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Agreed. In Canada, a woman or man can take up to 18 months of paid leave (although, if you take over 12 months, you'll be getting the same absolute amount of money but just spread over the extra months) to care for a new child. Your employer, by law, is obligated to hold your job for your return (provided that you were an FTE). The money you receive is simply collecting unemployment. It's money that the employee paid into the system, so it's hard to scoff at their right to utilize it. Like other unemployment benefits, you need to have been employed to access this money. To be competitive, some employers choose to "top up" the pay to a certain percentage of your full time wage (for some or all of your leave), but that's just a perk that employers can opt to offer.

I think this policy is entirely reasonable and entirely reasonable. The side effect is that there are often "matt-leave" openings at companies (i.e. covering for someone while they're away), which is a good way to get to know a job on a temporary basis and for employers to get to know a hire without a long term commitment.

It's better than the alternative, but still far from perfect. Unemployment benefit is supposed to provide you a safe net should your employment lapsed - so no one really expects that you would maintain the same quality of living. If push comes to shove you can and will cut all the excess (entertainment, dinning out, traveling), leaving with just bare necessities.

Now, with the parental leave, when your expenses rise (diapers, formulas, cloths, ...) you're expected to make do on the same barebone salary replacement. I've experienced this myself quite recently: I had a choice to take parental leave and get a huge pay cut, or just burn through all accumulated vacation time and get back to work early.

Currently, Service Canada web site says that "maximum yearly insurable earnings amount is $53,100" - which cuts your income 3-4 fold you choose to stay at home. I think many high-earners (read: more that 53k) would rather choose to have more deductions throughout the year, but have 70-80-100% matched.

Yeah, it's definitely not a perfect system. I say this as my wife is currently on maternity leave. We've definitely adjusted our budget and had to plan accordingly.

The biggest point that I try to make when describing the system is that it's not a government handout, it's just an extension of unemployment insurance.

The idea of increasing deductions to bring up EI values seems reasonable, although I imagine it could be a hard sell for men who never intend to use it (not saying that's a reason to not do it, however I'm sure there would be opposition). An opt-in system could be better, but then that kind of goes against the idea of insurance (you'd likely only opt in if you knew you'd be needing it and it'd be advantageous to do so). I guess the argument against the idea would be "just save your money instead" which would bring us right back to where we are today.

I believe the company is less concerned with paying someone who isn't working - which is basically just a fixed cost they can absorb - than they are about the lost productivity while that person is gone. That may or may not be replaceable, and often is not for shorter time spans (say, up to a couple of months). Unfortunately, the government paying for leave wouldn't fixed that misaligned incentive.

You're spot on. Most companies won't care about saving a few thousand. They want that money deployed and potentially multiplying in the form of getting something built or selling something.

If a company is not profiting from their work more than their absence, that says little for the empolyee. Training is often estimated to be nearly a year of pay in functional terms. I think you underestimate the impact of a lost employee.

Not everything a worker does provides immense leverage like software development. Many times it is 1:1 with hours worked.

You're right, but I don't know how to fix that part so let's fix the part we can.

The relatively severity depends on the company and employee for sure. Software vs McDonalds...

Maternity leave has the advantage of a good amount of notice, which can give time to mitigate the loss from a missing employee.

Let the company include a bonus in the employment contract for every year that leave is not taken. Then leave-prone employees will self-select into companies (and lines of work) that don't bother to pay such a bonus (because they would lose a big chunk of it), while employers that do lose a lot of productivity from leave will make sure to offer it.

As a complementary approach, one that's more strictly targeted to the issues that the article talks about: offer generous family leave (12-months or more) but after the first 8 months or so, the leave becomes strictly conditional on the employee spending some time at work (less than an ordinary part-time job), focusing on "re-onboarding" and getting familiarized with what has changed in the enterprise. This ensures that the employee's time is put to the highest and best use, in that he can properly care for the kid's best long-term interests, but at the same time he's providing much-needed reassurance to relevant stakeholders that he's not overly neglecting his future career (either willingly or inadvertently).

