Without parental leave I might be dead
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm convinced I'll go to my grave with working that time being my biggest regret in life. I had benefits, but was saving the limited time for when my wife returned to work... to only lose it when my child passed.
I couldn't advocate more for maternal/paternal leave.
I'm not going to respond to those comments, inevitability, that will say there's more to this story, because there isn't, I was a good employee and understood my job, but they just saw a replaceable body. I'm never going to dedicate more than the minimum effort to a company ever again.
The best thing I could do for my child is to not rock the boat.
And the insurance companies are laughing all the way to bank.
For some people, charity replacing government social safety nets is a feature, not a bug, since they want to control where "their" money goes. Sure, it sucks when you're not photogenic[1] enough to hit your GoFundMe targets, but look at the bright side: we'd have avoided wasteful government spending.
1. Wink wink.
If anyone else reading is ever in a similar situation talk to your HR department. I help HR departments negotiate things all the time. A common thing is taking an LOA and the company will pay your COBRA premiums. They don’t have to, it’s technically unpaid time, but if you have some savings and insurance is your barrier this is actually kind of common. But again, I’m in healthcare industry so YMMV.
I have a great manager, who would've been ok with whatever, but there's only so much I was entitled too. I also had bills rolling in, so anything unpaid was out of the question. I'm sure I could've survived with being unpaid, but living off GoFundMe donations didn't sit well with me. Ultimately GoFundMe paid for her funeral.
With complete respect, I feel I must add however: Society on the other hand did not do the best it could have done – sheltered and cared for the people in this situation. It isn’t even efficient at any scale or context to just let it ride like this. This breaks people. Grief and burnout burns people up.
They shouldn’t have had to keep powering the treadmill, shouldn’t have to had to do anything to ensure insurance coverage didn’t run out. Earnestly and calmly speaking, I honestly think it’s most useful to view the practice as… barbaric.
Thank you.
We met many other parents in the ICU who worked jobs that weren't remote, crane operators, waste management professionals, mill workers, etc. I imagine they share the same sentiment as me.
As a parent, your post is incredibly impactful.
As a company owner(20 FTE), I've had several staff take leave for catastrophic health issues in their immediate family.
It's been incredibly costly for my small company to keep paying them indefinitely beyond their accrued and used holiday/sick leave, but it's been worth it in the long run.
It has engendered the kind of effort, loyalty, and performance that can't be bought, only earned.
From the company's perspective, it hurts a lot up front but it makes sense ethically, morally, and I think financially as well.
Here in NZ, we have paid parental leave. Mostly taken by mothers, but with some nudging for fathers to take some of it as well.
When we had our children it was 12 weeks total combined paid parental leave.
It has since been extended to 26 weeks combined paid, with up to another 26 weeks unpaid.
Hot take: it can be bought -- you bought it with paid leave!
Ok, I know what you're trying to express. But I don't think it's dirty at all to acknowledge that taking care of your employees generates loyalty. It's a competitive advantage to offer benefits like this -- that's why all the big tech co's do it.
This is something I just don't get to grok about the US. Here in Mexico we are supposedly "copying" the best of the US (sigh), having the option of paying for "major" health insurance with insurers like NewYork Life, along with other local ones (GNP, AXA). A year of mayor medical insurance costs around $3,000 USD a year. Sure, it is by no means a small amount, but it is definitely doable in case of an emergency.
There´s even something called "excess insurance" that you can buy as a individual while you are working. It covers any spending "on top" of whatever your companies' insurance covers, and serves to "exhaust" any cooling-off periods, so that if you are out of your job at some point, you convert it to full private insurance and get all the benefits.
Thank you for sharing this story, I'm so sorry this happened to your family.
Our health is the most important thing we have, and we should look after that
Its just not beneficial for anyone.
The mum is utterly frazzled.
The employer gets half an employee back
Society is conditioned to think that the only practical way to raise a baby is to give up on work/get live in care.
now, to look at it from a "my mum managed, I don't want to undermine the american nuclear family" point of view:
Yes, mums working is an anathema, but given that exceedingly difficult to own a good house, have good health insurance and have an economically inactive partner at home, I suspect the problem here isn't the mum. I suspect its the salami slicing of wages to the average joe/joelle.
Even if it undermines the american nuclear family, having such a big obstacle to the "correct"[1] type of family having babies is going to undermine the "correct" family having babies. Which means one's chosen view of family dies out with inflation.
Given that _every_ other "civilised" country has some sort of rudimentary care for new parents, which doesn't acutally cost that much, I can't see any reasonable objection to not having it.
[1]I'm not going to define what correct is, its divisive and allows people to project what they think is wrong with "the other side" who ever they might be, rather than engage with the specifics at hand.
Giving a special benefit that will for the most part only be exercised by women discourages hiring women. You can still think its worth it, but don't pretend like you're baffled by anyone who would object or question how this impacts women.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
This graph shows women's employment rate trending up in the UK:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
The model could be that employers are altruistic. Or that employers are dumb and don't realize this. Or they're sufficiently compelled by the law and the penalties and enforcement are strict enough.
And your model also has to account for the system not being a closed system. For instance, its not enough that all employers are altruistic, but any prospective employers that could enter the market would similarly be altruistic.
Again, it could be worth it, but don't pretend that there's no disincentive by this policy.
An interesting way to think, to say the least.
The arguments for "not hiring women because they'll just go and get pregnant" have largely been settled in the UK.
shared parental leave is a thing, its just what happens. Employers that don't facilitate it are punished, either by employment tribunal, or people leaving to join somewhere that does.
And absolutely nothing else changed in the UK in the last 20 years that may affect this number? Logic would tell you the disincentive exists. Looking at aggregate country data over 20 years doesn't tell you anything about a single policy.
> Employers that don't facilitate it are punished, either by employment tribunal, or people leaving to join somewhere that does.
That's a lot of employers to keep track of. In terms of people leaving for jobs that do offer paid parental leave only works for those wishing to take parental leave. If someone does not wish to have children, she would be willing to take a higher salary in lieu of a company that provides generous parental leave.
Either way, seems like a net win for women!
Explain why this matters? The data demonstrates that you can increase parental leave while also reducing employment discrimination and improving conditions. That's the real world outcome.
> Logic would tell you the disincentive exists.
Surely logic would tell you to give more weight to real world outcomes than to imagined mental models about how others "should" behave?
I'd question why you think people should think that way in the first place.
The main argument against paid parental leave is that is will cause wage gap to grow. I don't see the data backing that up.
Yes, there have been other landmark cases in the courts about equal pay.
> That's a lot of employers to keep track of. In terms of people leaving for jobs that do offer paid parental leave only works for those wishing to take parental leave.
You see this is where I think we differ. Here in the UK parental leave is part of a few measures that are aimed at flexibility. There is the right to flexible working (ie working non standard hours) Working from home (which is implied rather than a legal obligation) All of these in 2019 were part of a movement to make work a bit less shit. I had a number of employees who were childless that we enabled hybrid working. So that they could avoid coming in hungover, or work non standard times from abroad. Or just not come in with a cold and get everyone ill.
When a company advertises its "benefits" (this was pre covid) they used to use parental leave as a signal that they had a more relaxed working atmosphere.
For me, I've found that happy employees are loyal, more productive and willing to forgive mistakes. I have tried to make sure that those I manage feel like they have some level of work security, which rewards me as a manager with better productivity and lower staff turnover.
I used to try and be a bit like malcom tucker (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjKHPv7b3fQ) it doesnt work as well as just being reasonably caring.
> she would be willing to take a higher salary in lieu of a company that provides generous parental leave.
again this is not a british thing to do. A right is a right, opting out of a right to get more money undermines everyone. I mean sure you can come back two weeks after giving birth, (I know someone who came back after a month) but you're not going to get more money for it.
The study doesn't agree with how I believe the world works so therefore they must be wrong.
It's telling that your only conclusion for why companies could possibly continue to hire women is that they must be stupid or chivalrous.
So you're interested in theory, not reality?
See this comment for explanation:
Now the pay does not replace a full salary of course. It is a percentage of your pay up to a maximum of 1800€.
I know many dads (myself included) that have used this program.
Since the pay is capped at 1800, I know a few fathers who didn’t take even their two months because they were living at the edge of their paychecks (yes, it’s possible to live a little too large anywhere, and Germans aren’t immune), and one mother who went back to work at the end of the eight weeks post-birth that we’re absolutely forbidden to work (but are paid quite close to our pre-maternal net pay) because she was the primary earner. It’s also rougher on single mothers than partnered ones, of course, but at least isn’t as harsh for them here as it is back in the US, and for low earners, 2/3 of your previous net + 200 child benefit is not much less than net + child care (subsidized for big earners, highly subsidized for lower earners) + general costs of working.
“But you could have saved even more than that over the past few years if you didn’t have to pay really high German income taxes!” Yes, we certainly could have, and would have, given our behavior even with taxes the way they are.
However…
Most people wouldn’t/couldn’t, and because the benefit is so widespread, employers expect you’ll take it and have policies in place to accommodate it. The fact that a maternity year is normal makes it less of a career risk, and the same with several months away for fathers.
How its taken is up to the parents. The people that I know who've taken it have split it fairly evenly. (I know I know sample size.)
I did not take any, as I was not eligible at the time.
As someone who does a lot of recruiting, I don't think "hmm I'm going to have to pay this woman for mat leave" because frankly that's bollocks, who knows who's going to be here for six months, 1 year or 8?
From a purely business point of view, the women that have come back from maternity are normally bargains. They don't ask for more pay, they are flexible and are loyal, assuming we have made the correct allowances for being parents.
also being a parent in tech allows people to deal much better with the toddler tantrums/playground fights that seem to be common in this industry.
An insight that comes from a place of being forced to be more mature yourself. Well said!
Wonderful comment that brought this book and idea to my attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27468582
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap#/media/File:OEC...
Seems like countries with paid leave have comparable or higher rates of labor participation and (on average) lower gender pay gap.
Rents are too high, and wages are too low.
Would be very interesting to see actual time spent not working, and caring for children at home, in relation to amount of paid leave. And across income brackets. Would not be surprised if it comes out to more time with children in many cases even though paid leave is less..
Ah, here we go. This is a veiled "only people who have enough money should have children" argument.
> And people can and do stay at home with their children at all income levels.
I am sure that disproportionately favors certain income levels.
Also, I never said only rich people should be able to have children. However at the end of the day raising children requires money. Hence the newly introduced children tax credit.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov...
There may be some effect of the very poorest people having children for the purposes of benefits, but the vast majority of women will have fewer kids once they get access to birth control and financial independence.
I really don't get the point of doing something you don't enjoy for 8-12 hours a day just so you can have expensive things.
Not quite. $ rich people can't afford time with children.
