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Under parental leave; > You may also choose to take an additional 8 weeks leave unpaid. Note that this does not guarantee your employment. We're simply keeping

• scurvy 9y ago
  This is curious considering DHH's involvement in Basecamp and how often he espouses European ideals. You'd think they had a year of maternity and paternity leave.
  • tptacek 9y ago
    50 person companies can't as a rule guarantee year-long parental leave; that's just not realistic. They can do their best to make it work, but no company of this size in this kind of market can make promises like that.
    • kayhi 9y ago
      "Employees at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world, will be able to enjoy up to one year of paid time with their newborns during the child's first year after birth or adoption starting next year." - Business Insider
      • tptacek 9y ago
        The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation can promise a lot of things that a 50 person competitive startup can't reasonably promise.
        • zip1234 9y ago
          Also, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does not make a profit...
        • scurvy 9y ago
          I'd hardly call Basecamp a startup. It's rather long-lived and has a proven business model at this point.
      • huac 9y ago
        As of 2015 they had 1382 employees, a far cry from 50. They also had Bill Gates.
        • ryanwaggoner 9y ago
          Wow! For some reason, this blows my mind. I guess I had my mind a dozen people sitting in an office writing checks and compiling reports. I had no idea it was a huge global organization with 1420 employees and 8 locations around the world. In retrospect, it makes such perfect sense that I feel foolish :)
      • run4yourlives2 9y ago
        So basically a "super generous" company in the US is basically the average of the rest of the western world. That's pretty amazing in and of itself.
    • goseeastarwar 9y ago
      I think it's fair to say that given DHH's lifestyle, Basecamp can afford to do this. No judgement on how David choses to spend his time or money, I just think it's a little disingenuous to act like they're a normal startup. It's a well-oiled lifestyle company that prints cash.
      • pc86 9y ago
        DHH's money <> Basecamp money. Yes obviously DHH gets paid from Basecamp, and he's earned it. But just because he has a lot of money doesn't mean he can turn around and insert a massive expense into the company that turns a nice perk into a huge financial liability.
        • goseeastarwar 9y ago
          That's exactly what it means. You can choose to take a yearly LLC dividend of $2M instead of $10M to make sure your staff is well cared for. I'm not saying he should or needs to do that, it's just the economics of the situation.
      • tptacek 9y ago
        This is not remotely fair to say. To promise a year of leave for all employees, you have to be able to add headcount to cover the absence. It's not simply a year's cash salary we're talking about; it's a potentially uncapped obligation.
        • douche 9y ago
          Exactly, it raises the question of how often you can take (m|p)aternity leave successively. For a lot of people, if you're guaranteed a year to eighteen months of paid leave every time you get pregnant, and you get to come back to your job at the end of it, then when you get married and want to start a family, you could ghost for four or five years. I'm not sure that'd be a bad thing, in the grand scheme of things for society - childcare is an unbelievable racket, and we'd probably be better off if parents could actually raise their children instead of having to foist them off on strangers 9-5. But it'd be ruinous for businesses.
    • fooster 9y ago
      So how to non-US companies manage to do that? 51 weeks is mandatory in Canada for example.
      • slantyyz 9y ago
        Isn't the mat leave in Canada is funded by your employment insurance benefits? IIRC, the latest budget also extended it to 18 months too.
      • herge 9y ago
        It's paid out of unemployment insurance funds from the government.
        • fooster 9y ago
          I know how the leave is payed for (although most companies top up the meagre payout from the government). My question was to the point: > 50 person companies can't as a rule guarantee year-long parental leave That is clearly not legal or even true in most civilized countries.
          • cdcarter 9y ago
            The company isn't guaranteeing it. The government is.
    • ryanbrunner 9y ago
      For paid leave, you have a point - most European companies don't expect employers to foot the bill for a year of paid leave. For unpaid leave, however, this really is the norm outside of the U.S. Large and small companies manage just fine to "hold a spot" for anyone on maternity leave - either you bake it into your hiring plans, or you hire someone temporarily for the length of the paternity leave.
      • tptacek 9y ago
        This doesn't make sense. A single engineer might represent as much as 10% of a 50-person company's engineering capacity (many of Basecamp's employees are customer support staff). Forget about the cost of a year's compensation for them: if a small company loses an engineer for a year, they have to fill the gap. What do they do about that? Besides discriminating against anyone who might potentially claim family leave, I mean.
  • pc86 9y ago
    You'd think it would be the same for both parents. How does my employer know whether I am the primary or secondary caregiver? How do they know there even is a primary or secondary caregiver?
    • CalChris 9y ago
      You tell them.
