7 ms·

This seems really tricky to get right, though. For example, if you forced companies to pay through their leave, that gives them an incentive to hire people who

by rifung 12y ago

This seems really tricky to get right, though. For example, if you forced companies to pay through their leave, that gives them an incentive to hire people who they don't believe are likely to have children soon. If that's the case then it seems like this would penalize people in the child bearing age even when they are not planning to have children. On the other hand, not offering paid leave means that women are always going to be at an inherent disadvantage when they are bearing a child. Of course, you could argue that having a child is really a choice (at least most commonly) and those who wish to have children should plan accordingly. Others might say that having a child is something that everyone should be able to do. I definitely don't belong in that group but I also don't plan to have kids so maybe I just can't understand. Either way, I'd love to hear your or anyone else's thoughts on why this should be law when it's such a complicated issue and thus one that I bet law makers would screw up.

jacquesm 12y ago
It should be a law because left to their own devices companies will otherwise simply evade the problem and hire guys instead of equally qualified women. But there are differences in implementation per country, some countries pay the interim out of tax revenues and the companies only have the requirement to re-instate the person that took leave after they return, in some countries it's only the women that can apply for leave like this, in others it's both the men and the women and so on. But those are implementation details, as a rule it is generally considered to be a good thing, even by the employers because they no longer have to fear that if they play nice they'll be undercut by competitors that have decided to go for an all-male cast.
- 542458 12y ago
  > It should be a law because left to their own devices companies will otherwise simply evade the problem and hire guys instead of equally qualified women. Sometimes these laws actually discourage hiring women. For example, you say: > companies only have the requirement to re-instate the person that took leave after they return This is a great example of why these laws are more complex than they appear. For example, in that case I'll need to hire somebody to fill in for the person on leave while they're away. So I'm paying for that training, paperwork, etc for the new person. Then when the first person comes back from maternity leave, I've got two people for one job. Either I have the unpleasant business of firing somebody who hasn't done anything wrong (and may actually be the better employee!) or depending on how the laws are written I may be forced to continue to employ both, despite a lack of need. What if I've downsized or pivoted, and no longer need to original person? Do they accumulate benefits and paid vacation while they're gone? All this can be an employer's nightmare. A post by a Hungarian entrepreneur partially on this topic went viral last year. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that maternity leave is a bad thing, I just feel that paining it as a simple issue is unproductive. http://andorjakab.blog.hu/2014/03/02/this_is_why_i_don_t_give_you_a_job http://andorjakab.blog.hu/2014/03/02/this_is_why_i_don_t_giv...
  - vidarh 12y ago
    If you can't deal with someone going on extended leave for some reason or another, your business is likely going to go out of business for reasons unrelated to maternity soon enough anyway. Maternity leave is generally going to be a lesser problem for most businesses than churn of people leaving and cost of hiring replacements, or other unexpected loss of staff. And no, you don't "have the unpleasant business of firing somebody" as that somebody would normally have been hired on a short term contract to cover for the maternity, knowing the position is temporary. > All this can be an employer's nightmare. It's an economic risk that is fairly straight-forward to estimate and amortize the cost of over your staff, and most of the concerns are risks that any responsible business needs to plan for anyway.
    - SilasX 12y ago
