6 ms·

Why should Google pay maternity leave for laid off workers? They are no longer employees once they're laid off. At the very most they deserve a severence.

aaronbrethorst 4y ago
Cynically, because the cost of paying out what they promised these workers is less than the goodwill they'll lose. Optimistically, because it's the right thing to do.
AraceliHarker 4y ago
The blame of the recent layoffs lay not with the employees but with the managers who had miscalculated their prospects in the midst of the covidic plague.
- throwaway45501 4y ago
  Why is it the company's responsibility to keep employees that are no longer necessary? I don't understand that. Did Google or any other company promised these people that they will be hired forever? Google hired them and paid them very cushy salaries. What am I missing? I really don't understand the discussion around those recent layoffs.
  - foepys 4y ago
    And people wonder why birth rates are falling and people are afraid to make long term commitments. Corporations like this don't deserve any loyalty. If I worked there and anybody offered to pay me even a few percent more, I'd leave in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't even work hard, only the bare minimum to not get fired, because why should I? In conservative media this this is being spun as "nobody wants to work anymore because millennials and gen Z are lazy" but the real reason is very obvious for anybody under 30: as a corporate employee hard work doesn't pay off most of the time, instead you will be fired when shareholders are in danger of losing a few dollars.
    - throwaway45501 4y ago
      Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? As employee I enter into mutually beneficial (and in case of IT and FAANG - extremely beneficial) contract knowing that I can be fired once the company deems my services no longer necessary. The backlash comes from highest educated, best skilled people who received high salaries and who have great prospects of being hired again quickly. Why they suffer? Should these companies not hire those employees in the first place? The employees would be jobless then, our would be hired by companies witch they previously rejected in favor of FAANG. To me it all seems like reality check for people who for years were bit out of touch with, well, reality. This is what regular people deal with all the time. Regarding your argument about falling birth rates - education, career, job stability etc. are all negatively correlated with birth rates. I'm pretty sure that FAANG employees have one of the lowest birth rates in society - I admit, I have no data to back this up.
      - lenkite 4y ago
        > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? What an utterly stupid analogy. You never hired the Plumber as an Employee in the first place. They layed off female employees on maternity leave just as they gave birth to children. No payout for the remainder of their maternity leave. That also contradicts your assertion of whether FAANG employees were making children btw. Google was horrendously cruel here.
      - rightbyte 4y ago
        > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? The analogy is flawed. You pay him until he completes his job. Or he will be pissed. Google is telling the plumber to leave before the agreed upon work is done.
        Kiro 4y ago
        The plumber analogy is flawed but yours is not much better. When is the agreed work done for an employee? Employees are not hired to complete a specific job like a plumber is.
      - 4y ago
  - rektide 4y ago
    A company has a basic obligation to only do what makes sense, not what is superfluous. Mis-hiring a ton of people to only let lots of people go shows a untrustworthy dishonest shallow character. Maybe in some cases companies honestly fuck up, but most of the time it just looks like the idiotic cancer of growth at all costs attitude, a delusional nature. The infinite quintupling down that seems to be the one & only move business-types so often seem to have, a pattern of relentless self-promotion in all conditions. The genuineness of a company that can tap a wider base, to make calibrated decisions upon, is rare. And instances like this just show how much disdain there is from the top to everyone below. Utter disrespect, no acknowledgement that the org was being false, no try to do right., just letting trust in the org fail.
    - throwaway45501 4y ago
      Business is not your friend, it's not your family. The only goal of business is to make profit. If they can make something good along the way - great, but don't expect them to do it. At this scale it seems very hard to make good decisions. It looks like a lot of companies overestimated their long term needs. Also, they might have hired those employees to prevent competition from hiring them,and it might have been a good business decision. What people fail to understand is that corporations goal is not to maximize well-being of their employees. I wonder if this is a result of liberal movement that allowed those companies to leech to various causes (LGBTQ rights,gender equality, etc) and allowed them to spread image of friendly, responsible, good, family-like image. I 100% support those movements myself, but I also have seen this coming for years. As soon as it no longer pays off to be friendly, corporations stop be such. The best way to fight this is to educate people that corporations are not your friend, family, they don't care much about you.
      - rektide 4y ago
        If businesses did try to align to & respect their workforces these dont-trust-anyone sentiments wouldn't be necessary. And I contend, the business would likely behave much smarter, make less f-ups, make better products and decisions. Accepting merely a fait-accompli that there is misalignment & operating in negative prisoners-dilemna non-cooperative modes forever is just a shit play. Both sides need to show up & power-share to actually make anything work.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  It's more than just Covid. When interest rates are 0 it makes sense to spend a lot on R&D that will pay off in 10 years. When interest rates are 7% suddenly that might not make as much sense. It's true Google management didn't foresee this issue but it's not like Google was an outlier. Everyone in the economy thought the same thing.
