TikTok exec said companies 'shouldn’t offer maternity leave' | Hacker News Reader

TikTok exec said companies 'shouldn’t offer maternity leave'

nypost.com

11 pointssamspenc11 comments

In the interest of equality for employment opportunities there should be a forced paternity leave such that women are not disadvantaged in employment hiring. Given this equality, it should not take the latin prefixes of "mater" and "pater", but "parens" - ie parensity leave. Further, since raising children is a societal obligation, this should fall as a burden on the state, as they will be collecting the taxes from the wealth produced by the well raised children. Therefore, Parensity leave should be a state funded legal requirement, and not an employer obligation.

You've described how it works in Canada!

https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/ei/ei-maternity-p...

Thats great, although I would say that I think that the maternity benefits should not exceed the parental benefits for time off, as this creates a different burden on an employer for two equally matched candidates. So, while a mother is arguably more deserving of a break, the long break creates a different cost to an employer which may negatively effect a woman who is yet to (or may never) have a child.

The US government doesnt think companies should give people maternity leave. Otherwise, it'd be a law like every other developed country.

The interests of corporations are opposed to the interests of society in many cases, of course maternity leave is not good for a company. Its paying people to do what? Nothing? How is that profitable.

Anyway, I guess we like it when our executives are not honest about what they think.

I'm of the opinion it should be akin to workers compensation insurance, as in a pseudo-mandatory requirement to be a successful business (eligible for contracts, retention of employees, etc) but without such a high level of bureaucracy/informal disincentive and with a minimal burden of proof. I would think insurers would love this; it's a virtually guaranteed income stream, and the chances of any given payout are fairly low from an actuarial standpoint, even if abortion were to become absolutely illegal. It's so clear to me that it would be profitable to provide this that I'm 100% sure I'm missing something.

Nobody plans to or wants to make a worker's comp claim. Lots of people specifically plan to and want to make a "maternity leave insurance claim". Lots of other people are extremely unlikely to do so. And, of course, about half of my coworkers would only be eligible for the paternity leave variant.

The chances are fairly low that my 64yo small business owner will be making a claim. They're quite high for my 27yo purchasing agent who just got a house with her husband, which they'd wanted to do before starting a family.

The key difference is that employers ought not discriminate between these groups. Workers comp strikes everyone equally and unpredictability, which works great with actuarial models, but you ought not just not hire married 20-40 year old women to drastically reduce your likelihood of a maternity leave expense...or worse, fire them about 6 months before they're expected to make a claim.

Health insurance has the same problem, as a 33yo with an 18-minute 5k and zero preexisting conditions, I'm unlikely to need much - especially if I don't skip my "annual" physical for the 3rd year in a row, but my smoking, obese, arthritic 59-year-old machinist has a serious doctor's appointment like every two weeks.

How do you run such a service both morally and profitably? At every turn there's an opportunity to sacrifice one for the other.

https://archive.ph/jbvSO

This is the closest thing I can find to a primary source on Joshua Ma's comments. There are only three words directly attributable to Joshua Ma in that entire article and any context for his comments is completely missing. If anyone has a better source, I would encourage you to link it.

A few more news articles on the same topic:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/tiktok-considered-censoring-it...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/08/tiktok-in...

https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-exec-bytedance-europe...

https://fortune.com/2022/06/08/tiktok-senior-exec-maternity-...

I've heard friends say the say thing privately. For example, a friend of mine is married but intentionally childless. He doesn't want to have children. He thinks it is unfair people (of both genders) get months of paid leave. I think he said something like you should get a couple weeks medical leave and then an option for more unpaid leave. It's also unfair to people who medically can't have children, who will work 100% of the year, but then people who have children get months paid leave.

America does a pretty good job culturally exporting its violently oppressive Protestant work ethic to the rest of the world … but this is why that’s bad.

This isn’t about the parents getting time off… good grief it’s like the quoted person has never even helped to look after a child under 1 year old… they are a full time job!

The socioeconomic policies regarding supporting families by things like maternity and paternity leave are there to support healthy future generations of citizens. These things are good, to use a horrible oversimplification your friend is being ageist against children under 1, quite obviously some of the most vulnerable humans on the planet, and a pretty shitty human being to anyone who is a new parent.

Its almost like living a particularly predatory version of capitalism wires people's brain differently.

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