On some level you have to encourage people to somehow try to support themselves and their children, and to adapt their footprint to match their contributions.
I mean, that’s just being a responsible parent.
that is what's wrong.
if we want a balanced society then we need to enable everyone to have children, not just those who are able to get well paying jobs.
in austria and germany this is solved with giving parents tax breaks and unconditional extra money for each child to offset the higher cost of raising children.
and if you get a minimum wage job as an animation assistant doing inbetweening work, then the laws should make sure that the minimum wage is high enough that you can afford your living costs.
combined both measures will allow you to have children.
if you are self-employed and you are not earning enough money from your art you need to apply for unemployment benefits with all the conditions related to that.
[0] If you cannot afford to unilaterally walk away from employment for several months, you have no economic power regardless of your churn rate. Sorry to break it to you.
- specific allowances (paid parental leave, paid sick leave) for obvious reasons
- "blanket" paid time off outside of federal holidays for recreation and stuff like parents dying
- extra PTO or working hours reduction to take care of sick/terminally ill relatives
- wages big enough to allow everyone working full time to save a meaningful amount of money
Most developed countries outside of the US have realized this. All countries in Europe have the first two points already covered (paid parental, sick and general time off), Germany has the third one covered since 2012 ("Familienpflegezeit").
The only thing we all seem to be lacking after decades of wage starvation and neoliberalism is the last one - but COVID-related disruption is likely to incite a massive paradigm shift as the market goes from an employer market to an employee market and companies are pulling production back on-shore for a myriad of reasons.
I don't know that I agree with the specific optimism in your last paragraph. Apart from the basic death toll, I think most of what is driving the "labor shortage" is people knocked out of situations where they were barely treading water, and retreating to lower rent areas and living with family. So wages will only rise enough to get people moving back onto the rent treadmill, and won't necessarily give away surplus wealth to increase their bargaining power. I'd love love to be wrong about this, of course.
IMO what is really needed to fix the economy is for the government to stop feeding the asset bubbles (aka giveaway to the upper class) through this ongoing combination of ZIRP plus austerity. Raising interest rates would lower asset prices, making home ownership more obtainable (despite the short term pain). And government-spent stimulus will cause distributed price inflation that will hopefully make the Fed raise rates, as opposed to the past few decades of runaway asset-only inflation that they've been able to conveniently ignore.
A modern Western lifestyle. Almost every Western country without fail requires dual incomes to afford a basic lifestyle.
The working-dad stay-at-home mum has long gone.
The median personal income in 2019 was $35,805 (cf. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N). I think you'd be hard pressed to live on that with a family of 3+ people.
And what about the 50% of people who have a personal income less than the median?
edit: that stat was for 2019, not 2020, my bad
Biggest costs of life are housing, food and transportation. With one person staying at home, both the cost of transpo and food go down (because: one less person commuting to job, everything can be home cooked and the person staying at home have time to shop smartly and save a lot thanks to it).
This lives housing costs. Here, it's all about location. In many areas (assuming renting), you can have a house or apartment suitable for a family of three for less than $1000 a month.
Before taxes. That's in the area of 2400/mo after taxes [1]. My family of 3 pays around 600/mo for health insurance after employer subsidies, so call it 1800/mo. So after rent now you're living (with an infant!) on 800 a month. That's brutal.
My newborn burns nearly that much just on formula, diapers, and life-critical medicine.
[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/paycheck-calculator#nNffey40fm
ACA has subsidies for lower income households
I have no clue how the math works on average in terms of 35k jobs offering a subsidy at all, vs the marketplace subsidy. But even at a 50% subsidy it’s still not much money to raise a family on.
3000 gross is more like 2-25 net depending on the state. I haven't been in many industries where an employer is going to be covering healthcare costs for an $18/hr employee. So for a family of 3, that's another $1,000 a month for insurance.
If one's income is as low as the parent described, they would likely be eligible for Medicaid.
The parent described the median-income earner.
In my state of Arizona, if you were grossing 36,000 a year with a family of 3 you would be about 20% over the threshold to qualify for medicaid.
Gross. More like $2200 after tax.
Healthcare for a family of 4 averaged to $1777/month in 2020[1]. The higher up the income ladder, the more the employer pays that. On the low-end, the employer doesn't pick up much of that tab. So that's the largest expense… unless it's sacrificed in order to maintain a roof, food and transportation.
And we're assuming zero contributions towards retirement, here.
So... no, it is NOT easy to live on that amount of money anywhere where there are opportunities to grow one's job/career.
[1] In 2020, annual premiums for health coverage for a family of four averaged $21,342, but employers picked up 73% of that cost. - https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-health-insurance-...
It will be remiss not to mention that America stands alone among western countries in not providing livable subsidies/incomes to recent parents, and expects them to be back in the workforce after a couple of weeks. The rest of the western world is far less aggressive in "forcing" women back to work.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/17/archives/in-soviet-union-...
And they can’t understand why they keep on failing to achieve their policy goals.
PS: I don’t think there were too many <= 19 year olds signing up for hacker news in 2011.
Just to be clear hear, we're talking about parents being able to take care of their newborns and not being forced back to work after "2-4 weeks" as the OP stated.
Be time-idempotent; imagine if you were talking to someone from the 15th century and they were SURE they were right about their crazy opinions.
The meta-stable way to be reasonable is that as long as someone seems to be honestly asking the reasoning for your beliefs, and your principles, you should try to explain yourself, rather than just shut them down by repeating your assertion of correctness.
Otherwise, how will you find out about the likely beliefs you hold right now, which our descendants will consider insane and evil? Forcing yourself to self-introspection is a good practice. I don't expect anyone to change their mind about this, but being able to explain to others your reasoning can also clear up your own views, and help convince your adversary much more effectively than the "just repeat your position" argument style.
Have the government lend trillions of dollars at low interest with minimal qualifications for housing. Expected outcome is realized.
Same is happening with childcare. Government increases child care credit. No surprise that daycare has raised the rate $30 per week.
It cannot possibly be riding expenses for daycare operators.
For healthcare, the last time I heard about bending the cost curve was during the Obama administration.
For education, I’ve never seen any politician suggests we try to reign in cost growth—-just proposals around who should eat the costs.
For housing, governments at all levels have been pulling every policy lever they can find to increase costs. Falling costs are wildly considered a national emergency.
Why is it that progressives’ solution to everything is to dump money out of the air? Are there no structural improvements to be made anywhere?
Want to fix that? A true multiparty system, IRV, and eliminating gerrymandering as possibilities. The last one would mostly be by eliminating geographic boundaries generally; instead representation would be decided by proportionally voting in representatives from the IRV list, which might be preferenced by area specific politicians first and could then fall back to those who represent other types of interest focus.
Similarly the relative representation power of each voter in a body such as the senate should be resolved by merging similarly leaning smaller bodies until each voter is within relatively the same representation strength as other voters.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_pop...
This is an issue for E.G. California (~20M/senator) and Texas (~15M/senator) compared to Vermont (~310K/senator) and Wyoming (~240K/senator).
In the past the senate started out FAR more balanced by state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
For example in 1820 the top three most populace states were all around 1 million each. A core belle-curve hump ranges from around 600K down to 150K, and about 5 states have less than 100K. Senators representing roughly ~500K, ~250K, and 50K respectively, a weight difference of only a factor of 10 rather than a number approaching almost a factor of 100.
I happen to prefer (Path Vote) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method as a method of performing an election with instant runoffs for one round of ranked ballots.
For the later proposal (where districts are replaced by a mixed bag of candidates and issues) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_STV might be a good way of determining the membership of a body.
It looks like research into proportional voter representation is still ongoing, with important new papers released even this year.
Subsidize me until they are in public school and I’ll high five you.
We don’t need this tied to an employer like health insurance as this is something that benefits us all.
But consider if everyone was able to take the first year at some percentage less of regular salary. Then public funded care available with learning included?
My wife would have preferred this to having exhausted fmla just before giving birth because of early complications.
Returning to work was not an option for her, 6 years later returning to work was one of the most emotionally draining experiences for her.
We could have a society were children goes to public school as soon they can take formula.
I know this is an exaggeration, but it drew my interest. This expects that the rest of us have to work to subsidize you having children for five to six years.
I'm wholly on board with helping parents raise children. Children are our future. But at some threshold of subsidization this equation tips and actively offloads the entire burden onto those without children.
Both of my parents had jobs when I was growing up. Why are we suddenly expecting this to change? Childcare can be paid for at rates under minimum wage in aggregate. Look at our school system and daycare businesses. Just because you think your child deserves only the best does not make it economical, and lots of people make this work. Thousands of years of child rearing has happened in suboptimal conditions.
Raising children has been an incredible chore more often than not throughout history. It's only been briefly punctuated by moments of ease, and even then, it wasn't evenly distributed. Children are not easy.
I think modern parents are seeing their childfree peers and remarking on the delta in quality of life.
I honestly don't mean this as an attack. I'm just interested in the varying perspectives on this.
Are you including "people with children over the age of five to six years" in this group? Because it seems like they would be helping to raise others people's children (in your words) but would also have benefitted.
According to the first Google result I found it looks like in 2018 only 15% of women age 50 were childless. A first-order approximation assuming younger generations have kids at the same rate and it's the same for both genders (neither of these are guaranteed but it's a starting point) would lead me to believe that more than most people have children and would benefit from a policy like this over the course of their lives. People without cars help pay for roads, people without children pay for public schools...I'm not really seeing much here to suggest there's an undue burden on those without children.
If we're expected to move wherever for work, then that wherever needs to provide support. Because right now I'm hours from my sole remaining inlaw and a whole country apart from my own parents and brother, and it's been hell raising children like this. And not just young children; my teenagers' mental health would be much better if they were to have their uncle and grandma nearby.
True, but on a long enough timeframe one could also view it as a repayment from the people who (with or without children) were once children-being-subsidized themselves.
The point stated was that there needs to be a threshold. You have introduced another topic entirely, and the person you are answering implied nothing about your topic.
This is exactly how society works for ages 5-18 and we call it 'school', how is 0-4 different?
Public school is typically less than $50/day per student. I vaguely suggested minimum wage stipends for an extended parental leave (1 year+), and this would be more than we spend on public schooling.
Lots of poor families make childcare work on shoestring budgets and have done so all throughout history. My parents did.
How much money is enough? How much is too much?
Depends on who is paying
The amazing thing to me is you think the OP was asking for something unbelievable.
> The amazing thing to me is you think the OP was asking for something unbelievable.
The five years that OP alluded to is a really long time to not be working. That's 5/40 years for any given career (for a single child), meaning one eighth of a childfree person's productivity has to cover for it. At least at this extreme scale.
> Both of us had comparatively long parental leave for both kids.
How long was it? I'm genuinely curious.
Again, I'm not against subsidizing childcare and supporting children. Some of the expectations of parents seem to be really high, especially to someone whose parents both worked throughout my early childhood.
