Who's Advantages Now? The Case For Coming To Work

The corporate daycare setting has many advantages over small daycare centers and home daycare centers.

One very important advantage is their ability to extend meaningful benefits to employees that traditionally have been at the lower end of the pay scale.

However, in working in a corporate daycare setting there are other problems that crop up. Such a problem in the inevitable annual corporate negotiation to find a health care plan that will fit in with their "bottom" line. These changes generally mean a loss of some of the previously received benefit, such as medications on the insurance company's formulary, or an increase in the "visit" fee. These little increases are not little to daycare employees and they greatly impact the quality of their lives, and therefore often impact the quality of their performance at work.

Most corporations will have a prescribed vacation plan that is usually tied to the length of time an employee has worked there as well as the level of responsibility that employee holds. For example, our lead teachers receive 20 days of vacation time, which they must schedule to use. That comes to 4 weeks of vacation for the year in addition to whatever holidays the center may be closed. Vacation time not used by the end of the year is not allowed to be carried over to the next fiscal year.

Vacation is earned and accrued for use at a predetermined level. Usually an employee may "borrow" against their yearly vacation. This makes it possible to take a January vacation that the employee might not really have accrued until much later in the year. If the employee's work is terminated for any reason, the portion of used vacation that was not accrued is paid back to the employer in the last paycheck.

Vacation time is usually not a problem for employees. It is set and it is scheduled. That's pretty clear.

However, another benefit, known as sick time, can be a serious source of conflict between employees and employers. Most corporations provide somewhere in the area of 10 sick days for each employee. Sick days are to be used, unscheduled, for an employee illness as it arises. The corporation sets a number of usable days for illness, and thereafter the employee is directed to file for Disability Insurance or Workmen's Compensation.

The rub comes because unused sick days are often not cumulative, so if you don't use them you lose them. Many employees see this as an erosion of their benefit. They feel they should have the additional 10 days, of their financial equivalent, or they are being cheated. To combat this, employees call in "sick" and utilize their sick days.

This has three effects for the corporate daycare. The first is that the employee leaves himself open to having no sick days available when a true illness arises. Filing for Disability Insurance or Workmen's Compensation generally requires a specified "wait period" during which it is assumed the party will collect through their employer sponsored sick days. This means the employee may have unwittingly created a situation where they would receive no money at all for several days.

The second effect this has on daycare is that once employees begin to do this, there is a domino effect. Their co-workers feel it is acceptable to call in sick too. After all, when their co-worker isn't in the classroom, it would be fair to say that the remaining worker is doing his job.

The third effect is on the daycare center's programming. When there are several unscheduled "sick" days it is often necessary to move staff into other rooms to have proper coverage. There have been times at my center when it resulted in staff lunchtime being cut to only one-half hour and being required to work overtime.

I'm not sure there is anything that can be done to convince staff that not using all 10 sick days is to their benefit. There seems to be a bit of professional pride that is necessary to make this all work properly.

by: rupender

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