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Holdout Jeff Bezos Confronted by Amazon Moms Demanding Day Care
- Endama 8y agoThis may be an unpopular thought here but it seems to me that these momazonians may seriously consider unionizing. If executives at major tech companies are not willing to meet the needs of their female workforce (both current and future) then it seems that collective bargaining would be an effective means of making their position more convincing. The risk is that companies may increasingly try and avoid hiring more women in the future; but it could also be that employers, who want to seem more socially responsible, may take the financial hit and invest in the up-front-costs in order to get access to a larger labor pool.
- ethan_robot 8y agoThis is a popular opinion, and in addition it is correct and good. If you're looking for a union the https://www.iww.org https://www.iww.org are a great place to start!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Pharmakon 8y agoA union with fewer that 6k members worldwide and an extreme ideology seems like an insane place to start actually, unless your goal is to turn people off unions.
- memmcgee 8y agoThe IWW's ideology is hardly extreme considering the prevailing ideology in the US. And the IWW is small, but their track record speaks for itself.
- Pharmakon 8y agoWhat track record do they have in, lets be generous and say the last 50 years?
- eesmith 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World#Return_to_workplace_campaigns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_Worl... and onward?
- Pharmakon 8y agoThat seems like a ton noise with very little, if anything to show for it. It still seems like the IWW is a weird place to start a search for unionization, or a model to follow.
- eesmith 8y agoI don't know what "noise" means in this context, especially as interpreted though the lens of Wikipedia where you are certainly reading through editor biases. You said the IWW has - as in the present day - "an extreme ideology". Where is your evidence?
- memmcgee 8y agoWhat track record do ANY unions have in the last 50 years?
- rebuilder 8y agoThe underlying assumption here is that women take care of kids, while men work. That's what an union should address IMO. Instead of maternal leave, have parental leave that men, too, can take. That way, the playing field is leveled more. Of course, there's no quick fix here - it's a deepset cultural issue, and getting men to take that leave when it's available to them still seems to take some pushing.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoIn order to make it work, I think you would have to force men to take the parental leave, otherwise the implicit value of a man would still be higher. If the goal is to mitigate the consequences of giving birth and taking care of an infant, and the consequence is that women have less time for work, then you have to force men to also have less time for work.
- thecopy 8y agoI don't know why this is being downvoted. It is certainly true in Sweden that while we have parental leave, men take a lot less, and the left wing parties are trying to create a law forcing men to take time off.
- rebuilder 8y agoYes, you probably need to push men into taking leave. Incentivizing may work better than trying to force them. For example, go a bit further than just having parental leave, and have some of that time be paternal leave that the mother can not take. You don't have to use it, but there's an incentive to. Of course that's not going to fully even the books. Men don't get pregnant. They're not going to breastfeed or recover from giving birth. But that doesn't mean that you can't make things better. Look at it from the perspective of the family: requiring women to bear the entire burden of childcare in terms of time off work puts a serious damper on their career prospects. By allowing and incentivizing the man in the family to also take time off for childcare, you improve the woman's chances at building a strong career. That should translate to higher income for the family.
- 49531 8y agoUnions are also like macros for action. All the work that goes into organized action is streamlined when you do it permanently as a union. It makes little sense to stick your neck out, and then wait until something goes wrong again and having to do all of the legwork all over.
- cma 8y agoThe government needs to mandate or fund it with taxes it so all companies are under the same burden.
- camelNotation 8y agoMajor banks do a good job with this. They recognize that this is not just a matter of gender equality, but LGBT equality as well. They give equal parental leave to both sexes for both birth and adoption (for family bonding), which allows flexibility on how time off is handled in traditional male/female childbirths, but also in male/male and female/female adoptions/births as well. If companies like Amazon don't catch up soon, they're going to end up on the wrong end of some very serious PR attacks in the coming years.
- drawnwren 8y agoAs someone who was adopted, this seems excessive. Unless someone is adopting a newborn, adoption carries a significantly different set of requirements than childbirth. Also, calling adoption birth for same sex couples is weird. My mother is my mother but in no world did she give birth to me.
- camelNotation 8y agoIt's not the same as birth, but it is the same as "we have a new child in our lives and we need time to bond and learn to live together" which is really what parental leave is all about. When my wife gives birth (I have a lot of kids), only the first couple weeks are really about recuperation from the birth itself. Most of that time together is about getting established in new routines. It's affording new families time to take their first steps as a family. That applies in both birth and adoption.