The current costs of childcare in my area are $80-$250/wk for infants unless you're going for something super Bougie for your baby.
My friends and coworkers who’ve lived in the US describe pre-school childcare as dystopian. Even when expensive.
If you think of it as 5/(40 * 2) or if you had two kids relatively close together 7/(40 * 3) the math is significantly better. It’s also very telling that caring for kids is not seen as being productive.
If you imagine Adam and Betty have two kids Charlie and Debbie who have two kids Earl and Felicia who have Gary and Helen… each generation receives N years of leave income from (2M - N) years of work income. You can’t take Betty, Charlie, and Debbie’s work income (or total productivity) against just Betty’s leave income.
I think you take Adam and Betty’s combined leave against their combined M years and M years minus N years of leave, C&D’s N against their 2M-N, etc. (you can time-shift it however you like if you want to think of some generation paying for a different generation, but the long-run math doesn’t change for replacement rate births)
In your example, this seems like 7 years of 73 years (9.6%) is going to this program, not 7/120 (5.8%)
My point was to show roughly that worrying about the cost of productivity loss when having children is the only way to sustain human productivity doesn’t add up.
We can obviously unpack all the ways that this is abused, but generally speaking children are necessary for the continuation of the species. Children are also absolutely a burden on the parents, physically, emotionally, and financially.
So yes, broadly speaking, I would expect the childfree to disproportionately contribute into a societal pool to offset for the fact that they are existing in human society but not contributing their part to it's ongoing propagation.
Ultimately though, you're right - no parent should expect to have the same lifestyle as their childfree counterpart. Not with free time, disposable income, or even day-to-day "happiness".
> Both of my parents had jobs when I was growing up. Why are we suddenly expecting this to change?
Mine too. Here's what I think has changed: in that era (and for much of human history), it was assumed/expected that it "took a village" to raise children. Families stayed closer together - the previous generation was around to help with childrearing. And in general, communities took care of everyone's children in a pool that would be considered completely outlandish today. Heck, the concept of a Wet Nurse [1] is something that would probably explode most people's minds today. I bet at least one person will read this comment and not realize that this was something that was completely ubiquitous and standard for much of human history. Can you imagine that existing today? It would be inconceivable. Not that we need it since the advent of formula, but the point is simply that societies helped take care of children more in the past than they do now.
Today, people move further from home from work (losing direct family access), have children later in life (less energy to contribute/harder to tradeoff career responsibilities), and build fewer local community social bonds (online relationships may be meaningful but they don't help babysit).
I don't think we have adjusted accordingly yet.
Sounds like personal choices to me
Anyways, the difference between our family unit and our friends who have local family & ties is night and day different.
* Subsidize them with 15 years of child care for a relatively small amount now, and they will become productive members of society.
* Do nothing now, and in 15 years be forced to subsidize them via crime, the justice system, and outreach programs for the remainder of their life.
Sweden has one of the more generous programs that pays up to $41K/year (USD equivalent) or 80% of your income, whichever is lower. That amount is actually quite good if you're living modestly, but it may not be what people earning $100-150K have in mind when they see "paid parental leave".
Definitely better than nothing, though!
I would say 3 year is pretty good as kids starts to gain a lot from socializing after that age.
Why would this be absurd? It's perfectly normal. Looking after a toddler is hard 7/24 work with little time to spare. Of course you can go to work and instead pay for a house cleaner and a baby sitter to look after your house and your kid because.. work is more important? Or what is your argument here?
In Europe the baby boomer generation reached retirement and in the meantime the number of kids per household decreased. There is not enough people to pay the pension of the old and many governments are motivated to increase the number of kids by any means - like making it a financially acceptable or even desired to have 3+ children.
That's basically my plan, but running a business/contracting/freelancing is not for everyone. Sooo thankful I have my own insurance though.
our comfortable retirement is dependent on a good crop of reasonably successful children being born now, or in the previous 5 years.
It benefits us that those children are brought up to be balanced, rational pragmatic people. Perhaps extended child care might be the thing that does it?
I suspect that five years is indeed too much.
However perhaps the answer is one year "off" plus cheap, good quality child care from 1 year plus?
I have two kids, 2.5 years apart, and there was one year in NYC where a small family daycare was running us ~$5k per month in childcare. We'd been aiming for the kids to be a bit further apart, partly for financial reasons, but shrug, it didn't happen that way (first kid took a lot longer of trying than the second). We're fortunate in that we can afford that, but it did impact our long-term savings and eventual home ownership.
I honestly don't know what the working poor do. I guess you're not aloud to move away from extended family.
I think a child would benefit the most from an involved male and a female figure in their lives, but even one is better than none.
In other words, ideally that should read "and a father" ;)
(C-sections are somewhat more predictable on the physical recovery side...but do not lack for issues of their own.)
Surely we can show some empathy and demand better benefits for all. You know youre included in that pool too! I’m sure most folks on their deathbed will be glad they spent more time with their children then at their desk.
wrt duration of maternity leave, western europe is pretty much at 3-6 months, while some of the eastern countries go longer. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave)
Is it callous to throw criminals in jail? Is it callous to expect people to save money?
Maybe principles, morality, and justice are callous.
I disagree. There are plenty of people without access to birth control, abortion, or even proper sexual education in the US.
I've spoken with so many people who are at once against sex ed, abortion, contraception and parental benefits. That is wanting to have your cake and eat it, too. Without the first three you're going to need the last one. Not everyone has a good familial or social safety net. Not everyone is independently wealthy. Exceedingly few can live completely pastorally.
It's like asking for a software product fast, cheap and high quality. Pick two.
Same with society: you can have a healthy, free and educated populace, able to fulfill personal/social obligations (ie child rearing, taking care of aging parents, building lasting friendships), and/or working at peak economic production/efficiency. But I doubt you can have all three at the same time without massive subsidization or regulation. An individual's time and resources spent on one are the opportunity cost of the others. I'd be interested to know counterexamples of societies that were able to achieve all three.
Tbh if you really want to be logically coherent then I encourage you to try to defend ending free education for kids.
Why are you surprised that an american centered website have just the opinions that are current de-facto policies in america? And why are you surprised that highly educated people that work in for-profit organisations prefer to be independent and manage their own lives?
I'm rather more surprised at the opposite, to discover that american programmers are actually communists and want to be cared for by the state in every way, and live uniform, identical, slow and inefficient lives. That seems to me like you would be in constant conflict with your surroundings and contradict your own life choices.
People already have. That is what the state is. Society has come together to solve problems through the state. Just like with free education for all children (which sadly you didn't have the balls to argue should be outright abolished, and just ignored the point entirely).
> Why are you surprised that an american centered website have just the opinions that are current de-facto policies in america?
I mean the hyper-libertarianism you espouse is of course popular in the US but it's clearly not dominant judging by how much both Trump and Biden love to blow up the deficit.
>And why are you surprised that highly educated people that work in for-profit organisations prefer to be independent and manage their own lives?
Because not everyone thinks "fuck you I've got mine"? Is there any proof that going hyper-libertarian actually improves things? It's like the magical thinking surrounding "if we cut taxes, tax revenues will magically increase". Or in this case it's "if we cut the state so it doesn't help anyone who is in need, those people will magically be better off". Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so where is it? Where's the proof that leaving vulnerable people to rot is good for them?
>I'm rather more surprised at the opposite, to discover that american programmers are actually communists and want to be cared for by the state in every way, and live uniform, identical, slow and inefficient lives. That seems to me like you would be in constant conflict with your surroundings and contradict your own life choices.
I can't think of anything more uniform, identical and slow than a society which exists entirely to optimise GDP or individual earnings. Hardly distinguishable from communism's obsession with 5 year plans at that point is it? It's an equally mad obsession with wealth and economic growth that is utterly degenerate and uncivilised.
And being against parental leave is in no way hyper-libertarisnism and you know it, your argumentation is not made any better by using hyperbole.
Education is only free to the small extent that it's determined to be absolutely necessary. The majority of education that actually benefits society the most is not free at all.
"fuck you, I've got mine" is a funny expression, but in reality everyone always puts themselves first, and only has a limited amount of help for others, which they are very selective with. Nobody lives up the opposite of "fuck me, help everyone else" in reality, and the more you push that, the less effort you get from people. Fuck you, I've got mine gets things done. "why try" doesn't get anything done.
I'm personally a proponent of parental leave, but I'll answer this one point.
"Forcing women" back into work after pregnancy is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases. All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood.
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/motherhood...
And from a "nuclear family" point of view, most cultural traditionalists I know would argue to me that it's good for kids to be in multiple-parent households. When people talk about stereotypical traditionalist nuclear families, these are very often families that have extended support structures of multiple people involved in child-rearing.
Opponents to parental leave (even feminist opponents) are in some ways attempting to equalize the time-off risk between mothers[0] and fathers. And that can be done by reducing the mother's time off to zero to match the father, but it can also be done by letting fathers get involved in early child-rearing and giving them more time to help their partners.
----
[0] And nonbinary/transgender/adoptive/etc parents too of course, but I'm just using a shorthand here.
Better childcare / pre-k can help too, but there musn't be a gap between when at least partial leave ends and childcare begins.
Good thing we all work to much already, so reducing total "public sphere" labor hours is not a huge issue.
As an example, they could add extra parental leave days that are earmarked for father classes.
I can vouch from personal experience that I did not enjoy my paternity leave at all and I'd much rather work.
Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.
There are tons of possible explanations to explain a delta in salary between men and women. Men generally tend to negotiate better and women tend to take more time off when a son is born. You can also slice subsets of data, to show whatever you want. For example, if you look at women in their 20s, they are outperforming men on both salary and education.
> Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.
The gender gap was the explanation mbesto gave for why paid family leave for women might be opposed even by women. If the gender gap doesn't exist, and unbalanced paid time off between genders won't drive increased wage differences, then it seems like it might be fine to ignore mbesto's worry and just offer women that time off regardless of what paternal leave policies are.
I generally agree, keep in mind the idea is to force everyone to work less, distributing the non-domestic labor more evenly across the board. The idea is very materialist, in that domestic labor needs to be done, and it's not even that "all men" don't want to do it, but that bosses have more power than husbands and ultimately we need to stop the work hours/effort rat race to free up the free time to re-figure out what families and domestic labor ought to look like.
The current trend is capitalism reaches deeper into the family. Restaraunts are displacing cooking for more social strata, Pre-K is less controversial than paid family leave which brings intensified economies of scale to child rearing.
I'm not against either of those things --- at least there will be a villages (of wage-workers) to raise kids again and more social time --- but I don't want them to happen for the wrong reason of employers sucking up more and more of our time for no good reason.
And getting more than 3 hours of sleep a lot is a privilege that's not available to recent parents.