      >And no, you don't "have the unpleasant business of firing somebody" as that somebody would normally have been hired on a short term contract to cover for the maternity, knowing the position is temporary. But the whole point of these policies is to prevent the workforce from trending toward the all-contractors-no-benefits situation, in which maternity leave could be avoided all together. If you're so casual about suggesting that the replacement be hired on as such a contractor, then why not suggest the original employee be so hired as well?
      - xorcist 12y ago
        Why do you think short term employees (or even contractors) wouldn't have the same parental leave as everyone else? Over here parental leave is common and expected, so it is always factored in. It is a very common way to enter the work force or try another job, as it is short term by nature.
        SilasX 12y ago
        I'm not sure I follow. What contracting job is there with paid parental leave from the employer/customer? Do you mean a job where you work for a "job shop" which is your employer of record but are actually working at client sites? If so, I can see how that would work out. But that's not what the GP was describing, in which firing someone is no big deal because "we hired them on a short term basis anyway". But if you accept that as legit, I claimed, why are you even complaining about maternity leave, since you seem to be okay with people being hired on short term bases with no such promises, which is somehow all okay because "hey you made it clear from the beginning"? IOW, the GP seems to be saying "Don't treat workers as disposable! You can just get a disposable worker to fill in for them!"
frandroid 12y ago
> that gives them an incentive to hire people who they don't believe are likely to have children soon That already happens now.
antr 12y ago
> incentive to hire people who they don't believe are likely to have children soon. If you are hiring the right people that fit your company's needs, team, skills, etc, this is not an issue. I've hired half a dozen female employees in the past four years, and living in Europe, this "issue" didn't cross my mind. Three of them had kids later on, we hired substitutes who covered for them during maternity leave, and no biggy. I don't know what it is, but US companies seem to have a real issue with taking a "European" approach to this work-life balance matter.
- pc86 12y ago
  Your parental leave is government-paid, correct? You're ignoring the first part of the sentence you're quoting: > if you forced companies to pay through their leave
  - antr 12y ago
    Not really. The first 20 weeks or so are paid by the company 100%. Those 20 weeks are also your rights as parent by law to take off. Then you can take more time off (there is a maximum discretionary number of weeks), and in that case the company doesn't pay for that leave, but the government subsidises x% of the income. Maybe since our last maternity leave the law might have changed slightly, but not materially.
- zo1 12y ago
  >"I've hired half a dozen female employees in the past four years[...]Three of them had kids later on, we hired substitutes who covered for them during maternity leave, and no biggy." And if your company is too small to have that kind of money to throw around? What about tough financial times? As much as I admire and believe that some of these laws/regulations do good, and mean well. I have to stress to individuals that they all have an effect on the economy/market. They skew things one way or the other, with constraints and incentives. E.g. The example above, it unfairly discriminates against companies that are unable to provide government-mandated perks to parents, or people interested in having children.
  - 12y ago
evanpw 12y ago
The economic argument would be that some of the benefits of creating new people are captured by the rest of society, not just the parents, and so to maximize efficiency, some of the costs should also be borne by society. Interestingly, this implies that the more enjoyment you get from your own children, the less you should support subsidies for childbearing. Another interesting angle would be to say that most of the benefit clearly flows toward the child themselves (over their lifetime), so the best solution would be a large, universal subsidy, coupled with a per-person tax (independent of income, etc.) so that every person pays for their own birth and childrearing. Why should your parents pay for something that you get most of the enjoyment from?
- john_b 12y ago
