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Comment by vecplane | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine what it would be like, and I'm terribly sorry that this happened to you.

BUT what's the limiting principle behind 'forcing' companies to provide 'a great deal of leave' for this?

I certainly agree that it's reasonable for an employer to offer bereavement time for the loss of a close family member, but why should this be made into law?

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Because of cases like this article. Evidently this woman's employer does not have the insight to behave like decent human beings and needs to be forced.

Your argument can be turned on just about any labor law. "It may be reasonable for a company to do this, but why should they be forced?" The answer is without reasonable minimum standards, some people will exploit their employees.

That doesn’t speak to why the employer should do this rather than government.

When employers provide this social good they will inevitably call some of the shots; why should their voice have influence on this matter?

To me, this is similar to the public coming to the feeling that digital public spaces are worthy, but then the conversation turns to whether Facebook should be the one doing it...

The employer has to do it because they're the one who employs the person experiencing the loss. If this guarantee is written into law, then the company's voice will not have much influence on the matter. This is how labor law works.

Looking at it from a labor law perspective we can look at what other countries have done. Sweden for example do not provide any paid grieving period, but labor laws does give a right to take a leave of absence. Unions often extend this to paid leave, but also limits it to a set number of days, and often the amount seems to be a single day for the funeral.

What I have seen for actually grieving is that either people go back to work or they go to a doctor and get diagnosed with acute stress or depression because of the situation. I suspect that if the case in the article had occurred in Sweden then that is what actually would happen and the person would have got a few months to recover.

You only have to look at worrying trend of declining minimum wages in very many developed countries to find employer exploitation is alive and well.

My preference would be for law makers started with laws that forced companies to give theirs workers a fair days pay for a fair days work.

Obvious answer I didn't see from others:

Because hypothetical employers who are actually benevolent are forced to compete with those who aren't, absent regulation? AKA a "race to the bottom".

When corporations send me stuff in writing every day saying that they can only do the minimum mandated by law in respect to any ethical matter, I have to wonder whose opinion it really represents to say that minimum standards aren't necessary.

Competition goes both ways: employers that offer better benefits will attract more applicants, so they can higher higher quality employees.

Which means that those employees not deemed higher quality will only get the minimum market rate of benefits.

This is the essence of competition. Increasing demands on employers pushes people who want to/would be willing to work for less completely out of the market.

People have to make decisions based on the most likely scenarios. Big companies can take advantage of the unlikely scenarios, for employees or for customers, because they average across large numbers of people. This is like a memory leak that defeats competition; it's not a flaw in the rationality of either party, but it is a real problem absent good regulation.

It is reasonable, but reasonable employers for the most part don't exist. That's why we have laws establishing a minimum wage, nondiscrimination, paying out PTO in California, and the FMLA act which gives us parental leave in the first place.

This sounds like you're suggesting no one had good wages, paid time off, etc... before these laws. Is that the case?

If you look at the late 1800s, you can see that that was the case

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