I don't know the exact details of what policies are correct for paid time off, but the fact is still true that we have a strong societal incentive to handle situations like this in a way that's beneficial both to the parents and (especially) beneficial to kids -- at least if we believe that parental presence helps early development, which seems reasonably well supported.
I say this as a single person with no plans to ever marry or have children, but the reality is that being single or having kids each carries its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and I'm not sure that fairness between parents and childless individuals is necessarily the best lens to look at policy through.
There's a lot of middle ground here between status quo and what GP describes, but even in that case raising a child is still an 18+ year commitment; I don't think that a single family vacation significantly changes that.
And sure, as a non-parent I can't take a multi-month long vacation every year, but even as a recent graduate I get 25 paid vacation days per year (5 of which can be saved for a few years). So long vacations aren't a pipe dream for non-parents.
And with the way the economy currently works and the gradually increasing life expectancy, increasing the birth rate is a good thing, and generous parental benefits are a way to encourage that. I personally think it would be best if society/the economy wasn't dependant on an increasing population, but that's a separate conversation.
In the US, we have a program called WIC, to help women with infants and children with nutrition. If you are a poor man or poor single woman, this program is not available to you. I would not consider that a privilege. We are trying to help foster the next generation and improve society.
It definitely helped us economically (it's nice to have so much paid holiday) but it forced me into a nurturing role which my partner was definitely better suited for. I ended up being quite depressed by the entire situation and had a series of mental health issues + lost most of my friends. At the same time I am definitely better at negotiating than her and I am earning more - so without that artificial incentive we would have naturally gravitated toward the best solution.
I agree two parents households work great, but you don't really need two parents hands-on with kids all the time. I find it great in limited doses but I would go completely insane if I had to do it all the time, while I can tolerate work just fine. My partner was getting incredibly stressed at work but with kids it seems like she found her balance.
She's looking forward to go back to work once all the kids go to nursery / school in 3 years, but not in a typical employers / employee setting, more like running the family software business.
All babies are created by two humans.* Why should the career of one of them be penalized for it? Why not instead create as a society the tools so that both can share the upbringing and care of the baby while the mother is recovering?
* (although the parents are not always the same persons who have biologically made it; yet it is a good idea that the solution for such a case is the default behaviour).
Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable. Unless we can agree to a minimally reasonable set of differences between men and women in the reproductive realm, before and after birth, we won't get very far.
PS. There is nothing "penalizing" in taking care of an infant. It is a fundamental part of life. Some even see it as rewarding.
Admittedly, you can't read properly, because that's not a question I asked.
> Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable.
Speak for yourself if you want to introduce straw men in the discourse; no one else did. Here we adults are talking about participation in society in equal conditions for all humans, irrespective of debilitating conditions that may temporarily affect them, whether due to illness or strenuous exertion.
Excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere because some of them have a higher biological burden in reproduction is anything but a libertarian ideal. Having men participating in equal terms in the responsibility and joy of raising their children should be seen as a right as well as an obligation. A society that is unable to guarantee that right and claim that duty is a society that has lost its way.
1. The proposal is to offer mothers a 12 months leave, at the very least as a social expectation, even better paid by a state run insurance, see e.g. unemployment, to take care of their infant children.
2. Mothers rather than fathers because mammals feed their infants with milk, and milk is produced only by mothers. Human mothers need to feed their infants every 2-3 hours. As long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question.
"The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that infants be exclusively breastfed for about the first 6 months with continued breastfeeding along with introducing appropriate complementary foods for 1 year or longer." https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/index.htm
3. This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers. Specifically their wages will be smaller compared to same age fathers.
Working the chain of reasoning backwards, anyone that axiomatically insists no wage gap should ever be measured between men and women, sadly a very popular stance, is (willfully?) ignoring the motherhood aspect. Men and women are not fully interchangeable.
I don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from. As stated above, there is at least one critical area in life, specifically infant care, where men and women are not perfectly equal. Not being perfectly equal does not imply men and women must be maximally different to the point of "exclusion from the social sphere".
Until we drop the pretense that men and women are perfectly equal, we are going to produce inhuman outcomes. This is not even a new observation, the ancients had the story of Procustes holding people equal by the standard of his iron bed and fixing any deviation from his equal norm via blunt force.
You don't see it because you make chains of reasoning backwards leading you to absurd conclusions because you leave thousands of alternative explanations along the way, such as "as long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question" (then how is it possible that many women do exactly that, breastfeeding and working?) or "This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers" (no shit Sherlock, that's why there are proposals being made to fix precisely that effect. Of course it won't be fixed if you do nothing and keep the current status quo.)
> Men and women are not fully interchangeable.
And that is the starting point of my reasoning. The only option you see from that point is "as a consequence, women have a lower salary", completely blind to the possibility of "let's put means so that this biological difference does not represent a burden, on the basis of sharing the upbringing of children" that you keep ignoring over and over again.
Pumping is challenging, if not downright degrading. Ask a working mother. It also doesn't work as well as you might think, both the baby and the mother need breastfeeding 2-3 hours apart, or else the lactation may stop. Formula is suboptimal, according to AAP and common sense.
This is exactly how the singleminded focus on one metric (equal wages or bust) goes awry. Both mothers and infants suffer the pressure on mothers to compete on equal footing with males at all times. Is it really that hard to give mothers the space (and financial support) to chose the well being of their infants and of themselves, and accept that course of action will inevitably lead to a small decrease in lifetime wages?
Even the ancients were well aware of the dangers of attempting to equalize everyone to the exact same standard. See the story of the Procrustes bed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2007/07/12/fewer-m...
The argument assumes that all people receive the same pay and promotions for the same work. Wage differentials between people from the same age cohort appear because gap years, which are the human approach for infant care, lead to small but measurable delays in the mother's careers.
BTW, this is not an argument that all wage differentials that are observed in the real world are, or should be, explainable this way. It is simply a pushback against rigid Procrustean axioms that risk doing more harm that good.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/your-employment-rights-in...
There's a lot of evidence around wage discrepancies, but I have never heard anyone claim that it's the _mothers_ who are forcing themselves back to work. That seems like a huge stretch and doesn't align with anything I've seen before.
The cultural components manifest themselves different ways:
As a biz owner: Why would you give a raise to someone who hasn't contributed anything to the company in the last 2-4 months?
As an employee: how would you (man or woman) feel if your equal peer didn't contribute anything for 2-4 months and got the same raise as you?
> The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases.
Strongly agree with the above.
Citation needed. It's PART of the discrepancy, but the evidence is far from conclusive. Even the link you pasted shows otherwise. Women without children still peak at 90% of relative wages to men without children, which themselves are lower than wages of fathers (presumably because being in a stable relationship allows a working father to focus on their career with someone taking care of the home)
* the average person/family is trying to live a little beyond their means
* “work needed to do” is like a gas, it expands to fit the hours worked
* rent seeking elements expand to keep #1 true
The takeaway is that there is a lot of “work” being done in the economy that doesn’t need to be done because prices will always rise a little past what people can pay comfortably so… people work too much and think that they need to.
If you cut the lifetime hours worked by half, the standard of living probably wouldn’t change much.
The solution to this is radical modification of the markets which leech away extra income.
One such method would be to control real estate prices by enacting huge taxes on rental property and profits simultaneously making it extremely difficult or impossible to acquire large loans for real estate (owned or rented out). Making owning s home that isn’t your primary residence a huge financial liability and removing the ability to sell it for high prices would crash the market and remove the rent paid to landlords or “rent” paid to banks for mortgages. Both betting industries that take far more value than they give back.
After the prerequisite step is taken, then the tax code should be changed to fix that rent seeking, in houses yes, but generally too. Seeking rent is not an overall economic good, but a wealth transfer mechanism from the poor to the rich.
Property values rise in locations that are highly desirable regardless of government or market intervention. It has more do to with the surface area of the earth than any particular policy.
A government system will result in similar issues - Look at the retirees and trust funder tenants living in mostly-empty 4 bedroom rent controlled apartments in NYC.
You have to allocate the limited space somehow. You cannot fit more people into one square meter of land without building higher or denser, and building higher is not always a simple option.
-cease preventing density by legal fiat
-support density with infrastructure
-cease encouraging home cost inflation via the tax code, socialized lending institutions, and bank capital regulation
-put in place a property tax systems that encourages the most valuable use of land
-eliminate parking mandates and free parking
-broaden the commutable footprint by building excellent mass transit systems
That’s not perfect but if it’s far from nothing.
I’m not a landlord, but I rented 6 different places for a total of about 13 years after college plus my time during college. I’m glad those places were available at prices I could afford.
The middle class is rapidly shrinking and the dream of owning a house for many newlyweds is fast receding in the rear view mirror, but hey, equality! Right?
No, it didn't.
That ship had already sailed before ERA was proposed, and was a major driver for it.
Exploring the counterfactual numbers: If the workforce gender share remained at the 4:6 F:M ratio of 1972, then a male workforce of 85m would mean a female workforce of 34m instead of the actual 75m. This would lead to a total workforce of 119m instead of 160m, a decrease of 41m or 25%.
Would the USSR have won the cold war if the US had 25% less economic growth over the last 50 years?
This is not what happens. No one is being "forced" to do anything. Rather, free individuals (speaking from a U.S. centric viewpoint) make a choice to become pregnant and birth a child. It seems reasonable to me that the result of this private choice should not be the burden of others. Note that FMLA (again, U.S.-centric) grants unpaid leave. In other words, you can't be fired for certain finite length absences resulting from certain medical occurrences. But you're not entitled to payment for non-work.
So, when Mom gives birth, she absolutely has the right to say, "You know what, I can't/don't want to work." She just isn't entitled to force a company to pay her for the privilege of her non-work.
I may be in the minority on this, but I find it really weird how people, more and more nowadays, believe the consequences private, personal choices should be borne by everyone else. The entitlement is really hard to stomach. This idea seems to be coalescing with a belief that "stuff just happens". But the reality is, the economy–any economy–is powered by labor.
People need to work. If enough people don't, we go back to the default state of reality: poverty, starvation, etc etc.
> The employer gets half an employee back
This is a self defeating claim. Under your (implied) proposal, the employer would just not get any employee back for an even longer period of time. Or, worse, they have to hire a temporary employee to fill in, and are now paying two sets of wages, all as a result of decisions over which they have absolutely influence!
Starting or not starting a company is a completely private decision, yet we as a society have recognized that having entrepreneurs and a functional business culture is very important and actually profitable. So most governments, even the American ones, give grants and support to new companies to prop them up. Even though again, they are the consequence of someone's personal choice - yet the taxpayer bears the burden. Sounds familiar?
Bearing children is a benefit to the society as a whole - someone has to work, someone has to pay taxes, etc etc. So as a society we support mothers by allowing them to take maternal leave, even if having a child is very much a personal choice.
