You really are. It probably helps that the company is run by a woman (I think you mentioned that) and might have struggled with these issues early in her career.
My family is lucky too, in that as an academic my schedule is flexible, but my husband has been lucky enough to telecommute often. Plus, our kid is 14 now. Onsite day care at my husband’s work might have been useful when she was little.
What are the work and commute hours of their mother?
edited to add: I see you’ve answered that. If the longer commute between the two of you is only 30 minutes, no wonder you don’t think on-site daycare is all that important. Cupertino is a very different situation.
Do they have rooms with beds for people starting families? 
My at-work gymnasium:
Y’know what I’d really like my employer to provide? Spraypacks that don’t leak herbicide all over your back; a brushcutter that doesn’t give you an electric shock when you touch the HT lead; a saw that isn’t totally blunt; a proper watering can instead of a bucket. Etc.
Uh, Sunnyvale’s city council is famous for being bought off by Sunpac (ie, developers) and never, ever saying no to apartments (or much of anything else) even to the point of encouraging the demolition of mobile home sites.
By the way, I live a seven minute walk away from the mothership and will entertain offers starting at 1.8 million for a shitbox ranch house constructed in 1957. 
I see 68 comments talking about childcare and no fanboyism in sight. But don’t let that stop you from pretending we’re all idiots, given that you don’t read the comments anyway…
Don’t blame the companies for lack of affordable housing, blame the NIMBY mentality that has caused the “white and well off and want to keep it that way” municipalities in the area to say no to building enough housing to house all the workers.
Well, I think we can safely put the “the licensing and liability requirements would be too onerous” argument to bed. My company works intimately with state and city licensing for early childhood programs in New York, and the constant tension between capacity for affordable childcare and desire for higher quality standards (with the tie always going to the former) means that the bar stays very low. I guarantee the licensing for their food handling facilities is at least twice a rigorous. Child care is one of the businesses that poor women and immigrants with few other options often turn to to get a foothold in the economy. Not to say that they aren’t often excellent teachers and caregivers, but that isn’t because of the legal standards.
NYC has some of the most rigorous requirements for providers’ (read lead teacher/caregiver) education level, buuuuut, oops, we’d never be able to staff up the centers with people that qualified, and keep childcare affordable, so whoops, they have 7 years after they start working to meet these requirements (and don’t tell anyone, but if they move to a new job at a new center, the clock on that 7 years starts over.) If you don’t think education matters in the qualifications for early childhood teachers, I have some literature for you!
Now, I agree with others in this thread that Apple building onsite child care is not the answer to access to excellent child care. Like employer-provided heath insurance, this is backwards, crapitalistic approach that breeds inequality and social reproduction. However, I can hold this thought in my mind and see that the fact that they built all these other perks and left out child care is a clear indicator of their gross anti-family corporate culture.
If Apple really wanted to make the world a better place for their workers and their customers, they would pay their fucking taxes and work toward universal, high-quality child care for all. I won’t hold my breath. New York is taking some huge steps, expanding both universal Pre-K and what we’re calling “3pk” for 3yos. This is the best move, IF they can avoid the trap of treating early childhood as just test prep starting earlier (while you’re at it, public schools, stop treating ANY education as test prep, kthanx)… Leveraging the infrastructure and cultural familiarity of the public schools (even though, at present, they know dick-all about early childhood) the way single payer leverages the infrastructure and acceptance of medicare seems the smoothest, and most politically feasible strategy.
The same logic can be used to justify 96 hour work weeks with no bathroom breaks. “If you don’t like it, find a job somewhere else!”
I guess it’s fine if you think the world is already perfect, but uh…citation needed as the kids like to say.
[quote=“louisvillian, post:26, topic:101116”]
It could be argued that having to forfeit childcare if you wished to leave their employ would be another set of “golden handcuffs”.[/quote]
There are indeed many people where I work who tell me they’d never leave until their children are out of daycare. But overall, they’re not complaining. We have two facilities and they are beloved by the parents.
Maybe they could pay their employees enough that one spouse could afford to stay home with the kids. That system seemed to work pretty well when it was the norm.