  > "The economic argument would be that some of the benefits of creating new people are captured by the rest of society, not just the parents, and so to maximize efficiency, some of the costs should also be borne by society." If you replace "new people" with "works of art" and "parents" by "artists" you have logic that applies equally to a universal subsidy for all artistic activities. This might be nice, but it's something that most people would recognize as impractical and idealistic. But when children enter the picture people lose all rationality and revert to a need-focused mindset instead of a resource-focused mindset. An actual economic argument would be much simpler than the one your propose. The production of children must be subsidized if and only if it is an objectively valuable and necessary activity (which it is) but insufficient people are dedicated to the task (which is plainly not the case, as evidenced by the stable population of the US). Reasoning based on who enjoys the benefits of an activity is not economics, it's philosophy.
  - evanpw 12y ago
    The idea of positive externalities (also called "external benefits") is definitely mainstream economics. Deciding a priori what the "right" population level for the United States is seems philosophical to me. There are plenty of other rebuttals to the argument I gave, though. For example: 1) Negative externalities from having children (crowding, etc.); 2) Deadweight losses caused by the taxes used to pay for the subsidy; 3) Calculation problems: deciding the proportion of internalized vs socialized benefits from children seems almost impossible to calculate even on average; if you get that wrong, your subsidy could easily do more harm than good; 4) Government power: even if this particular subsidy is efficient, if you give your government the authority to tax and subsidize broadly, they are likely to make plenty of bad decisions, which could partially or totally offset the benefits
john_b 12y ago
> "if you forced companies to pay through their leave, that gives them an incentive to hire people who they don't believe are likely to have children soon" This is already done, though it is never admitted for obvious reasons. A portion of the gender pay gap, especially in tech, is due to employer perception that hiring women who might have children is risky. Federal law already allows employers to charge their employees higher health insurance rates if they are smokers [1]. And why not? Employers have an incentive to do this because they are required by law to provide health insurance to their full time workers (if they have > 50 employees, anyway). If you are paying for a significant portion of someone's healthcare, and they are making voluntary choices which will cost you more money, any kind of working market will lead to increased healthcare costs in such a situation. Childcare, as you mentioned, is usually a voluntary decision. Maybe, as a society, we decide that we want to subsidize procreation as is done in many European countries and have the government foot the bill for parental leave, but if we decide to leave it up to employers (who don't care if you have kids or not) we shouldn't be surprised if parental leave is lacking. The entire U.S. health and insurance system (I certainly wouldn't call it a "market") is rotten to the core. The bulk of the costs are typically paid by employers, so employers--whose incentives most definitely do not serve their employees' health--get to set the policies under which an individual's healthcare may be provided. It's absurd. The only two sensible systems are a completely individualized system with no employers as middlemen, or a completely socialized one where the government accepts ultimate responsibility (and therefore control) for the health of the people. What we have is a monstrous catastrophe that would have already bankrupted other nations. [1] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obamacare-penalty-could-make-health-insurance-too-expensive-smokers http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obamacare-penalty-could-...
wmt 12y ago
It would be insane to demand the company to pay for the maternity or paternity leaves. That would be like charging money for elementary schools and forcing companies to also pay for thay! Small companies could collapse by just a few employees having kids at the same time. If the government wishes for the people to have more children, the only reasonable payer for the costs is the same as with all goverment spending - the taxpayer. Handing out a proportion of your salary as the maternity or paternity benefit will also make the it more equal and not cripple the incomes of better paid people.