- tomp 8y ago> "we need time to bond and learn to live together" which is really what parental leave is all about I haven't had kids yet, but from what I hear from people who have, that very much not what parental leave is all about, at least in the very begining. It's all about being required to take care for an extremely helpless and vulnerable being who likely needs focused attention every 3-6 hours! It's exhausting (in the same way as working on an intensive care unit is exhausting, even if you don't even want to bond!)
- bob_theslob646 8y agoThis article is a waste of time. If they do not provide or offer what you want, go and work for someone else that does. Is that not simply enough? It essentially read as a hit piece against Amazon. When enough people leave that are detrimental to Amazon because lack of day care, then Amazon will change their policies. Until then, it is going to be business as usual for them. How hard is that to understand?
- tracer4201 8y agoYeah but that’s not going to drive clicks to Bloomberg. I’m being 100% serious here. To be fair, Amazon is now in the ad space and a direct competitor to Bloomberg, NYTimes, etc who earn a non insignificant portion of their revenue through ads. Why wouldn’t these outlets go after Amazon? Bezos could literally gobble them up with the next Amazon announcement about some acquisition.
- mars4rp 8y agoWhen was the last time this worked for the Average Joe?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Pfhreak 8y agoYou've never worked for a company whose mission or products are exciting to you, but who has policies you wish were better? There's a lot of cool stuff happening at Amazon, and there's a lot of reasons to stay there. I think it's absolutely correct to try and shape the internal priorities and culture, and use leaving as a last resort.
- mesozoic 8y agoWho wouldn't be motivated by the mission to make Jeff Bezos rich! I mean come on guys!
- mondo9000 8y ago
- tracer4201 8y agoI take articles like this with a grain of salt. It might be completely accurate or it might be heavily exaggerated nonsense to drive clicks. I work at another tech company. We’ve been in the news a few times about employees being upset and demanding leadership change some policy. Reading the articles, it gave the impression at least hundreds of people were demanding this change. In reality, it wasn’t even a dozen.
- Pfhreak 8y agoI wish them the best of luck. As someone who had to save two years of vacation time so that I could have any paid time off for the birth of my child while working at Amazon, I'm not surprised that Amazon is a late mover here. They've since changed their policies, but it definitely was later than their tech peers.
- throwaway6497 8y agoFor a long time, I don't think they even had a formal paternal leave policy or only had a just a couple of weeks for Dads. They are definitely a late mover in this area. They had to be shamed (Infamous NYTimes article, peers bragging their generic benefits etc) to provide better paternity and maternity leave policies. Current atmosphere of asking for these kind of benefits were almost laughable within the walls of Amazon 10 years ago; You would have either got yelled or scoffed at. Glad to see this effort. Hope they succeed. I know a lot of people in industry will be rooting for them, and many employees secretly hoping for them to succeed. It is good for Amazonians and industry in general. If the famously laggard company in providing good benefits is being put on spot to up its game to take care of employees, we should all cheer for Momazonians!
- ethan_robot 8y agoI'll just leave this here https://techworkerscoalition.org/ https://techworkerscoalition.org/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- marcell 8y agoIs this really standard at any tech company? When I was at Google they had some deal with a local day car franchise, but it wqs just a discount or something.
- BeetleB 8y agoNot sure that the article does a good job explaining this. In my company, they do provide this (or a similar perk). As an employee, you are responsible for "regular" day care, which I don't think is being discussed here. What is being discussed is backup/emergency daycare. As an example, my kid goes to some kind of school/preschool. But things happen (bad weather, etc) that causes the school to close on a given day. One option is that I stay home and take care of the kids, but then it becomes a gray area: How much of my time at home am I actually working? Should I use vacation time for this? So the "perk" is that I come to work, and arrange for some kind of "emergency" day care just for that day. My employer will pay for that. I think at my company, this is mostly optional. However, depending on your job function, you may simply really have to be at work for some reason on that particular day, so the company pays for the daycare for that day.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- itchyjunk 8y agoWhat does `backup daycare` mean? Do you have to prove you are using it as `backup`?
- PeterisP 8y agoShort-term day care that's available with minimum notice. As opposed to "default" day care that's expected to cover most days for months or years, and where it's possible to make arrangements long before you actually start.
- turtlebits 8y agoI don't get this. When my son was born I took plenty of PTO/WFH/sicks days due to child care, either helping out my wife catch up on sleep or doing mid-day pickups from school/care. My son is in elementary, and I still take lots of WFH/leaving early days with no issue from my employer. I don't get why backup day care should be offered - picking child care can be a pretty sensitive topic for the level of care/attention given to your child.