    • erroneousfunk 9y ago
      It's also frustrating from a "feminism" perspective. Women need time to recover physically from childbirth and time to figure out a feeding/pumping schedule (even if they don't plan to breastfeed long term, there may be complications to work out). Those are things that men can't do. In order to get that time, they may need to legally declare themselves the "primary caregiver." Especially at companies like mine where "secondary" caregivers get only 2 weeks of leave and FMLA doesn't apply. You can't recover from a c-section in 2 weeks. But "primary caregiver" is a loaded term that goes beyond biological necessity. What if a woman's husband is quitting his job to take care of the kid(s) and the woman plans to return to work? Is she the secondary caregiver because she spends less of her time doing childcare than her husband? What if the primary caregiver is a nanny? Even if HR says "Oh, nevermind what you actually plan to do, if you're pushing the kid out, we can mark you as primary" it creates a terrible start to things if you have two parents who set out with good intentions to share childcare efforts equally. HR is telling one parent they're the "primary" and another parent they're the "secondary" and they have to sign legally binding documents attesting to this. It's just ridiculous. I think it's a great example of good intentions backfiring dramatically.
  • andreasklinger 9y ago
    in european countries year-long p/maternity leaves arent paid by the companies directly but by the government
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• josefresco 9y ago
  Agreed- they should clean that language up a bit to reassure those utilizing parental leave that the "leave itself" won't lead to their job loss. There should also be language that commits them to at least notifying and discussing "redundancies" with you well in advance of you returning from leave.
• tptacek 9y ago
  6 paid weeks parental leave for secondary caregivers puts them in the top tier of "major" companies, as does 16 weeks paid for primary caregivers; that's more than Google offered a few years ago. It's a bit disingenuous to zero in on the unpaid leave policy; what they're saying is, if you need more than 6 weeks, they'll try to work something out with you, and it'll probably be fine. They're being explicit about something most companies are opaque about.
  • dejv 9y ago
    As a father of 11 month old, I can't imagine how people can live with just 6 or even 16 weeks of maternity leave. Even after almost one year it feels like care is (at least) full time job, which would be quite hard to outsource. In my EU country you will get up to three years of paid maternity leave per child, so I guess I am just spoiled.
    • raz32dust 9y ago
      3 years sounds extreme. How is a person supposed to run a business with that kind of law? More than 6 months paid leave is too long from a business perspective. The government can tax and guarantee income, but I am not for paid parental leave > 6 months paid by businesses.
      • s73ver 9y ago
        Business isn't the only thing in the world.
        • SwellJoe 9y ago
          That kind of law would guarantee only quite large business can survive, which is counter-productive if one wants to empower individuals. I'm pretty much always on the side of workers in any discussion of labor vs. employers...but, there's also small business to consider. I think there's some kind of happy medium to be found, where workers are treated well and small businesses can survive long enough to become somewhat bigger businesses. In the US this is codified into law; rules and regulations that apply to large companies may not apply to smaller mom-and-pop shops. My company couldn't afford to give an employee more than a few months paid time off; we're a four-person company, and we'd literally run out of money if a quarter of our work wasn't being done for months. On the other hand, if we had a hundred employees, we'd barely notice if one or two people were out for a while.
• abhorrence 9y ago
  That phrasing is really bad, but probably is trying to make a distinction between the protections afforded by the laws like the Family Medical Leave Act, and how their additional 8 weeks unpaid leave work. Assuming Basecamp is even covered by the parental leave portions of the FMLA (which they may not be due to size and geographical distribution of the company [1]), someone can't be fired or laid off while on the 12 protected weeks of parental leave. However, in this additional 8 weeks, they can be. [1] The internet says Basecamp employs 50 people, which is the minimum requirement for a company to be covered by the FMLA. Additionally a given employee is only eligible if at least 50 employees work within 75 miles of where they do.
• TomK32 9y ago
  Didn't take long before they removed the bit about redundancy. https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/commit/695f0bff611b3d9a41f2eadb13de3b2487689b18#diff-6e062289acf3be12f76887968c6c4d6b https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/commit/695f0bff611b3d9a...
  • piqufoh 9y ago
    Wow! What a great company :-D
    • tptacek 9y ago
      Grow up.
      • piqufoh 9y ago
        So I should have spent more time adding that comment; it wasn't intended to be negative. I honestly believe that a company who can adjust their corporate guidelines that quickly is something to be admired, and the fact that they're doing it on such an important topic is excellent news.
        • tptacek 9y ago
          I'm sorry. I'm taking out a frustration about this whole comment thread on your comment. Again, I think Basecamp is being transparent and forthright about something that most companies are terribly opaque about, and it bothers me to see people cheering as they get less transparent so as not to trigger message board haters.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• mmjaa 9y ago
  How long would you tolerate not having a fellow staff member, upon whose work you depend, away from their position? 8 weeks seems like a long time to have someone away from work, or to have to cover someone elses job during their absence. A lot of things can go wrong when people are gone from their work environment in that situation. From that perspective, it seems more than reasonable.
• TheSmoke 9y ago
  i think there's one important point that people are missing here: basecamp employees are remote employees and you work 4 days, not 5 days a week.