Overthe past 20 years, the cost of day care in the U.S. has doubled—forthose lucky enough to find any at all. (Photo:Shutterstock)

Nine miles outside of Portland, Oregon, Nike's corporateheadquarters is a mecca of work-life balance. There are wooded trails,ponds and grassy knolls, with company-branded bikes employees arefree to pedal from A to B. Inside, there are cafeterias, meditationrooms, a nearby deeply discounted employee store and, of course,every kind of athletic training facility imaginable.

But one of the company's most valuable perks has nothing to dowith athletics: the Nike Child Development Program, the subsidized,on-site day care available to working parents. Started in 1990, theprogram now accommodates over 500 families, with more than 500 onthe waitlist.

Related: Latest Starbucks employee perk: freebabysitting

Those lucky enough to get a spot say it's hard to overstate theconvenience. There's no added commute, and parents have easy access totheir kids during the day—a feature especially important to nursingmoms. At a company overrun with perks, there's broad agreement thatthe NCDP is one of the features that makes working at Nike reallyspecial.

Now Nike's planning to close the NCDP and replace it with anoff-campus facility run by a partner, Endeavor Schools. Prices willremain competitive. Nike will retain oversight. The location is yetto be determined, but the company promises it won't be more than a10-minute drive. Oh, and those kids on the waitlist? The newfacility will have space for almost all of them.

The move, aimed at making more Nike families happy, may haveachieved the opposite. Within weeks, a petition to keep the programNike-run and on-campus had more than 1,300 signatures, includingabout 130 from parents currently on the waitlist or who had triedto get a spot but never got in, according to several employees whohad seen or signed the letter. They asked to remain anonymousbecause they feared retribution from Nike.

Employees don't want the center to move off campus, according toemails sent to Chief Executive Officer Mark Parker and other seniorleaders at the company and reviewed by Bloomberg. They're skepticalabout Endeavor, a for-profit national network of day cares andschools owned by Leeds Equity Partners, a New York-based privateequity firm.

They're also upset by the decision to effectively lay off morethan 100 Nike teachers and caregivers who run the program now.Those teachers and aides have been offered $10,000 retentionbonuses to stay through the transition, according to a personfamiliar with the offer. They'll also be offered jobs at the newfacility if they want them, though without the stock options andother benefits available to them now.

Nike says it's responding to employees who have over the yearsasked the company to accommodate more kids and families. In theweeks since the company announced the change, the waitlist hasgrown by 250 names. “We don't want to sacrifice service, we don'twant to sacrifice quality,” said Sandra Carreon-John, aspokesperson for Nike. “At the end of the day, Nike's not childcare experts. We're working with people who are.” For its part,Endeavor plans to “preserve as much of the program as possible,”said Ricardo Campo, the company's Chief Executive Officer. “We haveample experience creating developmentally-appropriate and inspiringlearning environments and are confident that we will achieve thatin collaboration with Nike.”

For working parents at Nike and everywhere else, affordable,high-quality child care is incredibly hard to find. Over the past20 years, the cost of day care in the U.S. has doubled—for thoselucky enough to find any at all. There's not enough child care tomeet the demand, and parents can spend months waiting for anopening. This is especially true in Oregon, where roughly 60percent of the state's urban and suburban families live in what'sconsidered a “child care desert”—defined as an area where there arethree times as many kids in need of child care as spotsavailable.

Portland parents describe the hunt for day care as “bloodsport.”In one email reviewed by Bloomberg, a vice president whosent two of her kids to Nike day care petitioned Parker and otherexecutives, including Chief Operating Officer Eric Sprunk andHR-head Monique Matheson, to reconsider. She described how accessto the NCDP helped her rise through the ranks. She didn't have toworry about her children during the day; when she was a nursingmother, she didn't have to leave campus to breastfeed.What's more,some employees said, the change is emblematic of Nike's failure toadjust a corporate culture that at best ignores the professionalstress faced by women in particular. Last year the company ousted anumber of senior executives after an investigation related tosexual misconduct, but it is still facing a gender discriminationsuit.

Most recently, female track athletes signed with Nike publiclycomplained that the company financially penalized them when theygot pregnant. (Nike said it improved the policy last year butfailed to notify all athletes.)

Nike says the opposite is true—if anything, this change is partof a redoubled commitment to women's empowerment in general andfemale employees in particular. Since 2006, the number of employeesat its Oregon headquarters has more than doubled to more than12,000, growth that's strained the day care program. The NCDP hasthree sites in three different buildings on the campus. The newset-up will open up day care to more employees, while offeringsimilar benefits, pay, and better career opportunities to staff atthe centers, the company told employees in an email.

“We aim to make all of our benefits inclusive,” Sprunk said inan email to an employee reviewed by Bloomberg. That, he added,“includes providing this benefit to the more than 500 families whocan't take advantage of it today. I would ask you to also considerthe experience from the lens of the parents who have been on thewaitlist.”

Nike has long positioned itself as a champion of femaleempowerment, and it's increasingly targeting female consumers. InFebruary, the company released a 90-second ad, narrated by Nikeendorser Serena Williams, featuring dozens of women breaking sportsstereotypes and gender barriers. As of now, the company's women'sbusiness accounts for less than half its men's revenue, but it'sgrowing nearly twice as fast. “We think 2019 is going to be a truetipping point for women in sport,” Parker said earlier this year.“With more participation, more coverage and overall moreenergy.”

The recent criticisms of Nike's corporate culture, then, havebeen jarring. Nike's female employees occupy the same demographicthe company is betting on for sales growth. And while convenient,affordable child care benefits all parents, it's especiallyimportant for women, who are more likely than men to drop out ofthe workforce after they have kids.

“Child care is so expensive—that's a huge barrier for women inparticular who are looking at: 'I just had a child. Does it makesense for me to return to work given my income and the cost ofcare?'” said Julia Barfield, a senior manager at the U.S. Chamberof Commerce Foundation, who focuses on early childhood education.If subsidized childc are, not unlike what Nike currently offers itsworkers, were universally available, U.S. GDP would grow by $702billion in 10 years, in part by freeing up women to work, accordingto one recent analysis by Moody's.

Companies don't typically fill in that gap. Nike is among just3 percent of companies to provide on-site child careservices, according to a survey by the Society for Human ResourceManagement. Another 4 percent, including Starbucks andBest Buy, offer subsidized back-up care for when regulararrangements fall through. Earlier this year a group of 1,800 momsat Amazon petitioned CEO Jeff Bezos to add a back-up carebenefit.

Even as they asked Nike executives not to go forward with theproposed changes to the NCDP, employees acknowledged their relativegood fortune. They know that having access to high-quality childcare at work is an extraordinary benefit. They described it as apowerful tool for recruiting and retention—an incentive to work atNike and a reason to be proud of the company culture.

Read more: 

• Amazon's working moms campaign for childcarehelp
• Childcare costs surge past rent in most ofU.S.
• Trump admin targets child care policies to bringmore women into the workforce