whitemary 4y ago
They deserve the whole of the product of their labor.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
This is your brain on america
foepys 4y ago
This is one of the reasons why maternity leave compensation is paid by the government in Germany. But to American ears that's socialism or something, I guess.
hansvm 4y ago
- Laying off somebody on maternity leave and then not paying them for that leave is exactly what you would expect from a company laying somebody off _because_ they're on maternity leave, which would be strikingly illegal (IMO not immoral per se -- that burden should be averaged across all of society rather than localized to each employer -- definitely illegal though). At a minimum they'd want their ducks in a row to ensure those layoffs were legitimate. - Promising a person a particular thing (approving maternity leave, for example) goes above and beyond the ordinary employment contract, and cutting the duration of that promise short doesn't sit well. - Google offers (offered?) a variety of specialized healthcare plans that you can choose _instead of_ a standard PPO or whatever, and those require you to move to doctors in a very small network. Cutting off those services and saying "LOL, have fun with finding new doctors on top of figuring out Cobra" with less than a day of warning is a bigger inconvenience than you'd expect from comparable layoffs elsewhere.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Isn’t the entire point of Cobra that you can keep your previous healthcare plan?
  - hansvm 4y ago
    Yep. That didn't stop Google from denying that coverage to the people laid off in the article though, and the fact that it's some sort of custom/in-house thing means they probably have the power to cause that sort of disruption regardless of any eventual legal outcomes.
alanfranz 4y ago
Because while you are on a medical leave or a maternity leave it’s especially difficult for you to sort out things, or to find another job? “I laid you off while you’re lactating, please find another job in 60 days or leave US”. In most places in EU it would be illegal to layoff people in those situations, that’s not a US thing of course, but just asking the already-approved deal to be honored seems just obvious.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  Aren't they getting 16 weeks of severance + 2 weeks per year. Say an average of 2 years of work. Most people at Google are making at least 150k. That's almost 60k. That's more than the median U.S. worker makes in a year. And more than the median household income in almost every EU country. Not to mention no one Google lays off is going to have any trouble finding a job paying at least the median wage.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    Most Google employees do not have median expenses or a clear path to getting there without drastically upending their lives.
  - alanfranz 4y ago
    > Not to mention no one Google lays off is going to have any trouble finding a job paying at least the median wage. While feeding a newborn or dealing with serious illness? That’s the point. You’re on a leave for a reason. You don’t expect the leave to be unilaterally canceled. Not to mention that, if you’re an immigrant, you have visa problems as well.
- winrid 4y ago
  It's even illegal in China...
temp20160423 4y ago
G attracted workers by offering this baby bonding leave and increased it recently from 12 weeks to 18 weeks. Even amazon is letting people on leave finish it before their severance starts according to the article. This whole layoff round at G looks extremely rushed and someone probably didn't think through all the edge cases, such as people already on leave. For 20 years, G's main advantage was top of market perks and culture (comp was good, but not the top). These layoff rounds have permanently hurt Google's reputation IMO. When the tech hiring market gets competitive again, they will either have to raise comp significantly once everyone realizes the culture has changed or they won't be competitive to attract the top talent.
- schoolornot 4y ago
  I see a recurring pattern of chief people officers and their minions totally destroying company brands and internal morale. This isn't traditional HR nonsense but pure Peter Principle. It really must be too much run plans and messaging through a comms or marketing team first. As a manager, this stuff pisses me off to no end because it seeds worry in the minds of team members that are in no way at risk.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Yep. I know so many people that joined google from other places because of the culture and perks. I certainly chose not to leave because of those things. That calculus is clearly changing.
wesleywt 4y ago
Yes, if the worker was on maternity leave when laid off. What I have noticed about American culture, despite having money they are extreme penny pitches in the oddest of places.
- m348e912 4y ago
  I am the parent of this thread and been heavily downvoted for my initial comment. I agree with you. If the worker was already on maternity leave they should get stay on maternity leave for the duration of the leave regardless of layoffs. What I was referring to an employee that had been already laid off by google, and at some point after needs to go on maternity leave. I'm not sure google should be obligated to support maternity leave in that case as the employee is no longer subject to company benefits (with the exception of access to COBRA/health insurance)
camillomiller 4y ago
This comment is probably the best explanation of how American capitalism is effective at self-propagate its tenets through the confidence of those it screws over the most.
black_puppydog 4y ago
because people plan their family around things like maternity leave and rely on these actually being honored. what should they do now, get un-pregnant?

aaronbrethorst 4y ago

Cynically, because the cost of paying out what they promised these workers is less than the goodwill they'll lose. Optimistically, because it's the right thing to do.