Also I don't see anyone advocating that companies pay mothers through entirety of maternity pay - in most countries it's the public budget that does after some short initial time period.
>>People need to work. If enough people don't, we go back to the default state of reality: poverty, starvation, etc etc.
And within reason, people need to have children or the country you are part of won't have enough citizens to support it within few decades - that's the reality of life.
To what grants, specifically, are you referring? As someone who is active in the business formation space in the U.S., I’d absolutely love to get some free capital.
Humans have been giving birth since the very beginning. The phenomenon of insisting companies fund child birth is a brand new idea. As in, only the last 30 or so years. Societies have arisen and persisted since long, long before then. How is it that all of humanity managed this long without paid family leave?
Wow, clearly you are not a parent, and probably thats good for society. You know, parenting isn't a past time hobby of the privileged, but activity via which all of us came to existence. If we stop it, society, states and whole human civilization will collapse in 1 generation.
Nobody paying for social/medical/police etc services old ass xibalba would enjoy when retired.
But sure, lets maximize profits, lets raise a messed up generation with lack of strong parental touch in first years, child psychologists all agree there is no harm in that, right. I am sure that... 3%? 4%? extra income will make up for that.
As much as I admire the positive aspects what makes US so great, the negative aspects are such a horrible fucked up mess I politely say 'No, thank you' anytime offer comes from across the pond. Can't imagine raising family and growing old in such system, not once I've experienced what many western Europe countries offer.
Side info - recently Swiss improved paid paternal leave to 2 weeks. Just about take it off for my daughter. My company counted it into our social security dues. The added 0.05% of extra costs from each salary mean nothing, absolutely nothing, for anybody. It means the world to me. Thank you, Swiss.
> you are not a parent, and probably thats good for society
> old ass xibalba
You really undermine your credibility when you go ad hominem.
Some pregnancies are not planned. Some sex is not consensual. Unless we have free abortions available, people with uteruses are sometimes not free to decide not to be pregnant.
The decision to support pregnant people is a decision to support the baby. At some point, everyone reading this was a pregnancy, everyone reading this was helpless. One of the core functions of society is to protect helpless, young humans. Full stop.
If you are under the impression society exists for a purpose other than pooling resources to protect the citizens from outside threats of hunger, violence, or famine, I urge you to reconsider.
Moralizing about how better decisions should have been made is Monday-night-quarterbacking at best. The reality is there is now a small human. The small, helpless human should get the best shot we can give them, because otherwise, what the fuck are we doing.
Name something we should spend money on that's more worthwhile than a helpless baby not suffering.
I don’t disagree about abortion, per se, but it’s a separate issue.
For policies like the ones being discussed, assumptions are being made that everyone involved is making their own decisions. I’m refuting the claim that every pregnancy is the result of informed decisions.
Other gray zones include things like “either my marriage is over or I’m going to try to get pregnant”, or even “I was told I was infertile”, because those are going to truly muddy the issue.
I don't think we should incentivise families with two working parents and young kids. It increases the pool of workers keeping wages down, benefiting employers, and increases stress in the family, likely contributing to the epidemic of broken families we're looking at - which have negative effects on these generations' mental health and crime history.
If you're middle class and you manage well your spending and are willing to relocate / look into alternative career paths, it's possible to maintain a family on one career and I firmly believe it's better for the children. If you're having kids you can either outsource your kids early years education to the government or do it yourself. There are some studies (albeit I find social studies to be murky and hard to rely on) finding correlations between UK government programs paying for nurseries and increase in teenage crime roughly 15 years later. Study or not, I think that kids before 2/3 should not go to nursery, the social trauma of being unattended with other bigger kids needs to wait a bit longer, once they're ready.
In our family, we didn't send the kids to nursery before 2.5/3 years and my partner didn't work (for an employer, she kept working on her own personal projects, for "entertainment"). They integrated in nursery very well, we never had detachment problems and they're fairly well behaved. We're both developers, so maintaining the family on one salary is trivial, but I've met people from all walks of life who managed to do it.
Sure, some people are simply not creating enough value for society to break even on one salary and that's suboptimal. I'd advise to sort their life out to earn enough to support a new family, before making babies.
There are plenty of studies that link stable family structures to success and unstable family structures to crime and mental health issues.
The last time the government meddled with families, it didn't end up well for the black community: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/03/the_decline...
And nowadays the stats for broken families, across all ethnicities, is higher than ever.
I sat down with my boss about a month or so ago and told him I'm intending to take parental leave. "No problem" he said, I told him my intention was to take the full 8 weeks I'm entitled to. He didn't say anything right away to that... eventually it was more of a "...that's not typical for the guys around here"
We did a bit of back and forth. (I think he went to HR to find out he can't really deny that) and we've come to an agreement that works for both of us.
But honestly... I'm quite shocked at just how atypical it is for fathers to ask for, and get time off to care for their newborn. Not even just the child, the mother needs support early on too.
I've given a lot of myself to this company, and they've done a tremendous amount for me as well. So I do have a small sense of loyalty to them and don't want to leave them hard up on my absence. But if this helps my boss understand that we should hire extra hands for the times when I'm not available, this is a long term benefit overall as I see it. I'm hoping 8 weeks leave help me reset and address some of my anxieties about the work load. I hope it lets my coworkers understand exactly what level of shit I help shelter them from.
...and if none of that works out. I've already got a friend trying to poach me to a new business. Win/win in my eyes.
Thanks for listening to my rant.
Why? They already showed they have no loyalty to you. Also, 8 weeks is pretty bare bones as is. 12 weeks is the minimum even in US states that have managed to implement it.
You can have loyalty and still understand that there's a social/informal contract in place (and maybe a formal one in some places).
It is common for companies to expect "loyalty" in the form of working extra hours when the company is in a tight spot or settling for meager raises rather than switching companies while at the same time laying people off at the first sign of trouble. In such an environment, an employee offering loyalty to a company when none is offered in return is setting themselves up to be taken advantage of.
Have loyalty for people who deserve it, but never for companies.
just another hole in classical economics and theory of rational choice.
>I don't see why "they'd fire you in no time if you stopped providing value" is always thrown around as a negative.
It seems the whole loyalty thing is always sided heavily in favor of the employer. When both sides eschew loyalty and make cold, hard business decisions, my example is what the employee's might look like. Not very appealing I know, but neither is laying off 25% of your workforce because Zillow decided it wanted to be a real estate investor and failed miserably at it; an example of a cold, hard business decision.
You give 2 weeks because of the people, not the company
I got severely sick when I started working there... like 2 weeks in and I was hospitalized with a brain infection for a week + another couple weeks at home recuperating. They paid full wages during my absence.
When my father was dying from cancer they did the same thing as I helped move him to hospice and handle the estate.
There's been other things as well where they've gone above and beyond what an employer should do, and maybe "loyalty" isn't exactly how I should frame it, I do feel "safe" working there knowing I'm not about to be thrown out on my ass should something inconvenient happen.
I have no loyalty and have just been biding my time. I've been just comfortable enough so far, but things haven't been great in a few aspects. They were not hard up for coverage and my absence, which should have been planned for far in advance, would not have effected the schedule in any manner.
Never mind that in this labor market an open role might sit unfilled for more than 8 weeks!
An important lesson we all need to remember: there are two ways to get the time off which is owed to you, the hard way or the easy way. If your boss is really willing to make it the hard way, it's on him/her to find a train a replacement. Get out of there.
I've also seen this with vacation.... A skilled engineer saves up vacation with a well-known to the boss goal of making a 2 month adventure trip. When it's time to go, he's "too valuable" to "lose" for 2 months. He threatens to quit. Now he's "too valuable" to lose over the situation and he gets his vacation. So stupid.
Keeping yourself ready and able to change jobs is unfortunately necessary, because company loyalty is kaput, and the threat of quitting is unfortunately occasionally needed to get proper to treatment.
Unions or humane work cultures would fix this. Not holding my breath in the USA. Europe is way better.
Which is all to say - if this company in the slightest gives you more negative feedback about taking leave,.. I would, if I were in your shoes, be looking for a new place. They're not showing you any loyalty, so you don't owe it to them.
A twitter thread from Ezra Klein (also recently took parental leave) that might resonate with you: https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1457771021327503360
My wife and I get to split 69 weeks, of which neither of us can take more than 61. She's going to take the max, plus her 15 weeks she gets post-birth (76 weeks total) and I'll take 8 right at the start. We get a small amount of government-paid employment insurance, and jobs will exist when we return.
What's important is that here, it's enforced by law, not by company generosity. To punish me (or my wife) for taking this time off is literally illegal. I soon need to have a conversation with my manager (based in the US) to make sure he's aware of the this all. He's a nice guy, but he may be surprised.
That's how it works in most countries, companies almost never have to pay for maternity/paternity or parental leave. They only have to allow it and take the employee back on a similar position afterwards.
Throughout my life, I pay a small additional tax called "EI"- employment insurance. Everyone does. There's a yearly maximum of around $900 (CAD) and it scales based on income level.
The reward for this is that the government pays us $400/week (a little less I think) for those 69 weeks. That's not much, but it's enough to survive.
Overall in my life I likely won't come out ahead on this 'deal' but I'm okay with that. I'd rather live in a society where everyone gets this benefit than one where no one does. Kids grow up healthier, families are stronger, society is stronger. Lower-income families probably come out ahead overall from this, especially when you factor in daycare prices.
My employer's only obligation is that the job must be there when I get back, and punishment for taking my leave is forbidden. That said, there's nothing stopping them from doing more. My employer tops up my pay to 85% of my base salary for I believe 10 weeks of parental leave (might be 8 or 12, I forget).
The child got off the ground well and I think it stems from both parents being regularly present during the first year. Also, being a young parent is stressful, so it's good to share the effort.
If all goes well, my kid will be a productive member of society - so maybe it's not just family friendly, but profitable, too.
Shortly after I became the manager of my team, one of my reports informed me that he wanted to use 3-4 weeks of paternal leave (out of a max of 6) a few months after the birth of his child (company policy allowed it within 12 months.) He said he'd keep his laptop nearby in case of emergencies. "You're crazy!" I told him, "take the full 6 weeks! And leave the laptop off!"
As a manager, if it's the company policy, then it's the employee's right to take the time off. There should be no amount of brow-beating (assuming sufficient advance notice, of course.) I checked in with HR for procedural details, and overall it was easy/painless from top to bottom.
Those first few weeks present an unparalleled opportunity of becoming a larger part of the rhythm of your baby’s life. My husband took the month after our kid’s birth, and then the transition to daycare at a year old, and that has entrenched wake up/go to sleep as their special time together, no matter how long his work days have ended up.
In Norway there are a lot of political parties that can matter. All depends on the election. Some grow, some dont, new ones are added, old ones go away.
