“Apple’s flashy new $5 billion campus, one of the last projects worked on by company co-founder Steve Jobs before his death, has custom-built door handles, thousands of trees and a 100,000-square-foot fitness and wellness facility that boasts a two-story yoga room covered in custom distressed stone,” Shara Tibken reports for CNET. “What the campus doesn’t have, though, is a day care center.”
“The question people in Silicon Valley are asking is: Should it?” Tibken reports. “‘Huge gym but no day care. Apple campus gets it wrong,'” tweeted longtime tech executive Mitch Kapor, who invests in social impact tech startups through Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact.”
“Quartz called the move a ‘missed opportunity,’ while Slate asked, ‘Shouldn’t Apple and companies like it want to set an example that the workplace of the future cares about its employees’ families?'” Tibken reports. “Under CEO Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple has put itself at the front of social issues like LGBT rights, racial equality and the tech industry’s need to improve workforce diversity… Still, Apple’s latest diversity report showed the percentage of women rose only one percentage point from the previous year, to 32 percent. One way to attract women, say experts, is by being more accommodating to families.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: With “only 2 percent of US employers offer[ing] subsidized child care centers — either on the company’s campus or nearby — in 2016, down from 9 percent in 1996,” Apple hardly needs the liability headaches and loss of already limited space* in order to compete for employees, especially versus lesser companies making inferior products.
*Tim Cook is on record telling Steve Jobs that the new campus’ biggest challenge of all was “deciding which employees are going to sit in the main building” and which would have to work in the outer buildings.
