Impact of a Child-Care Company's Collapse - Building Gender Balanced Business

• The credit-crisis-fueled bankruptcy of ABC Learning Centers in Australia has raised a specter for working parents worldwide: Is a reliance on private-sector daycare going to haunt them and overall economies?

• ABC takes care of 120,000 Australian children, or a quarter of the continent’s day care population.

• ABC has vowed to maintain most of its centers as it reorganizes, but the future is uncertain for more than a third of the sites, which care for about 30,000 children across Australia.

• More than two-thirds of Australian daycare is privately run.

• The largest child care companies in the United States and Britain control only about 2% or 3% of all daycare places, compared with the 25% market share held by ABC in Australia.

• Critics cite the ABC case as an illustration of the the danger of allowing the private sector to dominate essential services like daycare.

• Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has responded, “When you have a company like that, with 25 percent of market share for long-day places in Australia, there is a problem for mums and dads right across the nation if something goes wrong.”

An article about ABC’s collapse and implications in Australia and worldwide