I literally worked for most of my child's 8 month life, from her ICU room, I worked the morning of her 9 surgeries, I worked through the genetic diagnosis, I worked through being told my child has brain bleeds, neuroblastoma, is deaf, re-intubated, etc... if my insurance wasn't tied to my work, I would've quit in a heartbeat.
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.
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.
> It has engendered the kind of effort, loyalty, and performance that can't be bought, only earned.
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.
I Germany it's 14 months total (if both parents take at least 2 months, otherwise it's 12) & it still felt like too little! I wish I could have spent more time with my kids when they were babies but I had to go back to work.
I can't edit this post, but I just want to add that I feel incredible lucky that I was able to work from my child's bedside at all.
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.
Sorry to hear - you did the best under circumstances - you could not help her medically or otherwise but did the only thing in your control - make sure the insurance coverage was there.
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.
it's so depressing working a good job in the imperial core and having it be like this. The generations of exploitation and extraction we've waged against the natural world and the people outside of the imperial core would at least make some sense if we all got to have the good stuff stuff but we don't.
I've heard it stated as: you're always 3 terrible months away from being destitute, but you're never 3 great months from being a billionaire. Let this inform who you have class solidarity with.
Did you ask for an extended leave of absence? Many employers are a lot more humane than a lot of employees give them credit for, whether they're bound by law or not.
I created a throw away for this, but during a recent family emergency, my small 100 person company decided to fire me rather than allow my request for 3 months off without pay. They could easily have supported it, and I was a good employee, but instead I heard now they've replaced me with an Eastern European contractor for cheap. So rather than help me in my time of need, after I had saved their ass from some other crappier contractors in the preceding year, they took it as a chance to cut costs. They had also just gone public and have a huge war chest from that, so it isn't like they were strapped.
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.
US? FMLA? Just curious if you felt you couldn't take it due to company culture or if it just didn't apply to you? Either way, a horrible experience for you I know. I’ve been fortunate to work with folks that are family friendly when things like this arise. I can’t even imagine opening my laptop while in the hospital and in that headspace.
Yeah, in the US. I had 2 weeks-ish off total and random days/hours when there were big procedures, but was "saving" the rest for when my wife returned to work. My child was chronically sick (but worse than I/we knew), and I had no idea what the future had in store for us, I was worried if I "used" it all, then I'd be forced to work from home and care for my child.
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.
It's times like this that I'm happy to pay my taxes for the NHS. Everyone gets ill, cares for someone who gets ill, or is someone who is just very unfortunate in life.
Our health is the most important thing we have, and we should look after that
I hate evoking empathy/sympathy, but with my child being gone, I really think it's important to share the real story and things that made our/my situation worse.
> if my insurance wasn't tied to my work, I would've quit in a heartbeat.
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.
I really cant understand the logic of forcing women back into work after 2-4 weeks.
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.
I think the core of the problem has a few basic parts:
* 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.
Renters are paying all the costs imposed upon landlords. Many people have perfectly valid reasons to want to rent housing rather than being coerced to buy by bearing the impact of huge taxes on rental property.
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.
This was attempted in New York City and failed miserably.
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.
Regulations must be altered to encourage building sufficient housing where it's wanted.
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.
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.
I wonder how much this would change if parental leave was also granted to fathers at similar or equal rates. The article mentions postpartum issues -- this is stuff that isn't really mitigated by having one parent alone care for a kid. If you're struggling with depression by yourself in the house with a kid... it's nice to have more people around to help. Even if you're not struggling with depression, having people around to help with care can let you avoid the worst parts of the whole 3 hours of sleep a night thing.
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.
> All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood.
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)
Perhaps this is a case of metrics getting ahead of reality. Some circles have taken as an axiomatic truth that any disparity in wages between males and females is an intrinsic scandal. Perhaps there are some reasons for that, for example the tradeoff between forcing mothers back into the workforce vs. giving them ample time (order of 12 months) to recover and take care of the new born. For the not parents out there, a new born requires feeding every 2-3 hours. Expecting a mother to feed on that schedule and perform as an employee is inhuman.
> is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases
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.
> Subsidize me until they are in public school and I’ll high five you.
