Dear Madam Speaker:
As the people’s advocate focused on improving the everyday lives of Americans, our country needs your leadership more than ever to push for funding to protect affordable and quality child care to ensure that as the economy starts to reopen and working parents return to their jobs, there’s capacity to meet demand.
Patagonia has a 40-year history of providing on-site child care and knows the essential role it plays in a healthy and equitable workforce. Supporting working parents isn’t just the right thing to do—it makes good business sense as it helps us retain great talent (100 percent of new moms return to work at Patagonia) and creates strong employee morale. Our Ventura, California, campus has an outdoor playground smack-dab in the middle, and we hear kids playing as we go from meeting to meeting— those joyful noises have a profound way of putting things in perspective. As discussion begins about how to get our country working again, the central role of child care in enabling parents to return to work has received scant attention.
Working parents, in particular working moms, will not be able to go back to work if we don’t ensure that employees have access to affordable, quality child care as the country reopens. But without financial support, this pandemic may decimate the child care industry. Nearly 60 percent of child care programs have closed under stay-at-home orders and in response to decreasing enrollment as families with children are working from home or facing unemployment.1 Revenue for these businesses, both small and large, has dried up, with many child care providers not able to meet operating expenses and being forced to furlough or lay off providers and staff. And, according to a recent study published by the Center for American Progress, without public funding, the United States risks losing nearly half of all child care capacity as a result of this pandemic.2 If child care providers cannot reopen their doors when employees are asked to come back to work, millions of Americans won’t be able to return to their jobs or reopen their businesses.
As Congress considers how best to safely get the country working again, we urge you to fund the $50 billion plan put forth by Senators Warren and Smith. And to ensure we reopen child care centers in a way that makes it affordable for all working parents, and recognizes the essential work our providers do, we encourage Congress to enact the Child Care for Working Families Act last introduced in 2019.
1 https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/nationwide-survey-child-care-in-the-time-of-coronavirus/2 https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/news/2020/04/24/483817/coronavirus-pandemic- lead-permanent-loss-nearly-4-5-million-child-care-slots/
May 1, 2020
It’s critical to identify significant resources dedicated to the child care system to help ensure that providers who have been forced to close their doors and lay off teachers can reopen when the time comes for parents to go back to work. The child care system has been pieced together over time and cannot weather this storm alone without serious risk to the economic recovery in communities across the nation. We must prioritize affordable child care and make sure there are federal investments now so that child care providers can retain their trained teachers, pay rent, make sure their licensed facilities are operational and focus on new practices to protect the children of front-line workers and the general workforce.
Even knowing how central child care is to Patagonia’s mission, we face our own serious challenges ahead to reopen. Our campuses are closed, our employees are working from home, our child care centers are shuttered and, as a result, we made the difficult decision to furlough our teachers for 60 to 90 days. It has been a heart-wrenching time, as our teachers are integral to our employees’ lives and our Patagonia community. As stay-at-home orders extend and we rethink what work looks like, we are also going to have to rethink what child care on our campuses looks like. Just two months ago, Patagonia’s campuses were alive with the sounds of children running wild, riding bikes, jumping in puddles and seeking refuge in the arms of extraordinary teachers. We must ensure that working parents returning to their jobs are confident that their children will have safe and healthy places to grow so our economy can begin again.
Sincerely,
Rose Marcario President & CEO Patagonia, Inc.
CC: Governor Newsom