4 ms·

Yes, it is...because the company is subsidizing your child and gaining nothing from it at all. You could work somewhere for a year, take a year off, then quit.

Yes, it is...because the company is subsidizing your child and gaining nothing from it at all. You could work somewhere for a year, take a year off, then quit. The company just lost tons of money and output. That's not sustainable for the company.

izacus 8y ago
How can a company subsidise a worker? That's just pay. (Also here in Europe it's standard that the pay for parental leave is covered from the social budget making financial strain on companies marginal.)
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Subsidize is not a government only term. Paying someone for nothing is subsidizing them. If government picked up the tab, it would be different...but in the case of the Gates Foundation that is not happening.
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    You could think of this as deferred compensation, in that policies like this make the Gates Foundation a more attractive employer, at no additional present* cost to them. [*] Or possibly future, if the employee does not have any more children.
    - partiallypro 8y ago
      Maybe if you forced the employee to sign a contract where they had to work there for X amount of years, which is something the Armed Forces do. But then enforcing that, and hiring lawyers to claw back money through the courts would be extensive and just bad press.
manfredo 8y ago
Maybe we're not on the same page here. Definitely, the company cutting paid child leave from a year to 6 months is beneficial to the company. I disagree, though, that this is beneficial to the workers or society as a whole because this benefits cut results in more women working. Such a justification necessarily implies that it's worse for a woman to be a full time parent than to be part of the workforce, and I can't bring myself to agree with that premise.
- kelnos 8y ago
  > implies that it's worse for a woman to be a full time parent than to be part of the workforce For an individual, that might be the case. A mother who feels incentivized to drop out of the workforce due to childcare might later in life regret not having a career. A better balance of incentives that keeps someone working while ensuring childcare costs are taken care of (or at least subsidized) might make for a better outcome. For society, well... who knows. You may believe that it's better for the kid to have a full-time parent in the home, but I don't think that's a settled argument with any degree of certainty. Certainly some amount of full-time parenting is great (some would say essential) for a kid, and lack of it can cause early development issues, but if -- just making up numbers here -- after 9 months, having a full-time parent only makes things 10% better for a kid vs. having a part-time parent and part-time third-party childcare, maybe that's okay?
  - manfredo 8y ago
    > You may believe that it's better for the kid to have a full-time parent in the home, but I don't think that's a settled argument with any degree of certainty I don't really believe either with any degree of certainty. What I do believe, though, is that parents should be empowered and equipped to make that choice for themselves. Which I why I don't see the positive impact in a company putting more financial pressure on couples to pick one of those choices is a good thing.
SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
So is vacation or sick leave a subsidy as well?
- partiallypro 8y ago
  In some cases, it is depending on the companies policy. If you get vacation accrued immediately instead of "earned hours" then yes. Subsidizing just means financially supporting. Companies subsidize a lot of things for workers, from college tuition, healthcare to special credit rates (at least at some insurance/financial firms that lend to their own workers.)
- adventured 8y ago
  Of course, there are a vast array of subsidies across employment in most every system. The issue is duration and reasonability of a given approach, which is open to a fair debate. Workers that are frequently sick are likely to be subsidized by other workers that are rarely sick. I'm not referring to pay, rather, to output. That's a form of subsidy. Does that mean there should be no sick pay and workers should come in sick? Of course not. What is the alternative to vacation being a subsidy? A god given right? That's absurd. It's plainly a subsidy and one that is widely supported and liked. Universal healthcare is a subsidy as well. Overwhelmingly the healthy subsidize the sick. The poor are subsidized by everyone else. It's nearly universally accepted as an approach to healthcare and yet it's definitely a system of subsidy. Subsidy is not inherently evil. Civil society is filled with all sorts of contracts between peoples, including subsidies between classes and people in different situations.
- x220 8y ago
  If the company is forced to provide it, it's a subsidy. If they provide it contractually, it's an employment benefit.
paganel 8y ago
> That's not sustainable for the company. It's not sustainable for a company that doesn't intend to stay in business for more than a generation. But for a multinational corporation the aging of both their consumers and especially of their workers is on the other hand pretty unsustainable. Just look at where Japan was in the late 1980s and where it is now, with no redress in sight.
- x220 8y ago
  >It's not sustainable for a company that doesn't intend to stay in business for more than a generation So 95% of corporations?
  - paganel 8y ago
    Google and Amazon are already more than 20-years old, Facebook is approaching 15, I guess, while Apple and MS are 40-ish. And these are technology corporations that are supposed to have a shorter shelf-life compared to big companies active in other areas of the economy. So corporations/big companies are here mostly to stay, and as such they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders that their consumer base doesn't physically disappear from under them in another 20 years.
    - x220 8y ago
      >Google and Amazon ..., Apple and Amazon Those are outliers and are not useful to talk about when discussing the economy as a whole.
      - kelnos 8y ago
        It's a bit disingenuous to toss out a hand-wavy 95% statistic and then similarly hand-wave away rebuttals.

