SATIRE: Essential Child Workers and Opening Daycares during the COVID Pandemic
Written by: Adam Riggio
The following is a statement from Beth Gluckwander, founder and CEO of Tiny Tracks Daycare Centres, a network of seven privately owned child care facilities across Toronto, Brampton, Pickering, and East Gwillimbury. Ms. Gluckwander reacts to the news that Doug Ford’s government is allowing some businesses in Ontario to reopen.
Reopening businesses will be tightly regulated, regarding safety and infection control procedures. Not all regions of the province will reopen at once. Regions that have brought COVID infection rates down to a sufficiently low levels can reopen before regions that remain volatile.
I interviewed Ms. Gluckwander off-the-record at a facility that her company recently purchased. The facility is in the town of Bradford, Ontario. It will serve as the home base for Tiny Tracks’ expanded childcare operations, including an alternative model of childcare, called work-care. The disused factory is the lynchpin of her plans to put the company at the forefront of developing new business models, which adapt to the challenges of a world with COVID.
She continues, in her own precisely chosen words, below.
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I would like to begin my opinion piece by thanking Mr. Riggio and The Canada Files for accepting my invitation to myself to contribute to the progressive side of the debate over what work will look like and how we will return to work as COVID becomes an ordinary part of all our lives.
Partnering with The Canada Files is a centrepiece of Tiny Tracks’ community engagement. To reach out to our critics, to normalize our existence and redefine what the public considers reasonable. I know that your readers may not at first be receptive to what I have to say, but we think that an audience as intelligent as yours will appreciate our common-sense revolution.
Some of you may have heard of Tiny Tracks already. Our performance shows the quality you can expect from private companies delivering public services. Tiny Tracks has operated with the highest standards since the start of the century, twenty years where we have built a reputation delivering the most efficient and cost-effective childcare.
Now, we are ready for the next phase of our business’ plan, to care for Ontario’s children in this difficult time for our province. The near-total freezing of our economy under lockdown will soon end, and our return to the prosperity of normality will mean we have to be safer than ever. Every worker is an essential worker, especially when our wages, salaries, and stock dividend payments now rely on work in a much riskier world.
Our Children Are Essential Too
As progressive leaders and investors in the private daycare sector, Tiny Tracks has developed a comprehensive plan. We will care for and educate our children, especially our most vulnerable.
Our first priority is our most important: How to run our Tiny Tracks locations without the risk of spreading COVID. After all, just because everyone will soon return to work doesn’t mean that COVID is any less contagious, debilitating, or deadly. If anything, we might be more at risk. Returning to work as normal gives many of us the completely false impression that everything is now fine.
To make our new normality as much like the old one as we can, we have to ask ourselves what was most important in a daycare consumer’s experience. The best daycare’s money can buy will offer your child complex, stimulating educational experiences that prepare their minds and imaginations for the real world. So, our kids’ Tiny Tracks will need that complexity in a fully socially distanced environment.
Tiny Tracks activity pods are the perfect answer. Installed along the walls of our newly renovated childcare maintenance spaces, these five-foot tall Plexiglas kennels bypass the need for physical distancing. Children are right next to each other, but physically incapable of touching or spreading disease-carrying droplets as they speak. Each activity pod is transparent, offering children 270 degrees of visual mobility, and enough space inside to sit, stand, and run in place. It’s the perfect personal space for all the fun activities that children love!
For-Profit Daycare Cares the Most!
That’s not the only way the for-profit sector cares for you and your families. If anything has become clear through the monumental work of our medical professionals, first responders, and essential workers earning barely enough to eat, it’s that people are at their strongest when we come together to protect those who are weakest. There’s no one more vulnerable, more in need of our protection and love, than our children. Tiny Tracks and the rest of Ontario’s for-profit childcare sector are the best places for the children who need the most love.
Humanity’s encounter with COVID has resulted in a lot of suffering, and a lot of tough decisions. Many people will go back to work, to get our economies and stock portfolios moving again. However, they’ll risk more than just their mental health working so hard for someone else’s company. Today, work comes with a risk of physical health too, up to and including physical existence. Quite a few of those people who sadly must lose their lives for the prosperity of our national economy and stock market, they will also be the parents of young children.
We in the for-profit childcare industry are prepared to take on the most precious burdens that COVID-deceased workers leave behind: their children. We assure all the people of Ontario that those children, no matter how young they might be, will still have a home in our transparent Plexiglas cabinets.
Not only will Tiny Tracks and countless other for-profit childcare businesses like us care for your children after you leave home, we will take over the care for your children after you leave this world. Far from being a burden, we are happy to take them on.
That’s because taking legal corporate ownership of COVID-orphaned children is not only a moral duty, but a boon to productivity. Our new facilities include new, updated activity pods that enhance intelligence development, even of toddlers barely old enough to use their arms properly.
We’ve worked together with our corporate partners in the small item manufacturing sector, to develop sets of modular panels that can slide in and out of the walls of our activity pods. On those panels, children play fun, intellectually stimulating games of memorizing patterns in repetitive switches and lights. Those switches and lights operate manufacturing equipment for thumbtacks, bottle caps, ball bearings, and countless other essential small objects in our everyday world.
Since they will no longer have parents, the activity pods will also include modules that will educate them physically and mentally, as they live, work, eat, and sleep entirely isolated, for safety purposes.
Children as young as three can achieve optimal performance with minimal physical conditioning. Not only will including orphaned toddlers in our manufacturing processes help bring important factory jobs back home from overseas, our child operators will be able to “workplay” safely, without any risky physical contact with another person of any age.
I hope that you progressives can see the bright new future for all of us, where everyone, even every child, is an essential worker.
Sincerely, Beth Gluckwander
CEO, Tiny Tracks Daycare, Orphanage, and Small Machine Assembly
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