by rifung 12y ago

jacquesm 12y ago

It should be a law because left to their own devices companies will otherwise simply evade the problem and hire guys instead of equally qualified women. But there are differences in implementation per country, some countries pay the interim out of tax revenues and the companies only have the requirement to re-instate the person that took leave after they return, in some countries it's only the women that can apply for leave like this, in others it's both the men and the women and so on. But those are implementation details, as a rule it is generally considered to be a good thing, even by the employers because they no longer have to fear that if they play nice they'll be undercut by competitors that have decided to go for an all-male cast.

542458 12y ago
> It should be a law because left to their own devices companies will otherwise simply evade the problem and hire guys instead of equally qualified women. Sometimes these laws actually discourage hiring women. For example, you say: > companies only have the requirement to re-instate the person that took leave after they return This is a great example of why these laws are more complex than they appear. For example, in that case I'll need to hire somebody to fill in for the person on leave while they're away. So I'm paying for that training, paperwork, etc for the new person. Then when the first person comes back from maternity leave, I've got two people for one job. Either I have the unpleasant business of firing somebody who hasn't done anything wrong (and may actually be the better employee!) or depending on how the laws are written I may be forced to continue to employ both, despite a lack of need. What if I've downsized or pivoted, and no longer need to original person? Do they accumulate benefits and paid vacation while they're gone? All this can be an employer's nightmare. A post by a Hungarian entrepreneur partially on this topic went viral last year. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that maternity leave is a bad thing, I just feel that paining it as a simple issue is unproductive. http://andorjakab.blog.hu/2014/03/02/this_is_why_i_don_t_give_you_a_job http://andorjakab.blog.hu/2014/03/02/this_is_why_i_don_t_giv...
- vidarh 12y ago
  If you can't deal with someone going on extended leave for some reason or another, your business is likely going to go out of business for reasons unrelated to maternity soon enough anyway. Maternity leave is generally going to be a lesser problem for most businesses than churn of people leaving and cost of hiring replacements, or other unexpected loss of staff. And no, you don't "have the unpleasant business of firing somebody" as that somebody would normally have been hired on a short term contract to cover for the maternity, knowing the position is temporary. > All this can be an employer's nightmare. It's an economic risk that is fairly straight-forward to estimate and amortize the cost of over your staff, and most of the concerns are risks that any responsible business needs to plan for anyway.
  - SilasX 12y ago
    >And no, you don't "have the unpleasant business of firing somebody" as that somebody would normally have been hired on a short term contract to cover for the maternity, knowing the position is temporary. But the whole point of these policies is to prevent the workforce from trending toward the all-contractors-no-benefits situation, in which maternity leave could be avoided all together. If you're so casual about suggesting that the replacement be hired on as such a contractor, then why not suggest the original employee be so hired as well?
    - xorcist 12y ago
      Why do you think short term employees (or even contractors) wouldn't have the same parental leave as everyone else? Over here parental leave is common and expected, so it is always factored in. It is a very common way to enter the work force or try another job, as it is short term by nature.
      - SilasX 12y ago
        I'm not sure I follow. What contracting job is there with paid parental leave from the employer/customer? Do you mean a job where you work for a "job shop" which is your employer of record but are actually working at client sites? If so, I can see how that would work out. But that's not what the GP was describing, in which firing someone is no big deal because "we hired them on a short term basis anyway". But if you accept that as legit, I claimed, why are you even complaining about maternity leave, since you seem to be okay with people being hired on short term bases with no such promises, which is somehow all okay because "hey you made it clear from the beginning"? IOW, the GP seems to be saying "Don't treat workers as disposable! You can just get a disposable worker to fill in for them!"

frandroid 12y ago

> that gives them an incentive to hire people who they don't believe are likely to have children soon That already happens now.

antr 12y ago

> incentive to hire people who they don't believe are likely to have children soon. If you are hiring the right people that fit your company's needs, team, skills, etc, this is not an issue. I've hired half a dozen female employees in the past four years, and living in Europe, this "issue" didn't cross my mind. Three of them had kids later on, we hired substitutes who covered for them during maternity leave, and no biggy. I don't know what it is, but US companies seem to have a real issue with taking a "European" approach to this work-life balance matter.

pc86 12y ago
Your parental leave is government-paid, correct? You're ignoring the first part of the sentence you're quoting: > if you forced companies to pay through their leave
- antr 12y ago
  Not really. The first 20 weeks or so are paid by the company 100%. Those 20 weeks are also your rights as parent by law to take off. Then you can take more time off (there is a maximum discretionary number of weeks), and in that case the company doesn't pay for that leave, but the government subsidises x% of the income. Maybe since our last maternity leave the law might have changed slightly, but not materially.
zo1 12y ago
>"I've hired half a dozen female employees in the past four years[...]Three of them had kids later on, we hired substitutes who covered for them during maternity leave, and no biggy." And if your company is too small to have that kind of money to throw around? What about tough financial times? As much as I admire and believe that some of these laws/regulations do good, and mean well. I have to stress to individuals that they all have an effect on the economy/market. They skew things one way or the other, with constraints and incentives. E.g. The example above, it unfairly discriminates against companies that are unable to provide government-mandated perks to parents, or people interested in having children.
- 12y ago

evanpw 12y ago

The economic argument would be that some of the benefits of creating new people are captured by the rest of society, not just the parents, and so to maximize efficiency, some of the costs should also be borne by society. Interestingly, this implies that the more enjoyment you get from your own children, the less you should support subsidies for childbearing. Another interesting angle would be to say that most of the benefit clearly flows toward the child themselves (over their lifetime), so the best solution would be a large, universal subsidy, coupled with a per-person tax (independent of income, etc.) so that every person pays for their own birth and childrearing. Why should your parents pay for something that you get most of the enjoyment from?