Living in an EU country (one of the Eastern Bloc countries) where the scenario you described is the norm (the state pays the for maternity leave), I consider this to be an unethical situation/ or unfair if you want (yes, nothing in life is fair, but the laws should at least be constructed to at least seem fair on the surface).

The reason I claim it is a very unfair situation, is because it offers a significant cushion to a particular class of people (parents), paid out of the taxes of everyone, and yet there are significant minorities of people falling through the cracks. For instance, due to a malfunctioning health-sector I've seen people who break a leg outside working hours get a significant paid leave, and yet people with job-caused mental illness (e.g. burnout) lose their job, and attain NEET status, with 0 state support (for the less fortunate, this is the road to homelessness and a whole lot of other problems). Of course, due to being low status groups, their are not in a position to negociate or lobby their interests to the law-makers. This is just an example, and I know the people disadvantaged by this policy are a small minority (single males for instance), but I think the state should provide equal opportunity to everyone, and for that reason, paying a certain subgroup of people with taxes taken from everyone is an unfair proposition in my book. (Of course, in this particular Eastern Bloc country, fairness is the least of worries, most state institutions are barely functional due to widespread corruption).

Of course, if you've got a population decline problem, like many of the European countries have, then incentivising birth is too good a solution to ignore.

But I still think the most fair/correct approach is having the employer pay for the leave, and factor that into wages/hiring. It's only fair to pay more/hire someone whose potential contribution/output is higher(although I know this is a sensitive topic that's become quite a taboo recently, I think around here people are more prone to think critically than the general public).

>run it through taxes and the government

I would rather take the selfishness of a corporation instead of the apathy and incompetence of a US government bureaucracy.

You can't do that though. Incentives and institutions are what they are. If you could "take the selfishness out of a corporation" we wouldn't need government. We should design our systems for the world we have, not some idealized world that doesn't actually exist.

>"take the selfishness out of a corporation"

You literally did not read my comment. Please read it again.

...

I said I prefer a selfish corporation managing this instead of the incompetent US government.

Ah, sorry. Misread you.

Actually I'm sorry for my tone up there when I clarified what I wrote. My first comment had a bad structure that was easy to misread.

No worries. My brain just sort of filled in some words, maybe because I expected an antagonistic response to the original post. Crazy how that works...I even rewrote what you said in the words I invented haha.

> wrong group is paying it.

And its not necessarily employers. Its also employees. The right group to pay for paid leave is a group of 1: the parent itself.

That's an argument I doubt we'll make useful progress on over the internet.

I think there is useful societal value in having parents spend time with their kids, and I think that as a society we should absorb some of the costs to cause that to happen.

I can understand believing otherwise though - it falls back to a difference in fairly fundamental opinions about how society should function (I expect).

What I hope you can agree with is that if we are going to have paid parental leave, it should be paid for by a shared pool across companies (i.e. the government).

> What I hope you can agree with is that if we are going to have paid maternity leave, it should be paid for by a shared pool across companies (i.e. the government).

I think only if its mandatory this makes sense. But it's not (significantly) mandatory in the us.

Company Benefits have 2 economic advantages: the first is that employees might care for the benefit more than its cost, thus having less salary for the benefit. (an example might be google's plethora of in-company benefits). The second is purely taxes: high incomes get high income taxes, which means that you get a 30%+ margin on any inefficient cost a company takes.

Paid leave is a combination of distortions. In the non-salaried world, its not even a debate: people freely choose what to do and to what degree. Think about offering paid leave benefits to small businesses and see what happens to the government coffers!

My arguments basically assume mandatory anyways, so sure.

> Think about offering paid leave benefits to small businesses and see what happens to the government coffers!

Nothing if it's funded properly. If you have, say, 5% of people taking paid leave, you tax everyone 5% of their salary and give that to the people on leave (roughly speaking). This is just a question or redistributing income not creating money out of thin air.

If we wanted to just give money to people with kids there are better ways to do it than paid leave. A tax that gave everyone paid leave would be so high that it would probably be politically untenable: it is now not effectively a tax, and its not redistrbuted properly, so it can fly as it is.