That is a dynamic that is entirely missing in the US.
We have parties in the European left and we have parties on the European right, parties in the middle, green party etc etc.
I try to get people to understand that we do not have a single party that is far right enough to compare with the Democrats in the US. (Discussing the Republicans is just hard).
There is no left in US politics. and you could say that there is no right in Norway.
The party considered to be "far right" would never think about advocating doing away with universal healthcare.
The same for our main right party (Høyre == Right) would not attempt such a thing either.
Europeans can understand the Republican party through their own history. They're basically just corporate fascists. Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece all had very similar corporate fascists governments for many years and their policies, politics and backers very closely tracked those of the contemporary American Republican party. Whereas the Dems are a better spoken, slightly more watered down and cuddly version of the same.
Literally all the fascist regimes in the countries you listed were Military coups in their origin and were all fairly economically inept regimes. They also included all out media censorship, political prisoners, prisoner torture and interrogation, political assasinations, and genuine terror across civil society.
Could it be a matter of comparing Policies vs strategies/tactics?
Unfortunately the US will never have the level of political diversity that is the norm in parliamentary democracies because FPTP heavily favors two party rule, and the two parties will never let go of FPTP for fairly obvious reasons. So the issue is, how can we make our system more dynamic given that the best solution, a change to our elector system, is probably out of reach?
I think people spend more time consuming the news than becoming familiar with the actual policies and laws of countries.
In case you anyone misunderstands my claim, these are the facts: the US has more progressive taxation both on income tax and corporate tax, a minimum wage, and more liberal abortion laws (case vs planned parenthood ruling).
Taxes are in general higher, for example the VAT is 25%.
I'm not particularly an expert on Norway though, I might be off a bit and basing this more on countries like Sweden/Switzerland/Germany, etc.
I don't think it's too far fetched to say that the US does not really have a "left" party, quite a few intellectuals would be saying this as well (e.g. Chomsky or Briahna Joy Gray).
For the rest of the states some are some are not.
States https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/overview-abo...
vs
Norway https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1975-06-13-50
For immigration, the US has much higher figured if you add it all together. US also offers many more way to move there.
If you look at asylum however the US takes in 0.02% per population per year. Whereas Norway has taken over 0.7% per year.
The US population is made up of 14% vs Norway at 15% immigrants The immigrant population in Norway is far more diverse than it is to the US.
https://www.faktisk.no/artikler/z4nyj/norge-er-et-av-landene... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat... https://www.faktisk.no/artikler/z4nyj/norge-er-et-av-landene... https://www.imdi.no/tall-og-statistikk/
Minimum wage is true, in that the US has one and Norway does not. However the negotiated wages between the unions and the business sector have been "almengjøring" which means they dictate what wages need to be, even when the company you work for is not a direct part and even if you as an employee do not belong to a union. That is backed by Norwegian law
This is per sector. Most sectors now have it Some dont. Where it does exist, it is far higher than the US minimum wage. You cannot live on minimum wage in the US. So it is below what is reasonable and humane.
A big problem is in the construction business were the builders love to hire Eastern European migrants for a lot less than what the law dictators. This is illegal but very common
As far as taxation goes I dont have time right now to really dig into it. I know I pay about 42% taxes on my income. 25% VAT on most things, but there are exceptions, for healthy food and many other things.
I paid a lot less in the US :)
I guess you can force people to take parental leave, but then that just further encourages discrimination against people of child bearing age.
Even if the federal government picks up the bill, it's still a discontinuity in business, something an employer would want to avoid.
> Withholding paid family leave isn’t just bad for parents and babies, it’s bad for business.
If this were true businesses wouldn't have to be forced to provide parental leave. You can point to a study that "proves" that parental leave is good for business, and obviously it makes sense as a benefit. Some companies pride themselves on their parental leave and use it to attract candidates. But obviously it doesn't make sense for many businesses, otherwise they would all be doing it.
It's like one of those things that promises everything to everyone. Like veganism. Proponents tell you it tastes better, is great for your health, is better for the environment, and is cheaper. Obviously it can't be better in all dimensions otherwise everyone would be doing it. You see the same thing with minimum wage. How paying people more is great for everyone and the business. Sometimes it is, but there are trade offs and someone that doesn't run a business can't do a "study" and tell you the optimal policy for your business
When you can't even have a conversation in good faith about the tradeoffs in a policy, nothing will change.
Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. There's no clear solutions
I truly don't understand this, and each time I see the stats on it sit in even greater disbelief. Why would anyone turn down the opportunity to spend, for an awful lot of companies, fully paid time off work to spend time with their new family?
Guessing I'm much less "career-minded" than of lot of these guys, but it makes zero sense to me that you wouldn't stretch this benefit as far as you can do.
Edit: appreciate all the comments! Main themes are to reiterate it's not an easy task by any stretch, and fears (both real and assumed) over retaliation for time out. I'm not yet lucky enough to be father, but I still can't square either of those between work and family time.
Higher level, the value of children to parents is declining based on total fertility rate declines.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/paid-paternity... (Men who receive paid paternity leave in Spain want fewer children, study finds)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... (Does paternity leave reduce fertility?)
As opposed to environments without prophylaxis options and where women do not have financial independence, where it was implicitly borne by women.
I enjoy work and the comradery of my co-workers. I was working from home anyway, so there was no long commute. And it gave me something to do. I'm a programmer. I like my work. It gives me an outlet for my creativity and allows me to bond with co-workers. And I care about the product and deliverables I'm working on. I don't like letting my coworkers down as they cover for me.
I took another 2 weeks after my wife went back to work.
So for the second child I had to get VP approval to take a whopping 3 weeks (unlimited* PTO, technically no paternity leave). That was essential because now there was childcare, chores, and baby care involved. It should've been more like 8w.
By indirectly, I mean that when they compare me to the other people they don't seem to be prorating my "stats" for that extra time off.
I doubt many people shorten their paid time off simply because they love work so much.
I still got a lot of pressure from my bosses to cut it short and work part time while I was out. One of them even questioned my "loyalty to the team" at a holiday party that I attended in the middle of it (I went specifically because I wanted to get face time with people and not be distant).
The way a lot of corporations work, you have the "policy", and then you have management interpreting that policy. Things like leave of any kind might be technically "guaranteed", but they come at a cost of fewer individual contributions to projects and lower billable rates. And, at the end of the day, you report to someone who only cares about his budget, who has control over your project assignments.
So after that, suddenly my first year was only 6 months long (something something fiscal year), and it did count (blah blah blah pattern extrapolation) and I wasn't getting good assignments (constantly set up to fail, and even though I always pulled it off, I'd get terrible reviews for the smallest of issues). Eventually, I got "laid off". Really, I was fired because my billable rates was too low (and my billable rate was low due to retaliation for having slightly more going on in my life than living at work), but the company schedules regular layoffs to axe the lowest x% of employees. I guess that is one silver lining of that awful, Metropolis-esque machine: they gave me a (very small) severance on the way out.
So yeah. You can have a company "guarantee" leave, but still will structure a reason to get rid of you.
It is an answer. For example, my cousin in England was able to spend a year breastfeeding her daughters without having to go through the arduous process of pumping. Their family is alive and well, and so is the UK.
Also, I have never once heard anybody here complain that maternity/paternity leave is in some way damaging the company/employee/economy - just stuff that happens in the office.
perhaps pentagon should get involved in parental leave policy. they could probably fund it outright out of their black budget.
Your argument makes me think about this satiric article : https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...
I live in a country where it's exactly what we do, and it's fine. I took a 7 months paid parental leave as a dad recently and my company congratulated me for the birth.
In fact, Mexico has 12 weeks. And Greece has 40. I'd rather be a parent in the US than Greece or Mexico. Policies don't exist in a vacuum.
Unemployment in Greece is nearly triple what it is in the US (14%).
Policies don't exist in a vacuum. Everything has trade offs. Until you accept that you'll never have a productive honest conversation.
Resources do not come out of thin air. Something has to happen for it to change:
1) Govt provide income to family engaged in child raising activity. -Need high level of tax base and political support to actually fund it.
2) Govt open free and quality child daycare. - Again need political support and competent administration to do it.
3) Force private employers to pay. - Only business survive are with high income and revenues. Not gonna work with conservative politics.
4) Go back to old joint family structures where grandparents stay in same home with couples and provide "free" child care. - Needless to say absolutely not gonna work. Its antithesis of progressive vision of society.
5) Keep giving examples of other countries. Useless until one look at whole societal structure and find why many other things work in USA but not in those countries.
Could you expand a bit on this? My impression was that it just became a cultural norm in places that could afford this, driven by the basic need to cultivate own "spaces".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemploym...
All else being equal, providing a large benefit that's most likely to be exercised by one type of worker will discourage employers from hiring that type of worker.
This shouldn't be complicated or controversial. It's basic incentives.
This implies that Greece's unemployment is a result of their parental leave policies, which is, of course, not true at all.
Greece is used as an example particularly because of its bad economy; If a country that's doing as badly as Greece can do it, why can't the US?
If you want examples of "successful" economies doing it, there are plenty of those too.
Any tax financed benefits for everyone like this, pensions, maternal leave, unemployment, health care etc are really just an institution forcibly saving money for you, on your behalf. So that you don't have to be responsible for saving money yourself, and don't have to take the risk of over spending or mismanaging. And for that service you will pay the price of salaries for all the people working in these institutions.
What's even the upside if you're just trading universal tax to paying a for-profit corp monthly instead? Skipping the queue through wealth instead of need?
The upside like I said, is that you save all that unnecessary work in the bureaucracy around the parental leave systems. Just look at sweden for example, it's a huge mess around the parental leave, they have a centralized agency now to micro manage every single household in the country with exactly how many days here and there, they will stay home with their child. It's basically central planning for child care.
And there are tons of edge cases and contradictions and bugs in this, of course. It's even become somewhat of a virtual currency now these "days" that parents are given as a gift from the state. Every single family in the whole country is now basically a welfare case that has to be processed through this machinery, with all the applications, paperwork etc, regardless of how well they actually manage on their own. It's incredibly costly, inflexible and inefficient, compared to just giving people higher salaries and letting them manage their family time themselves.
Edit: and, surprise surprise, it's also abused and people game the system. Many parents for example use their parental leave at the same time, to make extended vacations abroad of several months.
Lucky for me I happen to be Swedish and can call you out on that absolute garbage FUD post that doesn't in the slightest reflect the general Swedish opinion of the parental leave system.
Du borde skämmas, dagisnivå.
some people don't have the liberty of that privilege. being poor is very expensive.
And Sweden has 480 days. Poland 1 year. Switzerland 20 weeks. Ireland 26 weeks. UK 52 weeks. Canada 50 weeks. Norway 12 months. Denmark 52 weeks. France 16 weeks for mothers and 4 weeks for fathers. I can go on. There's 120 such countries in the world.
BTW that leave is on top of 20-30 days of paid vacations each year and unlimited paid health leave in most of these countries.
Notice that most of these also have free healthcare and free or cheap university education. Which is also "impossible" apparently :)
Also notice that some of these countries have higher or similar GDP per capita to USA. Also ALL of the countries I mentioned have lower gender salary gap than USA. And most of them have higher women workforce participation.
Somehow the argument used against paid parental leave turns out to work in favor of it :)
If you choose to ignore almost all developed countries other than USA (that have 20 weeks or more of paid paternity leave ) and cherry-pick Mexico as your counterexample - you should at least be aware what you're doing. You are searching for excuses to keep your ideological delusions going.
This isn't complicated, it works everywhere it's been tried, it's a simple change, the costs are marginal compared to benefits, even countries with GDP per capita one tenth of USA can afford it.
You sound exactly like this: "8-hour work week can't be done, the argument that other countries do it means nothing - in USA it won't work. I prefer to work 12 hours a day 6 days a week in USA than to work 8 hours in Wenezuela after all".
In the US, households have 10% more money than the second closest competitor (Luxembourg), and 20% more money than next closest (Germany & Switzerland).
I think that's a much better comparison than GDP (which isn't necessarily connected with employment), and shows how these tradeoffs work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
Realized capital gains, dividend income, income on rents. I'm not sure how the calculate disposable income. If I have 200M in stock that I could sell, is that considered disposable income? If I earn 2M in dividends that I reinvest, is that considered disposable?
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...
> Just do what the US does.
thanks, but no thanks.
It very much is part of the answer as it gives successful examples and as such proof how it's very much realistic to achieve, if effort was actually put into it.
Which is a much more constructive PoV than acting like even American problems are so exceptional that all of them need equally exceptional and unique solutions that no other country before could have figured out.
> Policies don't exist in a vacuum.
Indeed, that's why between Greece, Mexico and the US I would easily chose Greece, which has nearly half of the infant mortality rate of the US [0].
It's a tradeoff. It might be a better tradeoff for society as a whole but this idea that there aren't some cons to doing it that way is just false.
Personally, I think if your company was able to do without you for 7 months then they don't need you as an employee. My guess is that your salaries are much lower than someone would receive in the US.
They should be able to do without an employee for a few weeks not over half a year and be forced to continue paying this individual.
What this does is affect small businesses very badly while giving the upper hand to large corporations that can afford it.
I mean it definitely is, since 186 other countries in the world do offer paid parental leave. The United States is a huge outlier, especially given its wealth.
It is an answer, because it’s been working well for decades in other countries. Right now I have a man in my team taking his parental leave and I as a manager have no problem with it at all. When hiring I just accept this risk and keep in mind possible mitigations (temporary reduction in capacity and expences or hiring substitution or redistribution of workload etc).
There is a trade off in all things. Something that is being studied now, Abused children cost society a fortune in missed productivity, court, criminal, medical and social care. What is the cost for those not abused but just where the family is stressed for decades, what missed potential, what of those that fell into crime at the margin.
We forsake the growing of our adults at a cost later on. And 90% of that growing comes from the family unit. So we forsake the family unit at our own cost.
I am not saying we should all be the Waltons, but we should aspire in that direction. Schools, urban environments. Even seemingly crazy ideas like early start support, or therapy for couples every 5 years, all start to look like "stitches in time"
There may be no clear solutions at the level of "who pays for missed working days" but then we are privileging private businesses beyond the level their role in society is I suspect.
Or, despite the fact that they believe so deeply that time off to produce the next generation of workers and consumers is a net loss to their bottom line, they're actually wrong and are yet to discover this.
Parental leave should be a universal benefit for workers, period. Employers should foot the bill.
I think society should foot the bill for society-wide benefits. I do not see any reason to expect small businesses (or even large businesses) to have to worry about the costs of funding parental leave benefits, outside of having the requisite staffing.
Exactly, which is why tasking every business with calculating risks of pregnancies and funding for them is dumb. Just do it on a nation level, or at least state level.
It works in the UK and Europe because there is _some_ understanding that a prospering society at all levels can't be achieved by blind liberalism and some collective risk sharing is actually a good thing.
The long term interests of society, the employee and ultimately of the business is something that many business struggle to realize or care about.
So we have the government, whose power reigns supreme, who can compel the business to act. Sometimes this is necessary, because business managers aren’t always good at what they do.
My favorite example was something my local conservative radio media went insane over about 15 years ago. The state passed a law that requires employers to, in writing: (a) tell the employee what their job title is, (b) tell the employee what their rate of pay is, (c) tell them what their available benefits are, and what they cost, and (d) tell them what expenses the employee will have and what they cost. (ie, uniforms, tools) Dire predictions of doom were made, small businesses were going to be destroyed, yadda yadda.
But even then you're right that it's a struggle to get men to take the full available parental leave, often because "just" getting paid 100% of salary isn't enough. Losing X months of career progression is often seen as a bigger deal (and a not unsubstantial part of remaining pay discrepancies between men and women in some countries).
That doesn't mean you can't get significant improvements, though.
I live in the UK, and waking up to the harsh realities of how shitty parental leave provisions and nursery provisions are here compared to Norway where I grew up was not fun...
(And yes, some people will try to discriminate, and some will succeed. )
That's why many European countries are progressing towards giving fathers the same leave as mothers, and making it mandatory for both (e.g. in Spain mothers used to have much more leave than fathers, but they progressively increased the leave for fathers while also making things more inflexible - fathers used to be able to "give" their days to mothers, but that no longer works, and both must take at least six weeks mandatorily).
I don't think there is a clear-cut optimal solution for the problem and every solution has pros and cons. For example, mandatory equal leave for both means losing flexibility (and there are biological arguments that mothers need more leave). But I think it's a reasonable compromise to mitigate discrimination and bias.
It is always citizens that shoulder the burden one way or another.
Self: Pay with your own savings
Firm: Pay with higher prices and lower wages
State: Pay with higher taxes paid to the state
Fast forward to a rather late “happy accident”, and I thank whatever compelled me to move here soon after college.
Would I have saved more than the 18k EUR in parental leave pay had I been on even a non-SV US tech salary with US-only taxes? Yes.
Would I have had a whole work and regulatory culture around me that guaranteed that I could take that year, and come back to my choice of part-time schedule for the same type of work? No.
IMO this as well is something where the DevOps slogan "if it hurts, do it more often" should be applied.
The "discontinuity" of an employee leaving temporarily with months of warning in advance is the easy case. If that is a serious problem for your business, it's a failure of company culture and management. How would you deal with the "Hit by a bus" scenario?
If your organziation isn't shitty, so you can handle a woman taking maternity leave, you also won't get fucked by people getting sick, and can offer paternity leave and sabbatical options to help you attract employees which, newsflash, has recently become rather difficult.
Make it mandatory ?
In my country it's mandatory for my employer to let me take my vacation days. They are risking fines if they don't make sure I do and I can't give up on these vacation days either.
Have you asked any actual women about that?
Ah, the dark side of American exceptionalism. "Other countries do it" is absolutely an answer. We could, if we wanted to, peruse our way through the policies used in other countries and pick the one that best fits Americas needs and demographic situation. But that isn't possible if we put blinders on and pretend that the experience of other countries doesn’t matter.
It's why the Tea Party had limited success in the early part of the decade: they were willing not to participate. And it's why Democrats lost ground in elections (VA governor's race being the key one), and will be hit harder in the midterms.
We need steady incremental progress.
Anyway, businesses have had to be forced to not do things that turn out to be bad for their business, up to and including not killing their customers and employees. "Obviously it can't be better in all dimensions otherwise everyone would be doing it" is the ultimate conservative arguments, since it means nothing could ever change---obviously we have reached the optimum, right?
I bet over time that fraction would grow larger as paternal leave got more normalized, especially if the parental leave could be spread out over a few years (like it can in many European countries) instead of over the first few months.
Here's how the percentage of parental leave days taken by mothers and fathers in Sweden has changed over the years [1]. Note that between 2002-2015 each parent had exclusive right to 60 of the total 480 days of parental leave (12.5%), that has since then been increased to 90 (18.75%).
I worked with someone from a European company working in the USA. She started her full time job here while she was on an 8 month maternity leave from her old European company (which she didn't plan on returning to afterwards). It would be fucked if her old company had to eat 8 months expenses and then not even have an employee returning back after.
But we are also in population decline and that is worse than having decent parental leave.
She supported her point rather well, post pregnancy complications are extremely common and it shouldn't be a shocker to say you should have time to handle those.
I don't think this story shows that. This story involves a call to the doctor. The doctor says it's life threatening. Any person would choose to take off rather than die.
In fact, in my experience the people who die because they didn't see a doctor didn't know how serious their condition was, or didn't know they even had a condition. If anything, this story is a good argument for better patient education. After all, she had time off and still didn't pay attention to her symptoms - symptoms which were almost certainly required to be covered with the discharge instructions. So this is really an example of what paid leave looks like and how patient education needs to be improved.
"post pregnancy complications are extremely common and it shouldn't be a shocker to say you should have time to handle those."
This shouldn't be specific to pregnancy. This same logic can be applied to other medical issues. Is there really any reason to differentiate on causation when talking about medical recovery? There may be childcare issues that could support maternity leave, but those were not really covered here. So I would say this was an article mostly focused on appeal to emotion and theatrics (just look at that intro), not a well reasoned argument.
America's the only county that doesn't offer parental leave, it's not radical to say this leads to poor outcomes.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5g8eq/amazon-denied-a-worke...
You mean paid parental leave? You should be able to take unpaid parental leave under FMLA for medical reasons.
America is not the only country. It depends on if you mean developed country or some other missing adjective. Also, you said parental leave. Many countries only offer maturity leave, and not parental leave (maturnity + paternity). These also have other impacts/reasons than the medical point the original article makes.
I'm not sure why you linked that article. Maturnity leave refers to post delivery. Pre delivery would be prenatal leave, which isn't discussed here. They do discuss some medical leave here, which brings me back to the point about not making this solely about maturnity leave, and that the original article is more about medical side and not the other aspects of parental leave.
No working class person can just take 6 months off and still make rent.
In many countries you can take leave before having a kid or after. America lacks any such framework, or general worker protection. A family member of mine missed significant time from work due to a difficult pregnancy. Lucky the kid was fine, but her employer just fired her. *Yes this was illegal, but their wasn't any real recourse she could take*
Most of us here are very privileged. But no normal person can sell some RSUs and take off half a year
Where do we draw the line for when a person can be fired - 3 months, 6 months, 12 months? If one is out for 6+ months, their replacement would likely be up to speed and would have to be laid off (assuming same capacity). At some point it makes more sense for the person who is out to seek a new job and allow the current worker to continue.
