This is not a life-or-death situation, but it's a mini-crisis of conscience nonetheless. I'm a big advocate of "voting with your wallet." If you don't like a product, don't buy it. If you don't like a company's business practices or social agenda, don't buy from them. Even though as individuals we have small voices, as consumers we can make those voices heard. I hear people complaining day after day about the evils of wal*mart, how they mistreat their employees, how they sell inferior products, how they circumvent the system and import goods from countries who don't have the same EPA standards. These people do a fair amount of bitching, yet they still continue to shop there. Why? Because they "don't have a choice." That's BS, there's ALWAYS a choice.
Anyway, I'm usually pretty good about where I choose to put my money, but now I'm up against a difficult situation. It took a lot of searching for us to find a daycare that we were completely happy with. 99% of the time I'm very happy with our center. I know Baby C is treated well and is in a caring and stimulating environment. I believe he's happy there, at least he's always smiley and engrossed in some activity when I go to pick him up. This is all well and good, but over the last few months I've begun to question their business practices. First I learned that they don't provide health insurance to their employees. I thought maybe this was the norm for care centers, but when I started asking around I realized that it's one of the only ones that doesn't. Care work (and, by default, care workers) has been de-valued in our society. I'm sad that these girls who care for my son every day don't have access to affordable health care. In addition to the health care issue, I've started to notice rumblings among the teachers about internal drama. I'm sure things like this are pretty much unavoidable when you have a building full of women, and I hope it's nothing serious, but I hate to think that infighting like this could spill over and affect the care that our kids receive. The third issue is pay-related. Again, I know that we don't place a high value on care work, but it's really sad that so many of these women (some of whom have children of their own, most of whom have college degrees) have to work two jobs because their primary job doesn't pay the bills.
So I have two choices:
1. Leave Baby C where he is and pretend I don't have a problem with these business practices
2. Find another center that aligns better with my belief system (unfortunately the organic/environmentally conscious/cloth-diapering center is too far away!)
On one hand I'd like to be able to say that I stand by my values, but on the other hand what good is pulling him out going to do? He would quickly be replaced by someone else, probably at a higher tuition rate once yearly increases are added.
