I was thinking I'd use this pic instead... (The Grey Havens - 7/7/2008 3:39:54 PM)
but thought maybe it would be too much.
So much for all that "Don't be evil" stuff.
Google has announced a 75% increase in the price of the daycare services they provide to employees and their children.
Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500--well above the market rate. For parents with toddlers and preschoolers, who were charged less, the price increases were equally eye-popping. Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000.
Parents wept openly at the announcement and many began searching for other work. It seems that the company had made a play to become the preeminent provider of daycare in the corporate world, and ended up subsidizing every child to the tune of nearly $40,000 per year.
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.
Day care matters to people's lives in a way that few other perks do. There are many people in this country--including, I'll bet, many Googlers--who believe that employer-provided day care, at affordable prices, ought to be like health insurance, a benefit that every company provides as a matter of course. Yet as the technology blog Valleywag noted recently, Google doesn't even advertise day care as a benefit for its employees anymore. That's the real shame.
Google's argues the decision to let the market sort it out, and thus they miss the key point that daycare plays a critical part of the life of a family. This isn't a new Lexus or a yacht, it's a necessary requirement for parents who work, for Americans who love their children.
Instead, Google has shown that it thinks about day care the same way every other company does--as a luxury, not a benefit. Judging by what's transpired, that's what Google is fast becoming: just another company.
This disastrous decision will go down in the annals of history as among the worst ever made. It will be derided as a brand-tarnishing, regressive, act of corporate cowardice which showed even the great Google is capable of incompetence and hubris. That's something that neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! could ever do. Another icon of good corporate citizenship tumbles.
but thought maybe it would be too much.
Hey, if most companies are now moving in the direction that health care should be left to the market to sort it out, daycare is nothing compared to that.
Now, are you ready to hear another shameful fact? In my last trip to Mexico, this last April, I learned that in Guadalajara, they have free daycare provided by the government until the kid is ready to go to preschool.
Wow. The government can actually solve problems. Now there is a radical idea.