I don't have RSUs, and I make a lot less than most on this site. I am lucky that my employer provides 10 days of paid family leave in a rolling 12 months. I also have disability insurance. The insurance is attainable for most people (depends on income level but could be as low as $10-15 per month). I think many people don't even think about it. It would be great if our schools taught useful stuff like this.
Such as an estimated 2.6 point boost in IQ from breastfeeding [1] (95% CI: 1.25; 3.98)
Yes, we (France) get a __mandatory__ 6 weeks paid leave before the baby is born, then 10 weeks after.
Dads get a little less, 25 calendar days after the baby is born.
Form an European standpoint this describes almost everything about the US quite accurate.
The US is in dire need of a social benefits system worth its name. The current situation truly can't be described as anything other than "barbaric".
Sorry for the hard words but it's just the reality.
> OK. So … what do you expect my employer to say about this?
> Congratulations! See you Monday!
Sadly accurate. I worry about my disability getting me fired if I have a bad episode.
- Paid parental leave is inadequate
- Child care is obscenely expensive
- Putting my child through a good school district might make me house-poor.
- I'm not sure I can save my child from crippling Student debt without killing my retirement savings.
- The looming climate disaster that my child might have to go through.
Given all these factors, it doesn't make sense for me to consider having children, I'd rather enjoy the life I have with my partner.
Climate disaster isn't an US thing. And it may strike Europe harder than the US.
But don't get me wrong, I'm all for you not having children. Fewer people is one way to solve our climate issues.
Plenty of women (and men) can and do just stay with their child, paid or unpaid. Many permanently do so.
Such as decreased or erratic milk production, clogged nipple ducts, engorged breasts, all which are greatly reduced when an infant feeds from the breast.
Not to mention the effects of oxytocin on the mother's healing body from having skin to skin contact with the baby.
The effects are extremely complex, I do not even see how you can measure them to claim dropping an infant off at daycare is "without issue".
If you also cared for an infant, you would also know they don't sleep 7 hours, and feed 1 hour. They feed every 2 hours, and they can take anywhere from 10 min to 45 min to feed every time. And every time, the infant will need to be burped, or maybe they will need to poop and the mom has to wait that process out, and then go back to feeding.
And to keep up this production while the infant is at daycare, the mom has to pump every 2 hours. Which means going to the pumping room, taking out the pump equipment, cleaning the pump equipment, storing (refrigerated or frozen) and transporting the breast milk, heating it up.
And no, there is not going to be a study that shows a discernible difference in childhood outcomes. That’s an immeasurable metric.
But it is known that babies extract milk and regulate milk production much preferably compared to pumps, from the woman and the baby’s perspective. And that benefit alone is worth the 0.1% a nation shaves off its GDP.
Sounds like you had some awesome babies. My kids took at least 1 hour to feed each time between latching, burping, puking, pooping, being fussy, and falling asleep while feeding. Seeing what my wife went through even with 6 months of leave, I would want my daughter to have better.
Obviously we can toss the kids in daycare and put the moms back to work and put the pumping burden on them. And then watch the data show the length of time kids drink breastmilk go down. Or we can step back and evaluate why the most “advanced” and “prosperous” society cannot give its women a year to raise their infant and protect their job.
The theory is nice, the reality is less so.
On one end of the spectrum you have certain European countries where women receive ample maternity leave. The right to have a family is protected by law.
On the other end of the spectrum you have certain countries where married women are not expected to work. The right to have a family is protected by traditional beliefs and customs.
But there is this nasty area in the middle where married women are expected to work but there's few workers rights - having a family becomes a privilege rather than a right.
Thanks to my parents they only went to daycare when they were about 4 years old - the baby section of their daycare took in babies from 6 months old.
To me it looked like those Romanian orphanages you saw after the fall of Soviet era dictator.
That's the baseline and no company needs to bother with any company-specific policy, pseudo-benefit. No company incurs any explicit costs for that.
This is not even the most family friendly country in Europe, btw.
Not really. Yes we have one year parental leave here in Canada, but the $$ value of that is not very high all things considered. It's not enough to live on on its own. Maximum in Ontario right now is $595 CAD a week for the highest income earners and lower than that (2/3rds of pre-leave earnings) for others, and rents and housing have climbed very high, so in reality you still need a working spouse to make ends meet on that.
So, no, we're not laughing, but we do have sympathy.
I will always celebrate the fact that we still have a nation on this planet does not mandate leave days. And I give full wish to people choose to move to countries with longer leave days.
It's a major pay cut if you have a high-paying job, so if you are a developer making $100k, you are going to have a large reduction in your standard of living. The monetary incentive is still very much to work as much as possible.
It's not like there's one pool of money, and some wizard distributes it.
Anyway, it's all short term thinking. We've had two revolutionary type events in the last year, the BLM movement and the Jan 6 movement. We currently have a general employment strike going on. People are pissed. Once they realize that the party divisions are mostly intentional and mostly cultural rather than economic, and everybody wants the same thing, who knows what will happen.
Things like roads (and even then there are many locales with crappy roads) are easy to justify. Things like parental leave and universal health care are hard because the percentage of those utilizing will be low and the disproportionate benefit will inherently fall with a small percentage.
It’s inherently a Ponzi scheme. Not to say that we shouldn’t participate, but it is what it is.
Add in the mindset of maximizing wealth and it makes even less sense because those who need is will be increasingly less fortunate and those who don’t can fund it themselves anyway.
The percentage of society deriving a benefit from a healthy workforce is very high. On the order of 100%.
Most insurance/probabilistic entitlements have the same property. It’s the only way the math can work.
I still don't agree it's a Ponzi scheme because it's not soliciting investments with promises of big payoffs unless you count paying taxes as investing. I would agree that is shares an important property with a Ponzi scheme. It will fail when it can no longer increase the amount that gets paid in.
Taxes in general aren’t a Ponzi scheme because many of the things paid for by taxes are continuous - less people, less tax collection needed. Tax collection for roads being an example.
Parental leave and the amount of taxes necessary is more contingent on the future population than the present.
By this definition, my job is a Ponzi scheme.
That's the secret sauce, and a smaller military
>lower incomes
That makes no sense, maybe don't sell your medicine for 10x more...but NO that would not be compatible with a pure capitalism
>and smaller populations
That's a NON argument
You think the math works if the population never increases? Consider how you’d fund it if the population decreased and immigration did not exist.
Also, again, lol that roads pass this criteria. No expectation of growth and expanding tax bases there...
Do you have an actual rebuttal?
Who are the "additional investors"? The children? In what way would parental leave had been a horrible misstep if they do not show up? Seems like a wash.
Or are the additional investors individuals and families who won't ever need paid leave, don't care about their neighbors, and don't care about the next generation of residents? If so, Ponzi schemes are when market participants indirectly spend money on things that they don't 100% agree to? So, like, every interaction in life outside of the household that one individual might fully dominate?
You introduce paid leave, which is fine, this creates more demand for children which is also fine.
So now you have more children. Who’s going to take care of these people? Presumably child care workers who are disproportionately women. And if those women have children as well? Who replaces them? And who replaces the women who originally were on leave?
If you think every industry can absorb 12 weeks (original proposal) of paid leave you’re in for a ride awakening. That’s if everyone only has a single child, by the way. Multiple children only compound the problem.
If you believe this problem will sort itself out you should consider that in San Francisco day care can be as high as 3000 a child per month. Keep in mind about 3 years of day care is necessary. So that’s almost 100k after tax. Even someone making 400k a year before tax would notice that. And that’s only daycare.
That being said this kind of Ponzi scheme isn’t really a big deal because that’s basically just having kids in a nutshell. However if you’re trying to convince your fellow citizens to pay for it you’re need some luck.
Given average salary where I am and roughly average tax rate, a typical household with two working adults is going to pay somewhere in the neighbourhood of $2m in tax over their working life. Paying 3% of that back to them is not going to break the bank.
There are other programs vying for their tax dollars, but I can't see any inherent reason why it requires population growth to fund the benefits unless as you look at a timeline longer than a single tax year.
As well, kind of an odd program to make that argument on. Parental leave is one of the few programs where you can pretty definitely guarantee the population growth since it's paying out for population growth that has already happened.
If a child were something that required no ongoing resources to provide for, then yeah I'd agree with you.
That being said I didn't really properly articulate that, so the way I described it I'd have to concede that perhaps it's not a Ponzi scheme.
It is not a Ponzi scheme for a number of reasons.
First, Ponzi schemes use money from new members to pay for older members. This might be a model for retirement spending (it isn't, see my next point) but it has the timeline reversed for parental leave. Parental leave is effectively funded by the fraction of the population not currently using it for the benefit of the fraction that currently is. It effectively serves a few different distributional roles:
a) It moves resources from your own pre-child and post-parental leave career to the period when the child is born. Many people who can easily fund a year of not working from their total career earnings cannot do so in their peak child-bearing years and there aren't any efficient ways of using saving or borrowing to shift that money either. For these people, parental leave uses the risk pooling and payment guarantee capabilities of the state to effectively borrow cheaply against their lifetime earnings.
b) It distributes resources from higher to lower earners, depending on how the obligation is structured there is usually a progressive taxation element which ensures a certain minimum is available.
Second point, retirement schemes are also not Ponzi schemes.
A Ponzi scheme requires an ever-increasing number of new entrants to maintain payouts. Pay-as-you-go retirement schemes require maintaining a balance between payers and payees which can be disrupted by changes to demographics but that does not mean that they are inherently fraudulent, just that in the presence of demographic trends which lead to a change in that ratio, they either need to reduce payouts, or increase payments in, or borrow to bridge temporary gaps. The difference is that in a Ponzi scheme, the changes required to maintain this are exponential and rapidly become impossible. There is no stable state to a Ponzi scheme.
I agree with this. However:
> b) It distributes resources from higher to lower earners, depending on how the obligation is structured there is usually a progressive taxation element which ensures a certain minimum is available.
This is irrelevant to whether or not parental leave is a ponzi scheme.
> a) It moves resources from your own pre-child and post-parental leave career to the period when the child is born. Many people who can easily fund a year of not working from their total career earnings cannot do so in their peak child-bearing years and there aren't any efficient ways of using saving or borrowing to shift that money either. For these people, parental leave uses the risk pooling and payment guarantee capabilities of the state to effectively borrow cheaply against their lifetime earnings.
Parental leave’s true cost is more than just the income lost. It’s the labor required to raise the new children.
If we say parents cannot just stay at home (in which case parental leave is unnecessary) then the people required to sustain the new children will be exponential in growth.
Children raised in this way will require childcare of their own but I don't see how the labour required to raise children goes up over time unless the fraction of the population which is children goes up.
This author's case is extreme, but any child benefits from more developmental time in the earliest stages.