Well… yeah, that’s completely valid.
Oh look, it’s this old trope again. I’m pretty sure there were congressional hearings on Apple’s taxes, and nothing ever came of them. So I guess that means they weren’t doing anything illegal. Tell me, how much is enough taxes? And how much more do you pay than you’re required to?
Well, except for all the women it DIDN’T work well for. And that the people who took advantage of that were mostly white and middle class (though that category certainly expanded over the years). A society which values paid labor over unpaid labor will always devalue the person who works maintaining the house, which will likely still be women.
I’m sorry. I won’t go back to that and neither will millions of other women.
Mmmmmm, technically legal, the absolute best kind of “right.” And “congress hasn’t held them accountable” doesn’t quite have the authoritative ring it should, given our current state of affairs.
It was four years ago, so our current state of affairs has little to do with it.
I was listening to an interesting story on NPR about this. Tim Cook’s been pretty upfront about saying that they want to bring their accounts back to America, but with the current tax rate being upwards of 35% to do so, it’d be an enormous loss. Trump has been talking up another reparations tax holiday, and so has Congress; Apple’s essentially waiting to see what happens. In that sense I don’t blame them for waiting.
I do wish that people would consider what a tax base like that could help do for the country, rather than worrying over a hit to their profits. Is there no such thing as good corporate citizens any more? they benefit from the American tax payer, why happily give back for that?
A corrupt congress, beholden to monied interests, whose economic/social welfare strategy consists of “kiss corporate ass for porkbellies” is older than Trump, and all counts as part of our “current state of affairs.”
I certainly did not want to imply that you or anyone else would be required to become a homemaker instead of pursuing a career. I just wish that more jobs paid well enough that one spouse at least had the option to stay home with the kids. if you don’t personally approve of that lifestyle, I don’t think anyone is likely to even want to force you into it.
Many people feel that having one partner stay home to raise the children, especially when they are very young, is the best situation for those children. Sometimes the parent finds the experience rewarding as well. My wife felt that it was best for our kids that she take a year off after the birth of each one, and I stayed home with them for almost all of their second year. That took planning and saving on our parts, but I still believe it was the best for us and our kids.
Nobody ever laments on their death bed that the wished they had spent less time playing with their kids, and more time filing paperwork.
I’ve got an extra daughter who just had her first child. She and her husband are now starting to realize exactly how difficult it is to have a family. It’s hard (and expensive) to find quality child care, and even if/when you do, at any moment something can change and you have to start over with a new arrangement. Grandparents (which is culturally the norm for them, as they’re both the offspring of Chinese immigrants) are racist, sexist, etc. and thus dangerous to leave anyone old enough to understand language with. So they’re discussing which one of them should take a multi-year sabbatical from work. Surprise: the husband’s workplace is grooming him for higher pay/authority, now that he’s a “family man”, whereas in her workplace she’s been told if she doesn’t double-down on work, she’ll be out of a job in the next year or two (to be fair, that’s what they expect from everyone, but obviously it’s harder-to-impossible for employees with preschool-aged children). So I asked her: sure, it seems to make sense now, based on how your work places are treating you differently, but can you go back to your work in 3-5 years? It took her a bit to answer, and then she said: no, she could go back into the industry in a non-upwardly-mobile position with lower pay and responsibilities, but she would never be able to go back to the work she’s doing because the entire industry is set up against family leave.
Now, this is in the 21st century, with two highly educated spouses committed to fairness and equality, and even if she couldn’t get back on her original career path she would still be able to make enough money to live on if, say, a divorce happened after she took time out of her career to be home with the child.
But you think it worked “pretty well” when women went straight from their family home to a marriage with little or no higher education and little or no work experience, so that they were in effect chained to their husband (no matter how abusive) at least until the kids were grown, at which point they really weren’t ever going to make more than minimum wage.
And that was for the lucky ones: white middle class women. Minority and working class women never even had that that much privilege.
Step outside of your own skin for a moment and imagine what it would be like to not have everything you’ve always had.