izacus 8y ago

How can a company subsidise a worker? That's just pay. (Also here in Europe it's standard that the pay for parental leave is covered from the social budget making financial strain on companies marginal.)

partiallypro 8y ago
Subsidize is not a government only term. Paying someone for nothing is subsidizing them. If government picked up the tab, it would be different...but in the case of the Gates Foundation that is not happening.
- mattkrause 8y ago
  You could think of this as deferred compensation, in that policies like this make the Gates Foundation a more attractive employer, at no additional present* cost to them. [*] Or possibly future, if the employee does not have any more children.
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    Maybe if you forced the employee to sign a contract where they had to work there for X amount of years, which is something the Armed Forces do. But then enforcing that, and hiring lawyers to claw back money through the courts would be extensive and just bad press.

manfredo 8y ago

Maybe we're not on the same page here. Definitely, the company cutting paid child leave from a year to 6 months is beneficial to the company. I disagree, though, that this is beneficial to the workers or society as a whole because this benefits cut results in more women working. Such a justification necessarily implies that it's worse for a woman to be a full time parent than to be part of the workforce, and I can't bring myself to agree with that premise.

kelnos 8y ago
> implies that it's worse for a woman to be a full time parent than to be part of the workforce For an individual, that might be the case. A mother who feels incentivized to drop out of the workforce due to childcare might later in life regret not having a career. A better balance of incentives that keeps someone working while ensuring childcare costs are taken care of (or at least subsidized) might make for a better outcome. For society, well... who knows. You may believe that it's better for the kid to have a full-time parent in the home, but I don't think that's a settled argument with any degree of certainty. Certainly some amount of full-time parenting is great (some would say essential) for a kid, and lack of it can cause early development issues, but if -- just making up numbers here -- after 9 months, having a full-time parent only makes things 10% better for a kid vs. having a part-time parent and part-time third-party childcare, maybe that's okay?
- manfredo 8y ago
  > You may believe that it's better for the kid to have a full-time parent in the home, but I don't think that's a settled argument with any degree of certainty I don't really believe either with any degree of certainty. What I do believe, though, is that parents should be empowered and equipped to make that choice for themselves. Which I why I don't see the positive impact in a company putting more financial pressure on couples to pick one of those choices is a good thing.

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago

So is vacation or sick leave a subsidy as well?

partiallypro 8y ago
In some cases, it is depending on the companies policy. If you get vacation accrued immediately instead of "earned hours" then yes. Subsidizing just means financially supporting. Companies subsidize a lot of things for workers, from college tuition, healthcare to special credit rates (at least at some insurance/financial firms that lend to their own workers.)
adventured 8y ago
Of course, there are a vast array of subsidies across employment in most every system. The issue is duration and reasonability of a given approach, which is open to a fair debate. Workers that are frequently sick are likely to be subsidized by other workers that are rarely sick. I'm not referring to pay, rather, to output. That's a form of subsidy. Does that mean there should be no sick pay and workers should come in sick? Of course not. What is the alternative to vacation being a subsidy? A god given right? That's absurd. It's plainly a subsidy and one that is widely supported and liked. Universal healthcare is a subsidy as well. Overwhelmingly the healthy subsidize the sick. The poor are subsidized by everyone else. It's nearly universally accepted as an approach to healthcare and yet it's definitely a system of subsidy. Subsidy is not inherently evil. Civil society is filled with all sorts of contracts between peoples, including subsidies between classes and people in different situations.
x220 8y ago
If the company is forced to provide it, it's a subsidy. If they provide it contractually, it's an employment benefit.

paganel 8y ago

> That's not sustainable for the company. It's not sustainable for a company that doesn't intend to stay in business for more than a generation. But for a multinational corporation the aging of both their consumers and especially of their workers is on the other hand pretty unsustainable. Just look at where Japan was in the late 1980s and where it is now, with no redress in sight.

x220 8y ago
>It's not sustainable for a company that doesn't intend to stay in business for more than a generation So 95% of corporations?
- paganel 8y ago
  Google and Amazon are already more than 20-years old, Facebook is approaching 15, I guess, while Apple and MS are 40-ish. And these are technology corporations that are supposed to have a shorter shelf-life compared to big companies active in other areas of the economy. So corporations/big companies are here mostly to stay, and as such they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders that their consumer base doesn't physically disappear from under them in another 20 years.
  - x220 8y ago
    >Google and Amazon ..., Apple and Amazon Those are outliers and are not useful to talk about when discussing the economy as a whole.
    - kelnos 8y ago
      It's a bit disingenuous to toss out a hand-wavy 95% statistic and then similarly hand-wave away rebuttals.