Nine miles outside of Portland, Oregon, Nike’s corporate headquarters is a mecca of work-life balance. There are wooded trails, ponds and grassy knolls, with company-branded bikes employees are free to pedal from A to B. Inside, there are cafeterias, meditation rooms, a nearby deeply discounted employee store and, of course, every kind of athletic training facility imaginable.
But one of the company’s most valuable perks has nothing to do with athletics: the Nike Child Development Program, the subsidized, on-site day care available to working parents. Started in 1990, the program now accommodates over 500 families, with more than 500 on the waitlist.
Those lucky enough to get a spot say it’s hard to overstate the convenience. There’s no added commute, and parents have easy access to their kids during the day—a feature especially important to nursing moms. At a company overrun with perks, there’s broad agreement that the NCDP is one of the features that makes working at Nike really special.
Now Nike’s planning to close the NCDP and replace it with an off-campus facility run by a partner, Endeavor Schools. Prices will remain competitive. Nike will retain oversight. The location is yet to be determined, but the company promises it won’t be more than a 10-minute drive. Oh, and those kids on the waitlist? The new facility will have space for almost all of them.
The move, aimed at making more Nike families happy, may have achieved the opposite. Within weeks, a petition to keep the program Nike-run and on-campus had more than 1,300 signatures, including about 130 from parents currently on the waitlist or who had tried to get a spot but never got in, according to several employees who had seen or signed the letter. They asked to remain anonymous because they feared retribution from Nike.
Employees don’t want the center to move off campus, according to emails sent to Chief Executive Officer Mark Parker and other senior leaders at the company and reviewed by Bloomberg. They’re skeptical about Endeavor, a for-profit national network of day cares and schools owned by Leeds Equity Partners, a New York-based private equity firm.
They’re also upset by the decision to effectively lay off more than 100 Nike teachers and caregivers who run the program now. Those teachers and aides have been offered $10,000 retention bonuses to stay through the transition, according to a person familiar with the offer. They’ll also be offered jobs at the new facility if they want them, though without the stock options and other benefits available to them now.
Nike says it’s responding to employees who have over the years asked the company to accommodate more kids and families. In the weeks since the company announced the change, the waitlist has grown by 250 names. “We don’t want to sacrifice service, we don’t want to sacrifice quality,” said Sandra Carreon-John, a spokesperson for Nike. “At the end of the day, Nike’s not child care experts. We’re working with people who are.”
For its part, Endeavor plans to “preserve as much of the program as possible,” said Ricardo Campo, the company’s Chief Executive Officer. “We have ample experience creating developmentally-appropriate and inspiring learning environments and are confident that we will achieve that in collaboration with Nike.”
For working parents at Nike and everywhere else, affordable, high-quality child care is incredibly hard to find. Over the past 20 years, the cost of day care in the U.S. has doubled—for those lucky enough to find any at all. There’s not enough child care to meet the demand, and parents can spend months waiting for an opening. This is especially true in Oregon, where roughly 60% of the state’s urban and suburban families live in what’s considered a “child care desert”—defined as an area where there are three times as many kids in need of child care as spots available. Portland parents describe the hunt for day care as “blood sport.”