- MrStonedOne 8y agoAnybody else take issue with this groups insinuation that child care is a single gender issue? All this lip service to inclusion, and keeping an eye out for the minority, but nobody thought the minority of single parents, (single fathers) might take issue with a group called Momazonians. Ya ya, sure, most single parents, or working parents who have child care concerns, are women. Yet most firefighters are men but we don't call them firemen anymore because we recognize that as bad.
- Tactic 8y agoAs a single father with sole custody of 3 children, yes, I take issue. But I am not surprised, it is a pervasive and socially acceptable bias. I work in the student loan industry and there are loans specifically for single mother's... father's need not apply. It bothers me every time I see it. Heck, why my daughter registered an American Girl doll, they sent me an "id card" declaring me the proud mother of my daughter and her doll. So I guess I should be happy to be a mom.
- MRD85 8y agoI do, in a huge way. I became a single parent when my youngest was still a baby. I was juggling my career, my family, and my home all by myself. It was brutal and I felt incredibly lonely and isolated. Every time I tried to find services or groups for single parents it was always "Women's support services" or "mums and bubs meetup". Parenting babies solo is a difficult experience, there is a reason that a ton of government-funded support services exist. I can't grasp why they're all exclusive, however. On the other hand in my professional life, I was having inclusivity rammed down my throat. I was being banned from using certain words due to them not being inclusive in my professional life at the same time I was being shut out from everything in my parenting life. Not one woman I spoke to about my issues seemed to see the double standard, the response would be "oh, but most mums do the parenting". I don't think these educated women would have been impressed if I'd replied: "oh, but most men do the work so why do you want a promotion". Of course, I'd never say that but I wanted to. I was simply stunned how educated women who have spent their entire adult life pushing for inclusion could be so blind. EDIT: For the sake of presenting a fair argument I just googled support services in my area and it now appears that there are gender neutral ones available. This is a change from 3 years ago, which was when my experience was lived. Importantly the governments' official support services now have gender-neutral terms in their names. Most of the independent ones are still women exclusive but at least some change has happened. I feel good about this. I personally wrote to government members and influential media about my issues when they were occurring. I might have had a horrible time during my experience but hopefully, the next generation of parents has it better.
- dev_dull 8y agoOn the one hand I think women in general deserve this. The burden of raising our children falls disproportionately on women in our society (all societies?). The moms deserve a lot more than this in fact. On the other hand, the idea of children being stuck in a daycare all day every day because both of their parents have to work full time just to survive breaks my heart.
- turc1656 8y ago"You don’t want to be the one to step forward and say ‘I’m a mom with kids and I may not be as single-mindedly devoted to my career as everyone else." Then be prepared to lose that promotion to the single-minded person. This is part of the cause of what the article says is "women who otherwise might be promoted to more senior jobs". If there is someone else - woman, man, alien, whatever - who is equally qualified but who is also completely focused on their career, then why would a manager not reward that person and instead choose the person who is not willing to dedicate an unreasonable amount of time to work? What manager would not choose the person with more time to dedicate and is actually willing to dedicate that time? You're going to get more out of the singled-minded person. It seems to me this is really an issue for these women at home, not work. Why would they not have a conversation with their husbands about this? If the wives are making more money and have more prospects and opportunities for advancement over their spouse - the spouse should theoretically be willing to agree to be the one who makes the sacrifice when surprise child-related stuff pops up. Right? So it's probably likely that either their spouse is making the same or more, or they simply aren't having these conversations at home and instead are asking Amazon to make their lives easier. I'm not sold that this is an Amazon problem.
- danudey 8y agoThe problems are: 1. Society expects women to do this work, and devalues men who do it. This means that mothers are often left responsible for children, and thus they lose out compared to men (or women who choose not to have children, or haven't yet). We're effectively punishing women for continuing our species. 2. Without these sort of support structures in place, managers will look at women as a liability; "but what if she has a kid and then she has to miss work all the time?" Your argument is basically "these women aren't as dedicated, or otherwise they wouldn't have had kids". The reality is that having children is important, and women specifically shouldn't have to look at having children as the end of their career, or at least their career advancement, because Amazon refuses to provide something which other companies already do. Essentially this is an Amazon problem because it's only a liability at companies who don't provide this sort of opportunity, which other companies do. Amazon is basically saying "We don't care about what women have to deal with, that's your problem not ours" and talented women are going to learn that lesson and go elsewhere where neither they nor their spouses have to make those sacrifices.
- mesozoic 8y agoI'm hoping for doggy day care as well.