From April, Korean companies will face tightened regulations on workplace nurseries as the government steps up efforts to raise Korea’s woefully low birthrate.
The new rules require workplaces with more than 500 employees or 300 female workers to provide on-site child care. A 2014 survey found there were 1,204 such workplaces in Korea.
If a company cannot run a workplace nursery on its own, it can either operate one jointly with other companies or outsource the care of employees’ children to neighborhood facilities.
Currently, a company is allowed to pay its employees an allowance for infant care when it cannot provide in-house child care. But from April, merely paying allowances will not be enough.
Failure to meet the new requirement will result in a penalty of up to 100 million won (about $81,300) every six months until the requirement has been met.
On top of that, companies that neglect this responsibility will suffer substantial damage to their reputation as their names will be made public.
The stricter policy on workplace child care is a step in the right direction. For working moms, the biggest challenge is to find accessible and high-quality child care. Many working women quit their jobs due to difficulties in finding reliable and affordable child care centers. Workplace nurseries address this problem.
But the problem is that on-site child care is costly. Building a workplace care center is estimated to cost about 2 billion won. The cost will be much higher for work sites located in urban centers. On top of that, about 700 million won is needed in a year to cover operating expenses. The size of the required investment is by no means small.
Companies also complain that the standards for the establishment of childcare facilities are too complicated. For instance, there should be no gas stations or entertainment facilities around workplace nurseries. The regulations also require child care centers to be located on the ground floor.
For these reasons, corporations have been reluctant to set up in-house nurseries. The 2014 survey found that of 1,204 workplaces, only slightly over half — or 52.7 percent — established their own child care centers. Another 7.7 percent of them outsourced child care services to neighborhood nurseries.
Corporations should take a more positive attitude toward workplace child care. On-site nurseries should be seen as an investment — not a cost — as they boost the productivity of working mothers by enabling them to focus better at work. Such facilities can also help to raise the proportion of female employees, as working mothers will not have to stop working just to take care of their children.
On the government’s part, it needs to provide financial assistance to companies to alleviate the financial burden of providing child care facilities, especially since these days, companies are struggling to cut costs in the face of increasingly strong economic headwinds.
The government should also provide consultation to companies regarding the establishment and operation of on-site child care centers as regulations for the establishment of such facilities can be difficult to follow.