john_b 12y ago
> "The economic argument would be that some of the benefits of creating new people are captured by the rest of society, not just the parents, and so to maximize efficiency, some of the costs should also be borne by society." If you replace "new people" with "works of art" and "parents" by "artists" you have logic that applies equally to a universal subsidy for all artistic activities. This might be nice, but it's something that most people would recognize as impractical and idealistic. But when children enter the picture people lose all rationality and revert to a need-focused mindset instead of a resource-focused mindset. An actual economic argument would be much simpler than the one your propose. The production of children must be subsidized if and only if it is an objectively valuable and necessary activity (which it is) but insufficient people are dedicated to the task (which is plainly not the case, as evidenced by the stable population of the US). Reasoning based on who enjoys the benefits of an activity is not economics, it's philosophy.
- evanpw 12y ago
  The idea of positive externalities (also called "external benefits") is definitely mainstream economics. Deciding a priori what the "right" population level for the United States is seems philosophical to me. There are plenty of other rebuttals to the argument I gave, though. For example: 1) Negative externalities from having children (crowding, etc.); 2) Deadweight losses caused by the taxes used to pay for the subsidy; 3) Calculation problems: deciding the proportion of internalized vs socialized benefits from children seems almost impossible to calculate even on average; if you get that wrong, your subsidy could easily do more harm than good; 4) Government power: even if this particular subsidy is efficient, if you give your government the authority to tax and subsidize broadly, they are likely to make plenty of bad decisions, which could partially or totally offset the benefits

john_b 12y ago

> "if you forced companies to pay through their leave, that gives them an incentive to hire people who they don't believe are likely to have children soon" This is already done, though it is never admitted for obvious reasons. A portion of the gender pay gap, especially in tech, is due to employer perception that hiring women who might have children is risky. Federal law already allows employers to charge their employees higher health insurance rates if they are smokers [1]. And why not? Employers have an incentive to do this because they are required by law to provide health insurance to their full time workers (if they have > 50 employees, anyway). If you are paying for a significant portion of someone's healthcare, and they are making voluntary choices which will cost you more money, any kind of working market will lead to increased healthcare costs in such a situation. Childcare, as you mentioned, is usually a voluntary decision. Maybe, as a society, we decide that we want to subsidize procreation as is done in many European countries and have the government foot the bill for parental leave, but if we decide to leave it up to employers (who don't care if you have kids or not) we shouldn't be surprised if parental leave is lacking. The entire U.S. health and insurance system (I certainly wouldn't call it a "market") is rotten to the core. The bulk of the costs are typically paid by employers, so employers--whose incentives most definitely do not serve their employees' health--get to set the policies under which an individual's healthcare may be provided. It's absurd. The only two sensible systems are a completely individualized system with no employers as middlemen, or a completely socialized one where the government accepts ultimate responsibility (and therefore control) for the health of the people. What we have is a monstrous catastrophe that would have already bankrupted other nations. [1] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obamacare-penalty-could-make-health-insurance-too-expensive-smokers http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obamacare-penalty-could-...

wmt 12y ago

It would be insane to demand the company to pay for the maternity or paternity leaves. That would be like charging money for elementary schools and forcing companies to also pay for thay! Small companies could collapse by just a few employees having kids at the same time. If the government wishes for the people to have more children, the only reasonable payer for the costs is the same as with all goverment spending - the taxpayer. Handing out a proportion of your salary as the maternity or paternity benefit will also make the it more equal and not cripple the incomes of better paid people.