From the businesses. Paid paternal leave is already a legal mandate in just about every country. The US is very lacking in this regard.
As Rayiner accurately points out, children are clearly necessary from a societal point of view. Thus, it seems "most fair" for the whole society to bear that, and for it to not be unevenly distributed such that it generates perverse incentives for business owners.
I also think that some industries, such as education, have substantially more women than men and thus will shoulder disproportionate burden. I also think that richer areas will shoulder the burden more easily.
I think these things point to a collective model of burden. I think bigger companies should shoulder uneven burden, but I'm not sure if different industries or areas should shoulder substantially different burden.
Note I’m not taking a blanket all regulation is bad stance. I support regulation to protect pregnant employees and family life. I am recruiting right now for a contractor to cover for a pregnant employee in my team (in the UK). I just think in general the simplest approach is usually the beast, or anyway the least worst.
I would also argue that burden to compensate companies for employees taking time off for personal or family matters (regardless of sex, reproductive plan or status) should be shouldered at the state or national level, and not at local level where there may be higher disparity in both burden and capacity. If both men and women are allotted mandated time to attend to family, and both men and women warrant access to funding for their employers, then companies would lose incentives to discriminate because presumably everyone would want their time off.
If the federal government compensated businesses, then startups and small businesses wouldn't be exempt from protection, nor unequally stressed relative to bigger businesses. As another commentator pointed out, the UK has a similar model.
Your third paragraph you say that this points to collective burden, so you actually don't agree that larger businesses should shoulder higher burden. You are more worried about the actions of the company then the moral implications to actual human beings, so you are highly immoral, noted.
I also think that some industries, such as education, have substantially more women than men and thus will shoulder disproportionate burden. I also think that richer areas will shoulder the burden more easily.
Your third paragraph you say that this points to a collective burden, yet in this one you say richer areas will shoulder the burden more easily. Aside from this being a statement as vacuous as "the sky is blue", you are also completely missing the fact that higher education is already highly subsidized by alumni, government and corporations. If you are talking about k-12, yeah they are funded by local property taxes already, and are completely irrelevant to this conversation, as this conversation is about corporations.
I think these things point to a collective model of burden.
It's hard to tell what you actually think.
Companies that pay higher salaries by their choice incur higher payroll costs. That’s just how that works. Trying to engineer the system to even that out somehow is just introducing bureaucracy and costs into the system. The only case I do have concerns about is small employers who by chance might get hit with the costs of a large proportion of their staff taking maternity/paternity leave at the same time. That could be crippling and possibly there should be some special programme to help those companies out.
If designed properly it would not. High-income employees would get more pay out of the program, but they would also have to pay more into the program. It would be a wash, just like employment insurance or social security.
Yes, and in those other countries, the vast portion of the cost (just like the cost of health insurance) is borne by the government, not the business.
For example, in the UK, 92% of the mandated parental leave costs are paid by the government (technically it's a refund but you can get an advance on it). Employers can (and often do) offer more if they wish.
source: https://www.gov.uk/shared-parental-leave-and-pay-employer-gu...