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.
You are asking for an incredibly high amount of welfare, essentially "everyone else in society should pay me for 5 years because I chose to have a kid". I'm choosing to have a kid too, but I'm taking the personal responsibility path of saving and paying for it on my own. Perhaps there is some middleground, but 5 years is absolutely absurd.
Maybe we should look at why three sectors of the economy have had insane cost growth for three plus decades (housing, healthcare, education) and fix that instead of trying to band aid the negative consequences?
You mean there's a choice?! Cool, I'd be happy if we simplyjust fixed all the massive, complex problems of the entire economy over just having parental leave.
Reality. Way too many people only can make ends meet by both partners being full-time employed - and in some cases (such as shown by a recent Last Week Tonight episode) even that is not enough to prevent being homeless.
"forcing women back into work" - I think it is simply a matter of money, not forcing. If you can afford it, you take the time off, if not, you go back to work.
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!
>>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
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.
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.
> It seems reasonable to me that the result of this private choice should not be the burden of others.
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.
An extremely impractical solution for majority of Americans who don’t want to uproot their life.
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.
This isn't practical advice for most people and a significant fraction of the people affected are not looking at anything like a 3x pay cut, especially when you factor in the significantly greater amount we pay for healthcare, which parents will likely use more than they previously did.
I think lumping together all European countries like that is not really helpful: not many european countries have a median income one third of the american one, and some are even higher than the US one.
> 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.
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.
So UK maternity leave is shared. Its a year with 6 months "pay"
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.
Give the benefits to dads too. 4 weeks for the first kid is challenging. It could be different for 2+ kids, but remember that every child has a few complications when they are born, that. Fade away after a while.
Maternity/parental leave is typically paid by the state, not by the employers. If both parents can take a leave, then it does not discourage hiring women.
Yeah, sure. Only the american libertarian knows how things really work.
All those other countries are stupid, and because of their stupidity, look at them, all the women are out of the labor market.
You might not have to "keep saying it" if you gave a little more context and detail as to what you're on about. That, and explain the acronym for those that are under, oh, about sixty years old.
There is nothing wrong with parental leave, but I don't see a compelling reason to have it be mandated by law.
If company wants to offer it, good for them. It may help retaining senior employees who reached the phase in their life when they want to have children.
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.
I don't think companies should be involved in people's personal lives at all, it's out of scope. The state is the only one that can subsidise a particular constellation of family life. You would open up to all kind of different excuses for why people should get special treatment in the work place because of their private life.
Old family wisdom: There is no "normal" for normal (meaning non-C-section) childbirth. A mother's physical and mental recovery timelines will vary (possibly widely) with each birth, and assumptions that it'll just keep getting easier tend to end badly.
(C-sections are somewhat more predictable on the physical recovery side...but do not lack for issues of their own.)
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.
I have an 18-mo old now. My company "generously" offers 2 weeks of paid parental leave. I went through similar conversations as you, only I was merely asking to use 2 weeks of PTO after my 2 weeks of paid parental leave for a total of 1 month of time off. My management and HR refused that request, I was told that my option was take the 2 weeks of paid leave and then you can take unpaid leave (the legally mandated FMLA). Due to "project schedule" they could refuse my PTO but legally they were not allowed to deny unpaid FMLA. Truly a despicable amount of leverage. I was also told by my manager at the time how atypical my requested amount of time was and was asked why I needed that much time since I wasn't the one giving birth. I too am astonished at the typical amount of parental leave used/requested by men in the US. It seems like a very deep cultural issue.
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.
The US is full of psychopaths. Just look at the comments in this thread. This amount of backlash against even maternity leave would be incredible in civilized countries.
I'm about a month behind you, but the difference is that I'm in Canada. I'll be taking 8 weeks, and most people are asking "is that all?".
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.
This is what Americans have never kind of enjoyed about "big government" (i.e. government heavily regulating some society rules): Private companies will always strive to minimize losses, and individuals have pretty tiny leverage force to negotiate. The government is capable of implementing laws fully in favour of such individuals, and maybe also unions could get more leverage, but they are also seen in bad light in the US.
