central repository of information for businesses, policymakers or parents that were addressing the challenges of availability and cost on their own.
The tidbits gleaned in the due diligence stage were synthesized over three or four months into a comprehensive strategy for addressing the cost and availability of care without compromising quality. The measures became the policy blueprint that E4C participants will now urge Texas lawmakers and administrators to turn into an action plan for addressing the issues of affordability and access.
The process dashed expectations that there could be a silver bullet of a solution, a single move or policy that would resolve all the issues that have traditionally kept child care out of reach for many working families. The complexity of the issue left no doubt that a matrix of solutions was needed.
Similarly, the group realized right from the get-go that the cost of expanding child care would be too big for any one party to bear. One of the programs they studied was an initiative in Kentucky that split the cost of broadening availability between employer, employee and government. That became a key guideline for E4C.
The best practices it wove into the policy blueprint range from no-brainer (and virtually no-cost) moves like creating an information resource center, to establishing a grant program whereby child care providers would vie for funding to expand their services into market areas where the need for more care facilities is particularly acute. True to its no-need-to-reinvent-the-wheel philosophy, the E4C admittedly copied the idea from a program underway in Fort Worth, Texas, that was instituted to bring more teachers to rural areas.
The recommendations also call for using tax credits to encourage employers to split the cost of child care with employees. Government would provide a tax break to the employer for providing a credit that workers could put against the cost of a child care service of their choice. The setup would allow parents to pick a facility instead of having their employer decide which one would be used.
A number of provisions are aimed at lowering costs for child care providers in hopes they’ll pass along the savings to customers. In particular, the blueprint calls for critically looking at the extensive regulations that apply to child care. Requirements that run up costs but provide little or no benefit to any stakeholder could be pruned with little pain, tempering the operating expenses.
Similarly, the proposals call for bringing down insurance costs, a major expense for child care centers.
E4C is confident the policy measures can be distilled into legislation and regulatory initiatives during the current session of the Texas legislature, according to Kelsey Streufert, chief public affairs officer for the Texas Restaurant Association. The legislature meets every two years.
“We’re cautiously optimistic about the bipartisan interest we’ve seen,” says Streufert.
By all accounts, the government-affairs specialist was the driving force behind the creation of the E4C, and she readily acknowledges that making child care more accessible to Texas restaurants is a pet goal—if not an obsession.
Her work on that front has drawn the attention of other state associations as well as the National Restaurant Association.
Accessible child care has long been seen as a significant way for restaurants to recruit and retain more employees. But bringing down the cost has been dismissed as an impossible dream, a moonshot that requires participation from stakeholders beyond the restaurant business. Hence the formation of the E4C.
The industry is the nation’s second largest private-sector employer and the largest within Texas.
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