No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Recently Nike has come under fire for trying to increase access to benefits it offers its employees. Nike has announced plans to expand the decades old subsidized childcare benefits to employees at the company headquarters in Portland, Oregon which currently provides daycare for 500 families. To do this Nike will move the childcare facilities off site but within 10 minutes of the headquarter campus. Nike also acknowledges it is not a company with expertise in childcare and has partnered with Endeavor Schools for that expertise while still retaining day to day over-site of the facility.

Childcare is expensive and in many locations, like Portland, hard to find. As a result the Nike onsite day care facility had a waiting list of hundredes of people working at Nike. The new plan would have taken care of most of the people on the waiting list and as a result of the announcement the waiting list quickly grew by 250 people.

You might be wondering who would criticize Nike for this effort. The answer is the 500 families already obtaining the benefit of onsite daycare. As a result of the move of the facility off site the participating families will loose the convenience of the daycare being located on the same campus as their job.

Instead of these individuals being grateful for the subsidized day care still being available, these families are more concerned about a little inconvenience than being happy for those hundreds of families on the waiting list that would now get to take advantage of the benefit. This strikes me as a perfect example of the sense of entitlement and the selfishness that seems to be prevalent in our society today. Instead of being a short walk from their children they would be subjected to a ten minute drive.

Nike's efforts to be more generous by expanding it's ability to offer more subsidized daycare for employees should receive praise from all Nike employees with the recognition of efforts to support all their employees. These families however are driven by entitlement and selfishness to sign petitions to Nike for the existing facility to stay the way it is. What's coming next will either be lawsuits against Nike or a push for these employees to be further compensated for the new inconvenience Nike is pushing on them. So much for them supporting their fellow co-workers.