Children spend day at office
| • | Employers fear lengthy teachers strike |
| • | State, striking teachers 'very, very firm in their resolve' |
By Glenn Scott
Advertiser Staff Writer
As business greetings go, this was not the usual — and not, by any means, the worst.
"Daddy, daddy," said 5-year-old Matthew Mazzella, as his father, Michael, entered a conference room at First Insurance Center. "Are you done yet?"
In fact, both father and son had two more busy hours to invest yesterday afternoon at the company's corporate headquarters on Ward Avenue.
The elder Mazzella, a so-called "people consultant" for the company's human resources division, was giving media tours.
His son was bouncing around in the third-floor conference room that reporters came to see on the first day of a public teachers' strike.
In an example of what employers might do to help workers during the strike, First Insurance turned the carpeted, square-shaped room into a daycare center, giving its 280 employees a place to bring children suddenly displaced from school.
Matthew was one of nine children, ages five to 11, supervised by two Kapi'olani Community College students the company had hired. Nelson Gutierrez and Tracey Ngo said they both want to become teachers.
The children played show-and-tell, paused mid-morning to do school work, wrote thank you notes to company president Allen Uyeda and joined parents at lunch in the company cafeteria.
Mazzella, who helped organize the daycare center, said the decision to care for employees' kids has been "a win in every way" for the company: Parents were relieved, colleagues impressed and supervisors satisfied.
"It's good for business for our employees to focus on work without having to worry about daycare," he said.
The children liked it, too, said accounting clerk Mae Katahara. Her son, Rex, spent the day doing stuff like drawing and pasting pictures of the two red-eared slider turtles that Gutierrez brought in a glass case.
"Rex could have gone to his grandpa's house, but he would only have watched television," Katahara said. "I knew he'd have other activities here."
Mazzella said the daycare program is meant to be a temporary solution, not the final answer in the event of an extended strike. Judging by the number of adults who poked their heads into the conference room yesterday, though, he figures more young voices will be warming up the corporate culture today.
