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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 maternit

by bko 5y ago

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

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> 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.
- giantg2 5y ago
  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.
- goldcd 5y ago
  Yes. 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.
- baq 5y ago
  some countries understand that healthcare and children are a matter of national security. perhaps pentagon should get involved in parental leave policy. they could probably fund it outright out of their black budget.
- bluesummers5651 5y ago
  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.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Sure, but pumping once or every other feed is markedly different than pumping multiple times in a row over a solid 9 or 10 hour block of time.
    - bluesummers5651 5y ago
      For sure. Certainly once she did start going back to work and pumping at the office, it was less "fun" - the pumping room wasn't the most comfortable, she had to do it a lot more and cart it back and forth in a cooler, etc.
wastedhours 5y ago
> 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.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Lots of folks out there who don’t want to do newborn work or spend time with their family, anecdotally. It’s a chore, not a benefit. 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-leave-study-spain-men-fewer-children 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/S0047272718302299 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... (Does paternity leave reduce fertility?)
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Or children are no longer a byproduct of sex due to ease and availability of birth control options, and women gaining financial freedom, so the cost of children is finally allowed to become explicit. As opposed to environments without prophylaxis options and where women do not have financial independence, where it was implicitly borne by women.
- orangepanda 5y ago
  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.
parental 5y ago
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.
speedgoose 5y ago
> 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-nation-where-this-r-1846975039 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.
- bko 5y ago
  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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - speedgoose 5y ago
    Why US can't have better parental leave policies when Greece, France, or Mexico can?
    - bko 5y ago
      > Nevertheless, the participation of Greek women in the labour market continues to be 8-10 percent below the average of E.U. countries Unemployment in Greece is nearly triple what it is in the US (14%). Policies don't exist in a vacuum. Everything has trade offs. Until you accept that you'll never have a productive honest conversation. [0] https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wiwrsa/ersa06p257.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wiwrsa/ersa06p257.html
      - speedgoose 5y ago
        I don't understand the logic. Because Greece has some issues with its women employment rate, USA can't do anything about parental leaves? You even suggested in your initial post simple solutions for this problem, that work in other countries.
mrsuprawsm 5y ago
>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.
moron4hire 5y ago
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".
ivan_gammel 5y ago
> 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).
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
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.
maxehmookau 5y ago
> 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.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  >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.
  - maxehmookau 5y ago
    Ok, sure. I’m on board with that. Except businesses will probably have to pay higher taxes to support such a scheme. Businesses are the wealth drivers of our economy (as we’re so often told). Money either comes from taxes on them, or on taxes on the people that they pay. It doesn’t really matter. It’s all the same money.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      >It’s all the same money. Exactly, which is why tasking every business with calculating risks of pregnancies and funding for them is dumb. Just do it on a nation level, or at least state level.
      - maxehmookau 5y ago
        Sure. Which is the most pallatable to the US legislature to actually make this happen? It works in the UK and Europe because there is _some_ understanding that a prospering society at all levels can't be achieved by blind liberalism and some collective risk sharing is actually a good thing.
Spooky23 5y ago
Easy. It’s not all about them. 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.
vidarh 5y ago
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. )
Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
> 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.
rsj_hn 5y ago
> 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.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Unless the singles are OK with no one coming to clean their bed pan, then it is not just pain for them.
- MandieD 5y ago
  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.
ykevinator3 5y ago
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.
brazzy 5y ago
> 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?
- yeetman21 5y ago
  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?
  - brazzy 5y ago
    Men are not invincible robots. They get sick, they quit. They may even gasp like to take paternity leave. If your organziation isn't shitty, so you can handle a woman taking maternity leave, you also won't get fucked by people getting sick, and can offer paternity leave and sabbatical options to help you attract employees which, newsflash, has recently become rather difficult.
johnchristopher 5y ago
> 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.
kristjansson 5y ago
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. Have you asked any actual women about that?
ashtonkem 5y ago
> 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.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  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
  - lifeformed 5y ago
    How does "having a spine" force votes out of people who disagree?
    - JohnWhigham 5y ago
      Because if a caucus isn't willing to stand their ground to get what they want, then what is the fucking point? Not to mention it was one of Pete Buttigieg's things he was pushing for. Yet when asked about why it didn't get included, he just kind of shrugged his shoulders like he didn't really give a shit. It's why the Tea Party had limited success in the early part of the decade: they were willing not to participate. And it's why Democrats lost ground in elections (VA governor's race being the key one), and will be hit harder in the midterms.
      - sjg007 5y ago
        Dems are screwed no matter what. If the progressive stick it to the center then nothing gets passed and 2022 roles around and republicans trounce them with empty promises. And then 2024 will look even worse for Dems because nothing will get done and the Republicans will say vote for our guy and we will pass infrastructure. The Dems need something to pass now so that there is 3 years of progress. We need steady incremental progress.
mcguire 5y ago
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?
DavidVoid 5y ago
> 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%). [1] https://i.imgur.com/FSOK5eD.png https://i.imgur.com/FSOK5eD.png
cm2012 5y ago
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.
- yeetman21 5y ago
  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.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Unlikely. 8 months of paid parental leave would not encourage multiple births considering the true cost of raising kids. You've got to clothe, feed, and house them. But we are also in population decline and that is worse than having decent parental leave.

