AUSTIN, Texas —
An Austin restaurant is working to fill the need for nontraditional child care for hospitality workers.
Often, these employees work nights and weekends, so finding day care can be challenging.
The owners of L’Oca d’Oro are working with others to start a pilot program to help servers and other restaurant staff.
Recently, the restaurant partnered with United Way to compare the need versus supply for nontraditional hour child care.
The study revealed that in Travis County, 32% of working parents have nontraditional hours. Most of those families include people who work at restaurants.
That comes out to about 18,000 children in the county whose parents or guardians work outside of 9 to 5. Yet, there are only about 2,000 seats available at child care providers open during those hours.
"It's an economic development issue for Travis County, knowing full well that there's a major need here and parents are being forced or excluded from the workforce. Employees can't hire or retain employers because there's this lack of affordable child care," United Way for Greater Austin consultant Brooke Freeland said.
Adam Orman, co-owner of L’Oca d’Oro, said getting benefits like child care is important to help keep people in the industry.
"I think a lot of people traditionally think of it as a job that you did in college, and then you grew up and got a real job when you had a family because you needed child care. Restaurants are the largest private employer in the country. We can't continue to just be something for college kids," Orman said.
Together with the Texas Restaurant Association Greater Austin Chapter, the groups are surveying workers to see who would need this child care and what they would want it to look like.
The answers from the survey will help direct what the pilot program offers, determining factors like what kind of care people need, when they would need it, what they can afford and where they would like it to be located.
The survey is running until the end of the month. Any hospitality workers interested in filling it out can find it here.
The program could be up and running by the end of the year.