It’s Okay Google, I Still Love You
It’s okay Google, I still love you. But, you know, that’s probably because (a) I’m childfree and (b) I read the entire New York Times article instead of just the excerpts being quoted elsewhere.
Just because I don’t have children, doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy reading the blogs of some people who happen to have children. I usually steer clear of the blogs that are All Kids All The Time, simply because the subject matter doesn’t interest me that much, but I actually do enjoy an occasional photo or story about someone’s kids.
Anyway, one such blog is Mom Voyage, written by Karrie. And today, Karrie had a very short blog entry that sent me over to a blog I’d never seen before: Hey, Ho KellyGo to read this blog entry about Google.
In a nutshell, Google (the company) provides daycare services to its employees and what appears to be well below market rate and Google is putting the kibosh on that, raising the price to something more akin to market rate.
On her blog, Kelly quoted from the New York Times article, but she left out a few key paragraphs, like how the day care that Google provides has been fashioned around the Educational Philosophies Du Jour, provides the most advanced toys, and has the lowest teacher-child ratios around. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like it would be pretty expensive to me.
But here’s one of the paragraphs in the New York Times article that I didn’t see mentioned on the other blog:
Meanwhile, someone at Google woke up one day and realized that the company was subsidizing each child to the tune of $37,000 a year — which nobody had noticed up until then — compared with the $12,000-a-year average subsidy of other big Silicon Valley companies like Cisco Systems and Oracle. Faced with this dilemma, Google decided that the way to solve the dual problems of a too-long wait list and a too-large subsidy was — are you sitting down for this? — to get rid of C.C.L.C. and make the Kinderplex more like the Woods! (Google says it was always planning to replace C.C.L.C.) Given that decision, the only possible way to reduce the subsidy was to raise prices through the roof.
emphasis mine.
So, it appears, that people are pissed that Google isn’t willing to pay $37,000 per year per child in its daycare. And, to an extent, I understand that. It sucks to have to start paying for something that you’ve been getting for free (or apparently nearly free) for a while. But I wonder if all the other employees, the ones who were not using Google’s daycare, were being given an extra $37,000 in their paychecks each year. I didn’t see anything about that mentioned in the article, so I’m guessing not. I’m guessing that the employees enrolling their children in Google’s daycare centers were getting something of significant monetary value that was not an across the board benefit. (For a better explanation of this theory, you might want to refer to one of my earlier posts on this subject.)
Another paragraph that seems to be glossed over is the one that states that Google has stated they will be offering scholarships to its employees who may not be able to afford the higher daycare costs.
Google, I should note, believes that it has handled the day care issue in a “Googly” way and object strongly to the criticism by the parents. The company points out that the prices are somewhat lower than originally planned, that it is expanding its day care operation, that its facilities will be state of the art and that it will be giving scholarships to parents who can’t afford to keep their children in Google day care. (Although yet to release the details of the scholarship plan, the company says that employees will have to show proof of household income to qualify.)
emphasis mine.
This seems quite fair to me. Multimillionaire employees (and it seems that Google has its share of those), will be paying full price for Google Daycare and, it appears, Google will still be subsidizing daycare for its employees who earn significantly lower salaries. However, Google hasn’t said yet how much these scholarships will be worth or what the income guidelines for qualifying will be. But even the New York Times article seems to only mention the scholarships in passing and, since I think it’s a pretty big deal, I’m not sure why.
It sounds to me like there’s a whole bunch of whining going on though:
Google may be providing the greatest day care ever, but so what? It doesn’t matter how good the day care is if only its wealthiest employees can afford to use it. If Google had really wanted to do something path-breaking about its day care crisis, it would have spent less time creating elitist day care centers and more time figuring out how to “scale” day care for everybody no matter what their salaries.
Isn’t that exactly what the scholarships will do … “scale” day care for everybody no matter what their salaries and, at the same time, provide state-of-the-frickin’-art daycare facilities?
Perhaps it’s because, when it comes to daycare, instead of thinking ahead (and when I say ahead I mean before you actually have children) about how much daycare is going to cost, it’s so much easier to prattle on about how good they have it in Sweden. However, I’ve yet to meet anyone who, while they might like the daycare set-up in Sweden, is any too excited about their tax structure. Swedes pay approximately 47.8% of their salary in taxes and are second only to Denmark as having the highest tax burden in the world. And, until very recently when Denmark pulled ahead, Sweden was #1 in the world for the highest tax burden. In comparison, in 2005, for a household with one wage earner and two children, only Iceland and Ireland had a lower tax burden than the U.S. While I would support a tax increase for universal health care, like Sweden and other civilized countries offer its citizens (because that would benefit everyone), I would be hardpressed to support government mandated and funded daycare, simply because having children is a choice, not a necessity.
Before I veer off course to severely, here’s a thought with regard to the Google daycare dilemma: maybe instead of running to the powers that be at Google and crying (yes, the article actually mentions that employees “wept”) about having to pay market price for daycare, maybe the Google employees who are so distraught should get together and come up with a viable plan themselves and present it to their superiors. If this is a perk that’s that important to them, then why don’t they put a little effort into solving the problem instead of just bitching about the solution Google came up with?
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July 7th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Wow… Google offers childcare? Guess I live in a small enough city that the idea that a company you work for would actually have this perk is something unimaginable.
What about employees’ pets? Do they have a daycare for them too? I’d love to have a daycare for my dogs that was subsidized for work. No? Oh well. Guess I’ll just have to be content to not even have to worry about the daycare issue.
