It impacted the business having him be absent for two weeks - I was forced to attend two meetings on his behalf and had to answer a bunch of email.
He could have chosen to man up and not take a vacation, or could have taken his laptop and attend meetings remotely and answered email. What a jerk.
Plus, benefits are often "unfair" in that they help some employees more than others. A sickly coworker gets more out of the health plan than someone who is as fit as a fiddle. Not needing glasses, I get literally nothing out of half of the "vision and dental" package. The tuition benefit does nothing if you're unable or choose not to take a course.
Because you do benefit from those benefits even if you choose not to have a child. The people working there would most likely not work there if these benefits didn't exist.
> it's impacting everyone else at the business negatively
Clearly it's not. The companies offering this clearly prefer the type of people that benefit from this. And you do as well, as the people taking advantage of this are clearly important to your job satisfaction.
Isn't his point that the asymmetric benefit is unfair for non-parents and thus contributing to a lack of job satisfaction for everyone left picking up the slack?
Solution: work somewhere else, where another benefit structure is offered
At the end they could choose to let the team be less productive. Business should already assume that they may lose an employee at anytime, or roadblocks may come up, so if they're assuming the teams are always going to be at 100%, that's probably not realistic.
The business could also: hire another manager, or promote someone whose been looking for an opportunity to learn to manage. If they do want to shift the load to other existing employees, ideally the business is structured so that other managers aren't at 100% capacity and can help fill-in temporarily. That's still a form of "picking up the slack", but if it's planned for, it's usually less an issue.