Joe Guszkowski doesn’t work in the restaurant business, and that’s a good thing right now. As the father of an 8-month-old, he and wife Leigh Burmesch are struggling to find a place that can take care of son Will so Leigh can resume her freelance career as a video editor and animator.
The plan had been to care for Will at home for his first year and then place him with a childcare service. But the place where they’d hoped to enroll him was now saying it couldn’t take the little guy until age 2; there likely wouldn’t be a spot for him until then.
Now they’re hunting for alternatives, and it’s been a daunting adventure. “The best-case scenario is that someplace will be able to take him by the end of this year,” says Joe.
Availability is just one of the challenges, though a big one. Told that the average cost of care is about $10,000 a year per child, Guszkowski demurs and says that would be at the low end of the prices he and Leigh have been quoted to date. “It’ll be just a little less than our mortgage,” he says.
The cost raises the question of whether the benefits of a second income will be enough to justify the expense.
It’s a dilemma you might expect Joe to hear constantly in the course of his workday; he’s a senior editor at Restaurant Business, dealing daily with restaurants as he covers casual dining and technology. His sources have it even worse in their hunt for childcare. One of restaurant work’s peculiarities is its hours; you might start at 4 a.m. if you work for a place that does its own baking, or from 5 p.m. to midnight if you’re a server. Extremely rare are the care options that can accommodate a nontraditional workday.
And, though journalism isn’t known for paying lavishly, Joe is presumably making more than he did while wearing a cow suit to greet customers at a Chick-fil-A, as he did in one of his first jobs.
“It would have been impossible,” he says of paying for care back then.
What childcare?
No wonder it’d be easier to find Amelia Earhart than a restaurant employee who’s confident they’ll be able to secure accredited, totally legal childcare. Even though a third of the industry’s workforce are parents, and a fifth are single mothers, according to the union-backed group Restaurant Opportunities Center United, shoppers for a full-fledged service are rarer than lottery winners. Users, even more so.
Indeed, we focused on Joe’s experiences because finding a crewmember who’s close to lining up outside childcare proved so daunting. Several of the industry’s largest employers acknowledged that formal childcare was regarded as a dream quest that was and would remain beyond the reach of restaurant-level employees, if not much of the salaried headquarters staff. By all accounts, the business aligns with projections that one-third of all childcare is currently provided by a relative. (Will is tended by one of his grandmas one day a week.)
Statistics on how many restaurant workers use any form of childcare are equally difficult to find. Anecdotal evidence indicates the benefit is even rarely extended to restaurant executives and other headquarters personnel. Those that do offer the perk, like Starbucks and McDonald’s, picked up only a portion of the freight.
Yet there’s a consensus that bringing childcare within reach would profoundly ease the industry’s labor shortage. The contention is backed up by broader gauges: 60% of nonworking parents say their inability to secure childcare is the reason they’re on the sidelines, according to the pre-school education advocate Early Matters.
That’s why the Texas Restaurant Association (TRA) took on the moonshot last year of trying to engineer ways of bringing childcare within reach of even a single independent restaurant’s employees. As their home state’s largest employer, Lone Star restaurants will need an additional 288,000 hires by 2030 to sustain the trade.
Merely the foundational work will take a good year, says Kelsey Streufert, the TRA’s chief public affairs officer. Since roughly the beginning of 2024, the association has been building an alliance of Texas industries that would all significantly benefit from employees having easier access to childcare. The original plan was to have the participants in the TRA’s Employers for Childcare Initiative spend most of this year studying the problem and gathering information.
The timeline called for “putting meat on the bones,” as Streufert puts it, this fall and winter, in anticipation of Texas’ legislature reconvening in 2025 (Lone Star lawmakers meet every two years.) But the schedule has been accelerated, Streufert says, in part because “the problem is so huge” and partly because of the time and effort that’s being invested by the coalition members. They’re plowing a lot into the process and are eager to savor results.
Phase II, she says, will be more action focused. The fact finding has convinced the TRA and its partners that there’ll be no magic bullet, no single action that will change everything. “This isn’t the sort of thing we’re going to solve with one or two bills during one legislative session,” says Streufert.
But there are facets of the issue that can be addressed short-term. A key part of the challenge for parents is access—having enough care facilities with the capacity to handle more tykes. About 51% of Americans live in “childcare deserts” where they couldn’t find childcare even if cost wasn’t a factor, according to the National Child Care Association.
Ironically, given the importance childcare holds for boosting restaurant employment, a big part of the problem is a shortage of labor within the childcare industry. Regulations set strict ratios of how many certified adults are required per specified number of youngsters, and those care providers are in short supply. And a big part of the issue there is pay.