July 7th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
FWIW, I did read the entire article. I don’t know if you meant in more general terms, but wanted to make that clear. I’m pretty sure Kelly did as well.
I’m trying to return to work myself–horrible marital problems—and childcare is even more of a bitch than I thought or planned for. Simply finding it, let alone finding a way to pay for it. Especially if I end up a single working mother. And this sort of thing does tend to impact women. Men end up the same, if not better off. Similarly working men rarely have to adjust their career’s due to having children. On site daycare seems one way to level this imbalance a bit.
What bothered me about Google most was the amount of the increase, in light of the fact that Google basically had a captive market–albeit temporarily– in the parents of small kids.
I would think on site care facilities would benefit everyone, although not equally in purely financial terms. If you know your kid is safe down the hall or at another building on site, you have more freedom to stay late to meet a deadline, rather than choose between dumping the work on a childfree colleague, or having a 3 year-old stuck waiting with an angry daycare director on the other side of town. I assume it also reduces turnover, which in theory would save Google a lot of money, and help with workload balance. One of the major complaints I see when I read the childfree perspective is getting stuck with a heavier than normal workload because of parents leaving early, or just plain leaving shortly after being hired.
I hear what you’re saying about a comparable perk for those without kids. If it is any small consolation, they’re almost always compensated at a higher level to begin with. Maybe extra vacation time could be offered or negotiated for? That was my major issue as a single, working adult, and something I still think merits real consideration.
The NYT piece did not say, but does Google also offer eldercare? I know a few companies here in Boston offer both. Eldercare scares the crap out of me, and I think it’s an issue we should all worry about. Ideally any tax increase that supported a change to daycare would also include eldercare. Sweden’s system is “cradle to grave.”
The scholarship details DO seem vague, and the change seems related to the sister in laws whims perhaps more so than a truly needed increase in standard of care. The original Google scheme sounded more than adequate before the decision was made to have some crazy go nuts Extra Special, Extra Pricey care option. And the article does mention how many parents loved the less expensive program. (Which sounded more than adequate to me on the surface as well.)
It did sound to me that the people in the focus groups proposed other solutions. I read the “weeping” as shock, since so many people live far beyond their means to begin with, that having a bill that basically is a utility increase so drastically, and unexpectedly, hit below the belt.
Muze–I could be confusing with another tech company, but IIRC, I think Google does have some kind of a doggy care or campus run set up.
And I’m probably the exception, but I would happily move to Sweden. (I actually did live there for a short time in the mid 90s.)
July 7th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Forgot to thank you for taking the discussion to another level. I am always interested in how these work-life sorts of issues come across to people with a different set of concerns.
And I’m stuck inside this afternoon. Bored senseless.
July 7th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Karrie…I wasn’t insinuating that you didn’t read the entire article, or that the other blogger I linked to didn’t. Just that a couple of paragraphs I thought were particularly important were left out.
I don’t think Google’s market was particularly captive. Google employees are certainly free to find alternative daycare. Yes, I understand how convenient it would be for parents to have on-site daycare. I guess it comes down to what’s it worth for parents to have that benefit?
The article only says that the employees “came up with ideas to save money,” but it doesn’t specifically say if those ideas were related to the daycare. The impression I got from that sentence was that perhaps they were suggesting that other unrelated perks be cut in order that they might continue to receive a $37,000 per year childcare subsidy. Frankly, when you’re looking at a perk that’s worth $37,000/year, unless you’re pulling in about $15,000 A WEEK, a couple of extra weeks of vacation is no comparison but, you know, it would at least be a stab at some minor semblance of equity.
At least a “cradle to grave” system would benefit more people than just daycare but, again, you’re paying one way or another – whether through taxes or privately.
And the fact that the “daycare issue” is usually a woman’s issue, frankly, pisses me off to no end, but I think that might be a topic for another post. Thanks for giving me that idea.
July 7th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Oh, and I almost forgot, I saw something about Google allowing employees to bring pets to work with them (hell, employees are even allowed to wear their pajamas to work, if they want to) as long as the pets aren’t disruptive and there’s no one in the vicinity of the pet who has allergies or other valid objection.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
It seems to me that if the Googlers are subsidizing child-care at a rate of $37k per kid, the non-kid-having Googlers should be given an equitable subsidy (cash, health care, legos, whatever).
Anything less would be…Evil.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Precisely, Thomas.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:53 am
$37K is a huge amount of money–absolutely no argument from me there. It’s why I think the change is more based on one woman’s whims–the Reggio Emilia fan—than on a true need to improve what they offered.
I look forward to the post about daycare being a woman’s issue– or not,and I’m going to add this to the link to Kelly.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:57 am
[...] Also, if you enjoy approaching these kinds of issues from several angles, go read what Emma has to say about the same situation from the perspective of a working woman who does not have or [...]
July 8th, 2008 at 7:08 am
The other thought I had related to the fairness of such a perk, was that for most, on site daycare is a perk that would be used a couple of years.
I’m pretty sure the freaky quiver-full types don’t work in heathen environments like Google.
By considering them a captive audience, I was referring to how long arranging alternative care or as you suggest, coming up with a grassroots workable alternative, would take. (Since switching day care is not usually simple and straightforward.) I’m also not clear on how much notice Google is giving as they roll this out–although now I guess the employees all know it’s coming and can begin to plan accordingly.
July 10th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
[...] brought up an interesting point in one of her comments to my post about the Google/Daycare Fiasco…that she, along with probably most of America, believes daycare is a woman’s [...]