Hawaii Has A Child Care Crisis. Employers Could Help Solve It …Setting up on-site daycare can be an expensive and difficult undertaking, but there are other creative ways that companies can help young families.
For more than a decade, employees at Hawaii First Federal Credit Union on the Big Island have enjoyed an unusual job perk: the ability to take their newborn children to work with them full time until the child is 6 months old.
So far, nearly two dozen children have spent the first months of their life tucked into bassinets at teller windows and in private offices at the credit union’s two branches. The next child is due to arrive later this month.
Letting parents bring their infants to work — and enlisting the support of fellow coworkers to step in when a child is fussy and their parent is with a customer — is the bank’s scrappy solution to a pressing problem facing workers in Hawaii: the lack of affordable child care in the islands.