Without knowing your company in detail, based on what you describe and general business practices, I'd be willing to bet that they'd fire you in no time if you ever stopped providing value for them. So why be loyal at all? 8 weeks is crumbs, and you even had to fight for that. I mean if you've been a solid employee for X years, briefly asking for a bit of time off for a life changing event should be absolutely fine, instead of the miserly response you describe. Just a bit of outsider's perspective, but I'd say you're hardly working with people who really respect you beyond their bottom line.
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.
It's a business relationship so I don't see why "they'd fire you in no time if you stopped providing value" is always thrown around as a negative. Of course that's the case. You'd stopped working in no time if they stopped providing value to you too. As it should be, from both sides.
You can have loyalty and still understand that there's a social/informal contract in place (and maybe a formal one in some places).
My former company enacted a paternal leave policy around the time MSFT required suppliers/partners to offer them in order to continue doing business with MSFT.
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.
I am sorry to hear this. As a recent father myself, I find the fact that comparatively few fathers here in the US do (or can) take this leave very sad. The act of caring for our newborn is how we form our attachments and love, and it is ultimately a loss for the dads that choose not to participate in the caring. My dad never really took care of me as a baby (in the feeding, diapers, etc. sense) and is squeamish/ not able to do it with our own child now. Again, a loss for previous generations of men.
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.
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.
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.
It always surprises me how little companies think this through. They're willing to lose all your knowledge and damage morale over a trifling 8 weeks? Talk about penny wise and pound foolish.
Never mind that in this labor market an open role might sit unfilled for more than 8 weeks!
Good on ya - your partner will be forever grateful, and you’ll thank yourself as well for not trying to work while no one is getting a full night's sleep. Even if breastfeeding works out 100%, having someone else get some of those overnight diaper changes is the difference between holding it together and being a complete wreck.
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.
My major advice on this is to consider splitting into two chunks, one right away and one a little later after the adrenaline wears off, you start bottle feeding, and you can take over the night shift (feeding etc).
I could take 7 month off from my job - all I have to say is when - it's the law and I could not be happier.
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.
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.
In terms of abortion rights, immigration, progressive taxation, and a host of other issues the US is to the left of Norway.
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).
While you might be partially right (I highly doubt immigration), there is still a huge difference in how the welfare state functions. Healthcare is paid by the government. Education is almost free. If you're poor, retirement is paid. If you cannot work you will receive some benefits like housing. There is maternity and paternity leave. There is sick leave. You get five weeks of vacation per year (not including sick leave). The prison system is humane and makes more sense, etc. etc. The list is extremely long.
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).
When it comes to abortion law it seems dependent upon state,
An extreme example right now is TX.
(I think that will be overturned soon but it is still there for now.)
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.
It's really strange to think that the American left (AOC, Bernie) are fighting for such radical concepts as social healthcare, free education and paid maternity leave. I'm from the UK, the most capitalist European country and we had all three until we regressed on university fees thanks to our wonderful Conservative party.
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.
I agree with the GP comment that the GOP has no right wing parallel in Europe. But your comparison with European Fascism is both innacurate and historically disrespectful.
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.
One of my general beliefs is that political competition is necessary for healthy and responsive governance. Everywhere I've ever lived with single party rule has devolved into myopic and unresponsive governance. The exact details vary depending on which party had total control, but the general issues remain. A party that is competing for voters is one that produces new ideas, and tries to persuade voters that they're the best choice. A party that wins by default focuses on base service and winning primaries, which often doesn't worry as much about governing well.
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?
The illegal immigrant population alone in the US is estimated to be between 10 and 28 million. The entire population of Norway is about 5.5 million. Perhaps the two countries have very different political realities.
I believe parental leave should be provided, but I don't see how anyone expects employers to shoulder the burden of providing paid parental (in reality maternity) leave without an implicit bias towards hiring men (or at least paying women less). You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time.
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 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.
Again, saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. That's like saying why are incomes in Mexico so much lower than the US? Just do what the US does.
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.
Which country? What do you mean by fine? It might not affect you directly but there's going to be some negative to treating it that way. A lot of countries that provide services like this tend to have massive burdens on their health systems as well.
