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In May 2000, the Dutch government announced plans to to make employers pay a third of their employees' childcare costs. It is proposed that a legal requirement to this effect will be implemented if employers and trade unions do not include such provisions in collective agreements within three years. Given the increasing number of women participating in the labour force, the intention is to institute a basic support structure for childcare. The VNO-NCW national employers' organisation is adamantly opposed to the plan.
The Secretaries of State for Social Affairs and Welfare, Annelies Verstand and Margo Vliegenthart respectively, have announced plans to compel employers to meet a third of the cost of childcare, alongside the contributions of the government and working parents. At present, individual employers support individual employees on the basis of collective agreements on the costs of childcare, but the proposal now aims to formalise such contributions. Currently, employers are obliged to contribute towards employees' childcare costs only in companies and sectors governed by collective agreements which stipulate such contributions, which is the case for only half of such agreements. The present collectively agreed arrangements also involve higher employer contributions for employees with lower incomes than for employees with higher incomes, and the proposal plans to redress this imbalance. Under the proposed measures, employers and trade unions would be given three years' grace to include the proposed childcare funding provisions in collective agreements. If this objective is not achieved in 90% of all cases within this period, the provisions will be imposed by legislation.
The aim of the proposal is to establish a basic support structure to cover the costs of childcare. To facilitate this in the Netherlands, significantly more capacity must be created in terms of the number of available childcare places. At present, some 7.5% of children under the age of four go to crèches, while only 1% of children make use of after-school care. Since 1990, when 20,000 childcare places were available, capacity has increased almost five-fold, with the intention of achieving an increase to 160,000 by 2003. Funding of of NLG 140 million a year would be needed to make this possible.
The secretaries of state see childcare contributions made by the government, working parents and employers as essential in the context of society's interests as a whole and the interests of employers in particular, with respect to the participation of women in the labour force. Secretary of State Verstand expects the proportion of women participating in the labour market to increase further, from 51% in 1999 to 65% in 2010, but this will be possible only if "work and care" provisions are expanded (NL0002182F). The main national employers' organisation, VNO-NCW, is adamantly opposed to the plan, stating that agreements on conditions of employment such as childcare contributions are a matter to be determined by employers and employees. Moreover, VNO-NCW states that two-thirds of existing collective agreements already include provisions in this area, some of which concern investigating additional childcare options, and that the secretaries of state have not taken this into account.