affordable childcare for working parents

Companies involved: Bright Horizons Family Solutions Inc. (shareholders vote here); KinderCare Learning Companies, Inc. (shareholders vote here); United Parcel Service (shareholders vote here); Etsy (shareholders vote here); Synchrony (shareholders vote here); Starbucks Corporation (shareholders vote here)

EDGAR full-text search across DEF 14A and PRE 14A filings back to 2001, for the phrase "shareholder proposal" together with each of "child care benefits", "childcare benefits", "on-site child care", "backup child care", "dependent care assistance" and "caregiving benefits", returned no proposal asking a company to provide or expand child care for its own workforce. The adjacent record that does exist is the 2018 paid family leave proposal at Starbucks.

The share of employers offering care is measured by the Treasury at 7 percent, and the return on offering it is measured across five named companies.

Removing this obstacle is not something companies could help with, it is the thing itself: the obstacle is stated as what employers do and do not offer, so changed corporate conduct does not move the outcome, it constitutes it. The Treasury found on-site or near-site child care at 7 percent of employers, with the larger ones more likely to offer it. Plenty of companies have chosen otherwise. Bright Horizons serves more than 1,450 employer clients, more than 220 of them in the Fortune 500, and KinderCare runs 77 onsite employer-sponsored centers with relationships at over a thousand employers. Moms First and Boston Consulting Group put the return on those benefits at between 90 and 425 percent across five employers they studied, so the usual objection has an answer on the record.

Companies involved: Bright Horizons Family Solutions Inc. (shareholders vote here); KinderCare Learning Companies, Inc. (shareholders vote here)

The Treasury traces low facility numbers to provider finances rather than to demand.

The Treasury found the overall number of facilities low relative to the number of young children, and traced it to how precarious provider finances are. Who builds a new center is partly a corporate decision and partly not. Bright Horizons says its employer sponsors typically fund a significant portion of new center development and absorb a meaningful share of the running costs, which is a listed company deciding where care gets built. KinderCare had relationships with over a thousand employers and 77 onsite centers. That route creates real places and it creates them next to employers, so it does not on its own fill a rural county. Companies have to move here, and so do states and the providers themselves.

Companies involved: KinderCare Learning Companies, Inc. (shareholders vote here); Bright Horizons Family Solutions Inc. (shareholders vote here)

The Treasury ties low pay directly to the revenue pressure providers work under, and to turnover.

The Treasury describes an industry that keeps costs down by paying low wages and offering few benefits, under pressure from low revenues. Most of those wages are set by providers no shareholder vote reaches. Two things stop that being the end of it. The listed chains employ care workers directly and set their pay themselves, and listed employer sponsors absorb a meaningful share of what a sponsored center costs to run, which is money that could be conditioned on what the center pays. That is a reachable party sitting in the chain as customer and part-funder. It is also not most of the sector, so the rating is that companies have to move and others have to move with them.

Companies involved: Bright Horizons Family Solutions Inc. (shareholders vote here)

The Treasury reports both the 7 percent figure and that larger employers are likelier to offer care.

The Treasury's finding is not only that 7 percent of employers offer on-site or near-site care, it is that the larger ones are the ones that do. A vote reaches the large listed employer and does not reach the small private firm down the road, so even a complete success at every listed company leaves most working parents where they were. That is a scope argument with an actor behind it rather than a price, and it lowers the answer honestly: corporate conduct matters here and is not on the critical path for the whole workforce.

The Chamber Foundation's figure is a measured economic loss across twelve states rather than a projection.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation put the loss across twelve states at nearly $29 billion, and found eight percent of parents leaving the workforce over child care before the pandemic. A company cannot stop a family's arrangement falling through, so conduct is not on the critical path. It can carry the consequence instead, through back-up care, predictable hours and the benefits in the first obstacle, and the return measured by Moms First and Boston Consulting Group is the reason a board has to take that seriously rather than treat it as charity.

Companies involved: KinderCare Learning Companies, Inc. (shareholders vote here); Bright Horizons Family Solutions Inc. (shareholders vote here); Learning Care Group (privately held, no shareholder vote)

The price and the share of the market held by listed chains both come with figures, from Child Care Aware of America and from KinderCare's own annual report.

Child Care Aware of America put the national average price at around $10,600 a year in 2021, which was 10 percent of a married couple's average income and 35 percent of a single parent's. The price is real and the harm is severe, and neither makes it a corporate decision. KinderCare tells its shareholders the five largest providers hold about 6 percent of total capacity, and the Treasury found the two largest chains care for less than 6 percent of the children, on margins usually under 1 percent. A price is a lever where a company sets it, through a monopoly, an exclusive right or a concentrated market. Nothing like that exists here, and the share is what settles it.

The eligibility and receipt figures are the federal government's own annual estimate.

In 2022, 11.8 million children were eligible for child care subsidies under federal rules and 1.8 million received them, which is 16 percent of those eligible. Who closes that gap is Congress and the states, through appropriations no company makes and no share owner votes on. On the second question, the corporate political activity this report found runs towards more support rather than less: more than fifty employers went to Capitol Hill with Moms First in April 2025, and the 45F employer child care credit was expanded that year, raising the maximum credit to $500,000. We found no lobbying against child care support in the documents read, which is a statement about what we read rather than about the world.