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.
> most men take only a fraction of the allowed time
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.
I took less than the allotted time. I was bored sitting at home. Much of the first 3 months is feeding the baby, something I am physically unequipped to do.
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.
I think you might be touching on a taboo that nobody will ever admit publicly: having a baby is no walk in the park, and in comparison sitting in a cubicle and answering a few emails can seem like a massive upgrade.
If you thought your boss would resent you for taking the full benefit and would rank your performance poorly, would you take that risk knowing that you've now got a very small person who is relying on you? You could potentially be limiting bonuses, raises, and promotions for an extra few days off. I'm not saying this is right, but I can imagine a reasonable new father feeling this pressure.
I doubt many people shorten their paid time off simply because they love work so much.
In most countries it’s not fully paid but a fractional pay setup for paternity leave. Some good companies top the benefit up to 75% of base pay. But bonus and stock are challenges. For many people being on paternity leave they earn 40% of total compensation which may be part of the reason many dads go back early.
I took all twelve weeks at my company spread out of the course of a year. 90% great, 10% work hassle. I manage 3 teams and it was hard to get some larger initiatives moving with me being out so much. But we aren’t good at leave like this is the US. Corp policies aside we as employees just aren’t good at it. But it’s the right way to go. And I wanted to encourage people on team to take the leave that was available.
I can think of a few reasons. Foremost is they feel threatened by the prospect of their employer realizing that they're not irreplaceable. Also they may love their project and want to be there for the next phase. Or maybe they just figure that their employer would be hurt by their absence and they'd feel guilty about.
When I took mine, I was told it was at a particularly convenient time because I had just started at the company (Deloitte, so huge corp) so wasn't deeply embedded in any projects yet, plus my billable time ratio "doesn't count in your first year".
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.
My career is basically non-existent. I realize that I have a job, not a career. I took my full amount. I think it indirectly hurt my rating that year. I took family medical leave this year. It appears that indirectly hurt my rating this year.
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.
Might be different in other countries, but where I live only one parent can take the full 18 months leave. For the other parent, its only a few weeks. In practice, the one that's paid less takes the leave, and that's usually the mother.
> Even if the federal government picks up the bill, it's still a discontinuity in business, something an employer would want to avoid.
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?
I don't think your analogy is a good one. Women go on maternity leave, not men. So if one group of people are the only ones who get hit by busses, and are in-fact expected to be hit by busses, who in their right mind would hire them?
> Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer.
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.
Not disagreeing with the point of this comment, but just as an aside, pumping is something that even mothers who are on leave do. Speaking from personal experience as the dad, I was able to feed the baby pumped milk for some of the many daily feedings instead of my wife doing the breastfeeding, which let her get a few extra minutes/hours of sleep when the baby needed to be fed. Both of us were on parental leave during this period. That tradeoff (getting some extra sleep vs. pumping) is not one that all parents would make, but it did help us get through the first few weeks of a newborn.
I think they mean it's not a good premise for implementing it somewhere else. Your mention of not needing to pump and being able to spend time with the kids are stronger premises.
>Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer
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.
> I believe parental leave should be provided, but I don't see how anyone expects employers to shoulder the burden of providing paid parental (in reality maternity) leave without an implicit bias towards hiring men (or at least paying women less). You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time.
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.
Where it works best in other countries it very much tends to be covered via taxation, combined with increasing pressure for providing benefits to fathers as well which are lost if not taken, coupled with strong legal protections against firing.
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. )
The goal of "the (political-)economy" is not to increase some number relentlessly.
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.
> You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time.
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.
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 obviously it doesn't make sense for many businesses, otherwise they would all be doing it.
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.
That line of thinking applies to everything, though: age, race, religion, disability. There is no developed-world country where employers don't have to be considerate of their employees needs, including the US, it's just that the US currently draws the line differently to everywhere else... just move the line a little, this isn't a radical change.
> I believe parental leave should be provided, but I don't see how anyone expects employers to shoulder the burden of providing paid parental (in reality maternity)
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
If you ask me, option 3) seems to distribute the pain to the most people, which does mean that singles who never get pregnant will be paying you to take leave, and most likely the benefits will be capped so that high earners don't get 100% of their wages, and those who don't work much the year before may get some average of salary earned, nevertheless I'm OK subsidizing fertility like this.
