Daycare Centers Shifting from Public to Private
From “Kazenoko Letter” No.453 - October 2015
| All public daycare centers in Osaka City are basically heading in the
direction of privatization. Public daycare centers were delegated to an
extra-departmental body of Osaka City to run, but approaching limitations
a couple years ago, started to be relegated and run by regular social welfare
corporations. However, due to the limit in the number of social welfare corporations, the city went to private companies to fill the need. Children waiting to get into daycare centers is a constant problem in the city, because many women now work while raising children and obviously need childcare. Despite having financial difficulties Osaka City can’t close down daycare centers, so wanted to privatize these public daycare centers that require large amounts of money. A few years ago, it was said that shifting from public to private would save \500,000 in running costs per daycare center each year. The expenses for childcare are the same for private as it is for public, so this reduction is probably due to the labor cost of government workers being much higher. In Japan, there has long been a strongly rooted ideology of respecting the bureaucrats but looking down on the citizen, leading to a public movement to build an abundance of public daycare centers from the 1960’s to the 1970’s. Thus, about 200 public daycare centers were built in Osaka City. And now, they can’t support those centers and are trying to convert them all to private facilities. However, daycare centers are child welfare centers regulated by the Child Welfare Act. So, these centers are supposed to aim for the upbringing of children under the principle of welfare. These kinds of childcare projects are for public benefit, so we can’t understand trying to reap a profit from them. What’s going to happen to a daycare center which a private company runs for the purpose of chasing profit? How can we understand this conflict of interest? . Many private companies are going into the business of facilities for the elderly and daycare services for children with intellectual disabilities. The world of welfare institutions is changing enormously and heading in this direction, but I think it’ll be reconsidered at some stage in the future, and the day of returning to the starting line will come. |
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