Shortage Hampers Job Performance:
Child-Care for City Workers

By BILL de BLASIO

As New York residents, we all rely on the city's employees to keep things running smoothly. Their work often goes unnoticed, but many provide essential services like in-home health care and hospital care.

Mr. de Blasio is a City Council Member from Brooklyn.

Because they're such an important part of the city's operations, it's crucial that city workers can perform to the best of their ability and reach a high level of productivity. We need to keep attendance levels and morale high and the rate of turnover low. The high cost of child-care, however, presents an obstacle to achieving these goals.

Worries Hurt Productivity

Many of these jobs are low-paying, which means that consistent child-care for city workers with families may not be an option. The cost of having a child is often the greatest financial burden families face - in New York City the average cost of child-care is over $13,000 per year. Finding money for child-care while juggling the costs of housing, health care, and putting food on the table in an expensive city like New York presents a challenge for any parent, but particularly for those earning low wages.

Parents who can't afford consistent child-care may have to rely on last-minute, unreliable, and inadequate child-care arrangements, which jeopardizes their productivity on the job. City workers help thousands of New Yorkers each day to access affordable housing and government-subsidized medical care, and in return we should provide them with the peace of mind of knowing that their children are safe and consistently well-cared for during work hours. Providing such assistance will allow them to dedicate more time and energy to their careers, to their families' futures and to making our city run better overall.

Subsidies for 150

This year's budget includes my new initiative, "Working Parents for a Working New York," which will help provide a group of city workers with quality and affordable child-care and will study how this affects job productivity. The investment of $875,000 to fund "Working Parents for a Working New York" will alleviate the high cost of child-care for some working parents employed by the city, which will likely increase their ability to contribute to the workplace and allow them to dedicate more time and attention to their work in helping the people of New York City.

The funding will provide child-care subsidies for approximately 150 employees of city agencies and subcontracted agencies, who do not currently receive child-care subsidies. Eligible participants will earn up to 275 percent of the poverty line, which is the Federal eligibility cutoff for subsidized child-care.

The initiative also includes a study, through which an independent evaluator will assess the impact of the initiative and analyze how the child-care subsidies affect job performance, job retention, and morale in the workplace. The study will help determine how providing such subsidies to municipal employees and employees of subcontracted agencies will benefit New York City on a long-term basis, and will better inform the city's efforts in developing family friendly workplace policies and benefits. It may also be used as a tool to support expanding the initiative further in the future.

Quality child-care for city employees doesn't simply assist parents and their children on a day-to-day basis. The "Working Families for a Working New York" initiative will help the city learn how best to support its work force, improve care for its children, and pave the way for improving New York City's future economic development overall.