Yet increasing compensation would aggravate the cost component of the challenge. The federal recommendation is that a family spend no more than 7% of its household income on childcare. The average pay of a restaurant server is $13,200 a year, according to the placement service Indeed. If every penny of that income went to childcare, it still likely would be insufficient to cover the cost.
For the benefit to ever catch hold in the restaurant business, the cost would clearly have to be shared. Streufert believes the TRA’s group has found a framework for spreading the cost in a program the state of Kentucky is currently piloting. Part of its appeal is the simplicity: Employers pay a third, the government pays a third and the remaining third is picked up by employees.
But the cost will likely still be beyond the reach of most restaurant workers, Streufert notes. “Is there a sliding scale we could use?” she asks.
Streufert hears loud and clear from TRA members that restaurant employers can ill-afford the burden that’d be foisted on them. Ways would need to be identified for tempering the impact, like tax breaks or other government incentives.
In the meantime, she said, steps can be taken to ease the situation while the Employers for Childcare Initiative continues to forge longer-term ways of delivering relief. “We all focus on the money piece, but there are also other issues, other challenges, that can be addressed,” she says.
A good place to start, she continues, would be obtaining and distributing more information about childcare access and ways employees can soften the cost.
For instance, Streufert says, many restaurant employers don’t know how to respond when an employee asks for help in finding childcare. They’re not familiar with the options.
Nor are they invariably up to speed on tax benefits and other forms of government assistance that might be available to working parents or could be offered if pressure was directed at the right place. She notes that Texas has money from the federal government that could be channeled toward the issue in the form of grants or subsidies.
Homegrown half-remedies
Meanwhile, operators are finding half-remedies that they can extend to employees. The First Watch daytime dining chain, for instance, offers employees a solution for the frequent instances where their babysitters call out on short notice. Instead of canceling their shifts, crewmembers can drop the kids off at a childcare facility run by Bright Horizons, a leader in the field, for a charge of $10 a day for one youngster and $15 for two or more.
Or, the employee can select a caregiver from Bright Horizons’ roster to come to their homes for $4 an hour.
The workers can use the stopgap measures up to seven times a year.
Similarly, Starbucks offers each of its U.S. workers a premium membership in the referral service Care.com, a perk that usually runs about $150 a year. The workers can choose someone from Care.com’s referral network to care for their kids at home for $1 an hour, or bring the youngsters to one of the provider’s facilities for $5 a day. The offer is capped at 10 days of backup care.
Kerbey Lane All Day Café in Austin, Texas, gives employees a bonus whenever they pick up a shift from a co-worker who had to cancel because they couldn’t find a back-up babysitter.
Where’s the data?
A major step in helping the cause would be addressing the dearth of data on the matter, Streufert continues. “It’s especially important with this issue because there’s no government entity that owns childcare,” she says. “Even basic data, like how many childcare slots are licensed but not used because we don’t have enough teachers.”
The one thing the industry cannot do, she stresses, is shrug and figure the challenge is too great to ever be resolved.
“I don’t get that,” she says. “The most common reaction I get is, ‘Thank God y’all are looking at this. No one has really given us an idea about what to do about it, so it’s great you’re looking at it.’”
One reality that works in favor of bringing childcare within reach of more employees is the bipartisan interest the matter currently enjoys. Republicans are focused on how government can play a role without fostering more employer mandates or government involvement, while Democrats see the issue as a critical component to fostering education and wellbeing among the less advantaged.
There’s also ample and irrefutable evidence that a childcare solution would deliver on the larger objective of improving the industry’s reputation as an employer.
“The convenience of commuting together was a welcomed surprise, and sometimes on Fridays, I pop down to have lunch with my kiddo,” saya an employee from Starbucks’ support center in Seattle, where Bright Horizons provides care subsidized by the coffee giant. “I won't have this benefit forever as she prepares for kindergarten in the fall, but while we have it, we're soaking it in.”
The anonymous worker’s comment was provided by a Starbucks spokesperson.
The scope of the challenge isn’t daunting to Streufert, who’s drawing a lot of attention from other state associations and even the National Restaurant Association for her efforts to crack the problem.
“There are problems that look too big to be solved but eventually are,” she says, acknowledging that most restaurant employers didn’t think 20 years ago that they’d ever be able to extend any form of healthcare to their workers.
Plus, she says, “part of the reason we need to shape this matter is so we’re not given a ‘solution.’ That’s what we don’t want.
“This has become my passion project. Some might say my obsession.”