affairs, media relations, trade issues, corporate communications, cultural underwriting and administration of the American Express Foundation. In his spare time, he has agreed to come and testify before us here this morning. He will focus on the interest American Express has in the issue of child care, and because his company has been one of the leaders in this arena, we look forward to hearing from him.

I understand you have a plane to catch right after your statement, so let me just quickly introduce our other witnesses, and then we'll get right to you, Mr. Freeman.

Sandra Salyer is the vice president of Mervyn's of Dayton Hudson Corp., in Hayward, CA. She has been with Mervyn's for the past 12 years. That is a soft goods retail business with over 200 stores in 14 States. Over the past several years, this store has contributed some $3 million to improve child care in the communities they serve. Given their commitment to the issue, we look forward to hearing her testimony about the roles of both government and business in this particular area.

Cheryl Smith is with Corporate Kids, in Kansas. She is the founder and executive director of a firm that advises other businesses on what to do about child care. Being a small business owner herself, she will pay particular attention to the role smaller firms can play in improving the child care picture. She is a member of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs. She will also focus on what investment the small business community expects governments to make in improving child care across the country.

Lastly, Margaret Fitzgerald, vice president of Hill, Holliday, Connors & Cosmopulos, of Boston, MA. Did I pronounce that right? Ms. ESHOO. You did, except the name is Martha Eshoo. Ms. Fitzgerald is not here today, and I am taking her place.

Senator DODD. I am sorry. All right. Thank you.

Hill, Holliday is an ad agency employing 355 workers. Despite their relatively small size, they have a child care center located three blocks from their offices. As President of the board of directors, Ms. Fitzgerald would have-if you are going to be talking about her testimony

Ms. ESHOO. Right. I am the Director of the center.

Senator DODD. Right. So you will describe the reasons why it was set up and so forth.

With that, let's begin with you, Mr. Freeman. Again, we appreciate your being here with us this morning. We'll take your testimony, and we will submit some questions to you after you leave, knowing you have to depart.

STATEMENT OF HARRY L. FREEMAN, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, AMERICAN EXPRESS CO., NEW YORK, SANDRA SALYER, VICE PRESIDENT, MERVYN'S OF DAYTON HUDSON CORP., HAYWARD, CA; CHERYL SMITH, PRESIDENT, CORPORATE KIDS, INC., OLATHE, KS, AND MARTHA ESHOO, DIRECTOR, HILL, HOLLIDAY, CONNORS, COSMOPULOS DAY CARE, INC., BOSTON, MA Mr. FREEMAN. Let me summarize.

At American Express, provision of proper care for young children is a matter of supreme, bottom-line importance for us. I mean that quite literally, as I will explain.

Child care concerns us as a company because it is a major concern to our employees, and we have roughly 95,000. Like most American companies today, people are the most important thing. Most employees are working in offices, in urban environments of various sizes of buildings and various sizes of cities.

We believe that we have the best and brightest employees; every other company, obviously, does as well. Many of these employees are parents of young children, obviously and their spouses work also; others are single parents. Not surprisingly, these people are concerned about the adequacy of their arrangements for child care. To the degree they feel doubt on this score, they will worry. And no management expert that I know of recommends a fretful, distracted state of mind as an aid to professional development and greater productivity.

Working parents are the same everywhere, and that is what makes adequacy of child care a concern not just for American Express and its employees, but also for the country as a whole. It is a workplace issue that connects directly with the broad challenge that has been on many of our minds-that of national competitive

ness.

This particular term may already be, perhaps, stale, but the problem it describes, unfortunately, shows no sign of withering away. If we are fully to maintain this Nation's economic vigor, then we must ensure that job-holding parents throughout the country go to work knowing, or at least with reasonable assurance, that their children are well cared for.

That is not the case now, and parental worries are taking a perceptible toll of our GNP. According to the Census Bureau, 6 percent of employed mothers say that they or their husbands have lost time from work because of problems with child care. In other studies, it has been an even higher percentage.

Now, when I say the economic toll will rise unless the child care picture improves, I am not just thinking of moral and absenteeism problems of working fathers; I am also thinking of the price extracted from the children, which is the future work force, our human capital.

Quality child care is, of course, available. One big problem is it is not uniformly available. The patchwork quilt of varying child care licensing standards that extends across the United States offers no security blanket to working parents seeking to relocate for promotion or other occupational reasons.

Throughout the country, we find widely divergent training_requirements, and in all too many instances the pay of care providers does not match the importance of their responsibilities. Unless we get greater consistency of child care standards nationwide, we will inhibit the work force mobility we need to adapt to the structural economic changes that are apparent in every advanced industrialized Nation.

And I should add, the United States is now the only developed nation of which we are aware that does not have a national child care policy.

To call for greater uniformity of standards should not, however, be interpreted as a demand for rigid, centralized, Federal control of child care programs. In this policy area, as in so many, the expanse and variety of this Nation means that decentralized flexibility is required to accommodate the diversity of community needs.

As we see it, Federal efforts should aim at setting minimum nationwide standards, while giving localities incentives to go beyond and develop supplementary standards and programs tailored to their own communities.

A coherent and comprehensive national system of child care will demand the participation, skills and resources of many different parties, corporations such as mine, medium-sized business, small business, the parents, the educators, and Federal, State, and local governments. No single agency in the public or private sector can do this job alone.

My purpose in appearing here today is not to offer expertise about which specific legislation you should adopt. My purpose, I think, is more fundamental-to bear witness to the absolute necessity of taking some definitive action in this area as soon as possible. Whether from the microeconomic view of one company in the service sector, American Express, or from the macroeconomic view that looks to the country's future competitiveness overall, the United States needs child care services that are backed by minimum standards at the Federal level.

In conclusion, a few points.

One, when you get to elder care, I'd like to come back to testify, because that is something that is very much on our minds and our employees' minds.

Second, why do we feel strongly about these issues? The answer is that we have surveyed our employees-we continually survey our employees around the United States and abroad-but in the United States, we do this every year or two, whether it is in New York, our headquarters, or Arizona, California, Florida, wherever. We see what is on their minds and what is bothering these people. In fact, we can sell these surveys, we think, to the Presidential candidates-a dwindling market these days-because we survey people in every State as to their principal concerns.

The same themes come up very dramatically and very vividly. They are: child care, elder care, public education and quality public education, safety on the street, safety in public transportation. All of them are quality of life issues. They are not necessarily in that order every time, but it is always those issues that come back. And we, sitting there in senior management, say, okay, this has become a problem; this is no longer a problem that just the human resources people have to deal with or the other units; it has become a real management problem. The consciousness of senior management in my company and, I believe, many other companies who do the same thing, realize that we do have a problem here. And we are moving rapidly, I think, in our case-and many other companies are doing the same thing-to address this kind of workplace issue. These quality of life issues in a country where 75, 77 percent of the people are in the service sector, largely in office buildings, in towns and cities-this will continue to grow. We are trying to ad