AraceliHarker 4y ago

The blame of the recent layoffs lay not with the employees but with the managers who had miscalculated their prospects in the midst of the covidic plague.

throwaway45501 4y ago
Why is it the company's responsibility to keep employees that are no longer necessary? I don't understand that. Did Google or any other company promised these people that they will be hired forever? Google hired them and paid them very cushy salaries. What am I missing? I really don't understand the discussion around those recent layoffs.
- foepys 4y ago
  And people wonder why birth rates are falling and people are afraid to make long term commitments. Corporations like this don't deserve any loyalty. If I worked there and anybody offered to pay me even a few percent more, I'd leave in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't even work hard, only the bare minimum to not get fired, because why should I? In conservative media this this is being spun as "nobody wants to work anymore because millennials and gen Z are lazy" but the real reason is very obvious for anybody under 30: as a corporate employee hard work doesn't pay off most of the time, instead you will be fired when shareholders are in danger of losing a few dollars.
  - throwaway45501 4y ago
    Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? As employee I enter into mutually beneficial (and in case of IT and FAANG - extremely beneficial) contract knowing that I can be fired once the company deems my services no longer necessary. The backlash comes from highest educated, best skilled people who received high salaries and who have great prospects of being hired again quickly. Why they suffer? Should these companies not hire those employees in the first place? The employees would be jobless then, our would be hired by companies witch they previously rejected in favor of FAANG. To me it all seems like reality check for people who for years were bit out of touch with, well, reality. This is what regular people deal with all the time. Regarding your argument about falling birth rates - education, career, job stability etc. are all negatively correlated with birth rates. I'm pretty sure that FAANG employees have one of the lowest birth rates in society - I admit, I have no data to back this up.
    - lenkite 4y ago
      > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? What an utterly stupid analogy. You never hired the Plumber as an Employee in the first place. They layed off female employees on maternity leave just as they gave birth to children. No payout for the remainder of their maternity leave. That also contradicts your assertion of whether FAANG employees were making children btw. Google was horrendously cruel here.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? The analogy is flawed. You pay him until he completes his job. Or he will be pissed. Google is telling the plumber to leave before the agreed upon work is done.
      - Kiro 4y ago
        The plumber analogy is flawed but yours is not much better. When is the agreed work done for an employee? Employees are not hired to complete a specific job like a plumber is.
    - 4y ago
- rektide 4y ago
  A company has a basic obligation to only do what makes sense, not what is superfluous. Mis-hiring a ton of people to only let lots of people go shows a untrustworthy dishonest shallow character. Maybe in some cases companies honestly fuck up, but most of the time it just looks like the idiotic cancer of growth at all costs attitude, a delusional nature. The infinite quintupling down that seems to be the one & only move business-types so often seem to have, a pattern of relentless self-promotion in all conditions. The genuineness of a company that can tap a wider base, to make calibrated decisions upon, is rare. And instances like this just show how much disdain there is from the top to everyone below. Utter disrespect, no acknowledgement that the org was being false, no try to do right., just letting trust in the org fail.
  - throwaway45501 4y ago
    Business is not your friend, it's not your family. The only goal of business is to make profit. If they can make something good along the way - great, but don't expect them to do it. At this scale it seems very hard to make good decisions. It looks like a lot of companies overestimated their long term needs. Also, they might have hired those employees to prevent competition from hiring them,and it might have been a good business decision. What people fail to understand is that corporations goal is not to maximize well-being of their employees. I wonder if this is a result of liberal movement that allowed those companies to leech to various causes (LGBTQ rights,gender equality, etc) and allowed them to spread image of friendly, responsible, good, family-like image. I 100% support those movements myself, but I also have seen this coming for years. As soon as it no longer pays off to be friendly, corporations stop be such. The best way to fight this is to educate people that corporations are not your friend, family, they don't care much about you.
    - rektide 4y ago
      If businesses did try to align to & respect their workforces these dont-trust-anyone sentiments wouldn't be necessary. And I contend, the business would likely behave much smarter, make less f-ups, make better products and decisions. Accepting merely a fait-accompli that there is misalignment & operating in negative prisoners-dilemna non-cooperative modes forever is just a shit play. Both sides need to show up & power-share to actually make anything work.
JamesBarney 4y ago
It's more than just Covid. When interest rates are 0 it makes sense to spend a lot on R&D that will pay off in 10 years. When interest rates are 7% suddenly that might not make as much sense. It's true Google management didn't foresee this issue but it's not like Google was an outlier. Everyone in the economy thought the same thing.

whitemary 4y ago

They deserve the whole of the product of their labor.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

This is your brain on america

foepys 4y ago

This is one of the reasons why maternity leave compensation is paid by the government in Germany. But to American ears that's socialism or something, I guess.

hansvm 4y ago

- Laying off somebody on maternity leave and then not paying them for that leave is exactly what you would expect from a company laying somebody off _because_ they're on maternity leave, which would be strikingly illegal (IMO not immoral per se -- that burden should be averaged across all of society rather than localized to each employer -- definitely illegal though). At a minimum they'd want their ducks in a row to ensure those layoffs were legitimate. - Promising a person a particular thing (approving maternity leave, for example) goes above and beyond the ordinary employment contract, and cutting the duration of that promise short doesn't sit well. - Google offers (offered?) a variety of specialized healthcare plans that you can choose _instead of_ a standard PPO or whatever, and those require you to move to doctors in a very small network. Cutting off those services and saying "LOL, have fun with finding new doctors on top of figuring out Cobra" with less than a day of warning is a bigger inconvenience than you'd expect from comparable layoffs elsewhere.

sokoloff 4y ago
Isn’t the entire point of Cobra that you can keep your previous healthcare plan?
- hansvm 4y ago
  Yep. That didn't stop Google from denying that coverage to the people laid off in the article though, and the fact that it's some sort of custom/in-house thing means they probably have the power to cause that sort of disruption regardless of any eventual legal outcomes.

alanfranz 4y ago

Because while you are on a medical leave or a maternity leave it’s especially difficult for you to sort out things, or to find another job? “I laid you off while you’re lactating, please find another job in 60 days or leave US”. In most places in EU it would be illegal to layoff people in those situations, that’s not a US thing of course, but just asking the already-approved deal to be honored seems just obvious.

JamesBarney 4y ago
Aren't they getting 16 weeks of severance + 2 weeks per year. Say an average of 2 years of work. Most people at Google are making at least 150k. That's almost 60k. That's more than the median U.S. worker makes in a year. And more than the median household income in almost every EU country. Not to mention no one Google lays off is going to have any trouble finding a job paying at least the median wage.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  Most Google employees do not have median expenses or a clear path to getting there without drastically upending their lives.
- alanfranz 4y ago
  > Not to mention no one Google lays off is going to have any trouble finding a job paying at least the median wage. While feeding a newborn or dealing with serious illness? That’s the point. You’re on a leave for a reason. You don’t expect the leave to be unilaterally canceled. Not to mention that, if you’re an immigrant, you have visa problems as well.
winrid 4y ago
It's even illegal in China...

temp20160423 4y ago

G attracted workers by offering this baby bonding leave and increased it recently from 12 weeks to 18 weeks. Even amazon is letting people on leave finish it before their severance starts according to the article. This whole layoff round at G looks extremely rushed and someone probably didn't think through all the edge cases, such as people already on leave. For 20 years, G's main advantage was top of market perks and culture (comp was good, but not the top). These layoff rounds have permanently hurt Google's reputation IMO. When the tech hiring market gets competitive again, they will either have to raise comp significantly once everyone realizes the culture has changed or they won't be competitive to attract the top talent.

schoolornot 4y ago
I see a recurring pattern of chief people officers and their minions totally destroying company brands and internal morale. This isn't traditional HR nonsense but pure Peter Principle. It really must be too much run plans and messaging through a comms or marketing team first. As a manager, this stuff pisses me off to no end because it seeds worry in the minds of team members that are in no way at risk.
UncleMeat 4y ago
Yep. I know so many people that joined google from other places because of the culture and perks. I certainly chose not to leave because of those things. That calculus is clearly changing.

wesleywt 4y ago

Yes, if the worker was on maternity leave when laid off. What I have noticed about American culture, despite having money they are extreme penny pitches in the oddest of places.

m348e912 4y ago
I am the parent of this thread and been heavily downvoted for my initial comment. I agree with you. If the worker was already on maternity leave they should get stay on maternity leave for the duration of the leave regardless of layoffs. What I was referring to an employee that had been already laid off by google, and at some point after needs to go on maternity leave. I'm not sure google should be obligated to support maternity leave in that case as the employee is no longer subject to company benefits (with the exception of access to COBRA/health insurance)

camillomiller 4y ago

This comment is probably the best explanation of how American capitalism is effective at self-propagate its tenets through the confidence of those it screws over the most.

black_puppydog 4y ago

because people plan their family around things like maternity leave and rely on these actually being honored. what should they do now, get un-pregnant?