by bko 5y ago

lotsofpulp 5y ago

> 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.

giantg2 5y ago
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.
goldcd 5y ago
Yes. 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.
baq 5y ago
some countries understand that healthcare and children are a matter of national security. perhaps pentagon should get involved in parental leave policy. they could probably fund it outright out of their black budget.
bluesummers5651 5y ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Sure, but pumping once or every other feed is markedly different than pumping multiple times in a row over a solid 9 or 10 hour block of time.
  - bluesummers5651 5y ago
    For sure. Certainly once she did start going back to work and pumping at the office, it was less "fun" - the pumping room wasn't the most comfortable, she had to do it a lot more and cart it back and forth in a cooler, etc.

wastedhours 5y ago

> 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.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Lots of folks out there who don’t want to do newborn work or spend time with their family, anecdotally. It’s a chore, not a benefit. 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-leave-study-spain-men-fewer-children 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/S0047272718302299 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... (Does paternity leave reduce fertility?)
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Or children are no longer a byproduct of sex due to ease and availability of birth control options, and women gaining financial freedom, so the cost of children is finally allowed to become explicit. As opposed to environments without prophylaxis options and where women do not have financial independence, where it was implicitly borne by women.
orangepanda 5y ago
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.

parental 5y ago

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.

speedgoose 5y ago

> 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-nation-where-this-r-1846975039 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.

bko 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- speedgoose 5y ago
  Why US can't have better parental leave policies when Greece, France, or Mexico can?
  - bko 5y ago
    > Nevertheless, the participation of Greek women in the labour market continues to be 8-10 percent below the average of E.U. countries Unemployment in Greece is nearly triple what it is in the US (14%). Policies don't exist in a vacuum. Everything has trade offs. Until you accept that you'll never have a productive honest conversation. [0] https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wiwrsa/ersa06p257.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wiwrsa/ersa06p257.html
    - speedgoose 5y ago
      I don't understand the logic. Because Greece has some issues with its women employment rate, USA can't do anything about parental leaves? You even suggested in your initial post simple solutions for this problem, that work in other countries.

mrsuprawsm 5y ago

>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.

moron4hire 5y ago

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".

ivan_gammel 5y ago

> 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).

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

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.

maxehmookau 5y ago

> 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.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
>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.
- maxehmookau 5y ago
  Ok, sure. I’m on board with that. Except businesses will probably have to pay higher taxes to support such a scheme. Businesses are the wealth drivers of our economy (as we’re so often told). Money either comes from taxes on them, or on taxes on the people that they pay. It doesn’t really matter. It’s all the same money.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    >It’s all the same money. Exactly, which is why tasking every business with calculating risks of pregnancies and funding for them is dumb. Just do it on a nation level, or at least state level.
    - maxehmookau 5y ago
      Sure. Which is the most pallatable to the US legislature to actually make this happen? It works in the UK and Europe because there is _some_ understanding that a prospering society at all levels can't be achieved by blind liberalism and some collective risk sharing is actually a good thing.

Spooky23 5y ago

Easy. It’s not all about them. 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.

vidarh 5y ago

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. )

Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago

> 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.

rsj_hn 5y ago

> 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.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Unless the singles are OK with no one coming to clean their bed pan, then it is not just pain for them.
MandieD 5y ago
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.

ykevinator3 5y ago

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.

brazzy 5y ago

> 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?

yeetman21 5y ago
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?
- brazzy 5y ago
  Men are not invincible robots. They get sick, they quit. They may even gasp like to take paternity leave. If your organziation isn't shitty, so you can handle a woman taking maternity leave, you also won't get fucked by people getting sick, and can offer paternity leave and sabbatical options to help you attract employees which, newsflash, has recently become rather difficult.

johnchristopher 5y ago

> 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.

kristjansson 5y ago

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. Have you asked any actual women about that?

ashtonkem 5y ago

> 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.

JohnWhigham 5y ago
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
- lifeformed 5y ago
  How does "having a spine" force votes out of people who disagree?
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    Because if a caucus isn't willing to stand their ground to get what they want, then what is the fucking point? Not to mention it was one of Pete Buttigieg's things he was pushing for. Yet when asked about why it didn't get included, he just kind of shrugged his shoulders like he didn't really give a shit. It's why the Tea Party had limited success in the early part of the decade: they were willing not to participate. And it's why Democrats lost ground in elections (VA governor's race being the key one), and will be hit harder in the midterms.
    - sjg007 5y ago
      Dems are screwed no matter what. If the progressive stick it to the center then nothing gets passed and 2022 roles around and republicans trounce them with empty promises. And then 2024 will look even worse for Dems because nothing will get done and the Republicans will say vote for our guy and we will pass infrastructure. The Dems need something to pass now so that there is 3 years of progress. We need steady incremental progress.

mcguire 5y ago

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?

DavidVoid 5y ago

> 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%). [1] https://i.imgur.com/FSOK5eD.png https://i.imgur.com/FSOK5eD.png

cm2012 5y ago

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.

yeetman21 5y ago
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.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Unlikely. 8 months of paid parental leave would not encourage multiple births considering the true cost of raising kids. You've got to clothe, feed, and house them. But we are also in population decline and that is worse than having decent parental leave.