That’s the deal here in Germany (taxes pay for parental leave), and I was ok with it, in a high-minded “it’s good for the children” way despite looking like I was just going to be on the paying-for-it side.
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.
> You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time.
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 think the pandemic has handily proven that C-suite executives are really good at generating whatever reality distortion fields are necessary to ignore any evidence contrary to their own personal comfort and how they "always did things".
I'm trying to figure out what "further encourages discrimination against people of child bearing age" means...
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?
> Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. There's no clear solutions
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.
The so-called "progressives" in Congress couldn't even get paid leave in the transportation bill because they have no spine. It just shows how badly this country is fucked by corporations
> Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. There's no clear solutions
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).
I think there should be more leave but it needs very strong federal subsidies.
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.
Does that not encourage people to then become baby factories? If you know you get 8 months paid leave every time you had a baby, why would any man or woman go to work again? They would just sit at home and breed.
Even accepting the tradeoff you posit, the basis of this argument seems to be that given the choice between guaranteed maternity leave and marginally higher expected pay, women should prefer the latter, or at least not be forced to chose the former.
Yeah I agree, we need socialist child care and socialist health care (and pretty much everything else should be free market). The sooner we decouple basic health and child care from employers, watch how many people quit their jobs to stat businesses.
While I agree that family leave is a good thing and needs some discussion about how to implement/fund it, I really dislike the title. It's a real stretch to claim that if she didn't have paid leave that she might be dead. The real root of the issue is that she should have been paying attention to her symptoms. One could even make the arguement that if she needed to go back to work sooner, that the symptoms would have been more disruptive and could have lead to addressing them even sooner. There are good arguments for family leave, but her story and the way she tells is not one of them.
Given my working class background, she's spot on. If you don't have paid leave, you don't have time to see the doctor. Thousands of people die every year just because they don't have time to see a doctor since they're too busy making Subway sandwiches or whatever.
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.
"Thousands of people die every year just because they don't have time to see a doctor since they're too busy making Subway sandwiches or whatever."
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.
I agree, the only way the author's premise makes sense is if she was given bad information, and she did not bother to research anywhere else. With both of my wife's pregnancies on both coasts of the US, we were told to immediately call the doctor if bleeding persisted after a couple weeks. You are even told exactly what the bleeding should look like and how its characteristics should change over time, and if it deviates, to call the doctor.
Apart from the very obvious argument that parental leave should be a human right and is essential to women's rights, the HN crowd might appreciate that there are significant individual and societal long-term benefits to mothers being able to care for their newborns.
Such as an estimated 2.6 point boost in IQ from breastfeeding [1] (95% CI: 1.25; 3.98)
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for sharing this story, I'm so sorry this happened to your family.
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.
Our health is the most important thing we have, and we should look after that
Dead Comment
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Subsidize me until they are in public school and I’ll high five you.
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.
We don’t need this tied to an employer like health insurance as this is something that benefits us all.
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.
Rents are too high, and wages are too low.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
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.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
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.
(C-sections are somewhat more predictable on the physical recovery side...but do not lack for issues of their own.)
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can have loyalty and still understand that there's a social/informal contract in place (and maybe a formal one in some places).
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.
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
Dead Comment
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.
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.
Never mind that in this labor market an open role might sit unfilled for more than 8 weeks!
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Dead Comment
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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?
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.
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.
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.
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. )
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is always citizens that shoulder the burden one way or another.
If you ask me, option 3) seems to distribute the pain to the most people, which does mean that singles who never get pregnant will be paying you to take leave, and most likely the benefits will be capped so that high earners don't get 100% of their wages, and those who don't work much the year before may get some average of salary earned, nevertheless I'm OK subsidizing fertility like this.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.
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%).
[1] https://i.imgur.com/FSOK5eD.png
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?
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 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).
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.
Have you asked any actual women about that?
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.
Such as an estimated 2.6 point boost in IQ from breastfeeding [1] (95% CI: 1.25; 3.98)
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26211556/
Dead Comment