In the News

The pandemic exposed many of the difficulties workers with children face in deciding how to juggle their job and child care. 

As employers and employees figure out the future of their relationship, child-care benefits have remained a priority for both on the Central Coast and across the nation. 

In an effort to address that issue, U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal, D-Santa Barbara, announced a new bipartisan bill he sponsored at the First 5 Santa Barbara County building in Goleta on Aug. 14 that would give tax breaks to businesses and middle-class workers to aid in child care. 

The bill, titled the Child Care Investment Act, was designed to combat one of the most significant difficulties for workers — finding child care for their children.

A number of local organizations have endorsed the bill, including the chambers of commerce of Santa Barbara South Coast, Ventura and Santa Maria Valley. 

The Child Care Investment Act has three main tax incentives for businesses and workers. If approved, it would expand the employer-provided child care credit, double the maximums for Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts and increase the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, as well as make the credit refundable. 

“It is a piece of the puzzle to solving this critical shortage,” said Carbajal. 

The bill would also allow businesses to co-own and operate child-care centers with other firms, and companies that qualify as small businesses would have a special tax incentive they can qualify for. 

This particular issue has massive repercussions for employers and employees, and it has grown in importance since the pandemic struck.

Access to childcare has long been an issue for workers, but during the pandemic, it became even harder for some workers to find childcare facilities for their children because of social-distancing guidelines. 

In a survey of Santa Barbara County conducted by United Way and Maria Chesley Consulting last year, over half of parents are dissatisfied with local child-care and education options before kindergarten and 70% of parents with kids under five said finding childcare was difficult or very difficult. 

Other workers that worked remotely during the pandemic grew accustomed to lower child-care costs and now many do not want to go back to paying the child-care fees that they had to before. The pandemic realizations have led to workers changing their demands for the types of non-monetary benefits that are included in their compensation packages. 

“[Businesses have] got to attract employees somehow and employees are increasingly demanding those sort of lifestyle, make-my-life-better benefits as opposed to foosball tables and free catered lunch,” said Rob Jupille, a business performance advisor with Insperity who works mainly with tech companies. 

Central Coast workers are relatively uncommon in their overall child-care needs because of the large number of the workforce in agriculture. 

“Their needs are unique. They start earlier, they work weekends. They work different hours than most of us do and many of our commercial daycare centers are open,” said Glenn Morris, CEO of the Santa Maria Valley Chamber of Commerce. 

Because of that, additional assistance from the government in creating pathways for making child care easier for agriculture workers is essential, Morris said. 

This bill would not just be a win for employees, multiple people told the Business Times. Employers would have the ability to offer significantly better child-care benefits, giving them another tool to retain talent. 

“Investing in child care is really an investment in future growth and success,” said Vlad Vaiman, a professor at California Lutheran University who studies talent management. 

Lack of access to child-care options disproportionately affected women during the pandemic, causing them to leave the labor market at a much higher rate than men. This bill could help alleviate some of the disparity and from an economic perspective, would allow companies to take full advantage of the available workforce, according to numerous people who follow workforce trends. 

Child care is even more important in the Central Coast because of how high the cost of living is. 

“This area because of the cost of living is so high that you need two people to work,” said Bethany Kasmar, who works in HR at HG Insights as the senior director of people. 

Better child-care options will also help employers with getting employees back to work in person, according to Jupille. Return to office protocol has become a point of contention in employer-employee relationships. 

“People were used to much lower childcare costs because they were working from home,” Jupille said. 

Carbajal’s inspiration for this bill came from a 2022 round table discussion that was supposed to be mainly about inflation. While inflation was discussed, many local business owners brought up child-care assistance as a pressing need for workers. 

From then on, it became an opportunity for public-private partnerships aided by local chambers of commerce. 

“It really came straight from [local business leaders]. That’s how this is supposed to work. I put business and government in the same room and the magic happens,” said Kristen Miller, CEO of the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce.