Japan offers most paid leave for fathers but few take it, UNICEF report finds | Hacker News Reader

Japan offers most paid leave for fathers but few take it, UNICEF report finds

japantimes.co.jp

60 pointsUltramanoid35 comments

> the third most common reason given was an “unfavorable atmosphere” in the workplace. The top reason was staff shortages and the second most common reason was that their company did not offer it.

If the company doesn't offer it, then they don't have a choice.

If they're short-staffed, that's (most likely) an atmosphere the company has created to keep labor costs low.

So the #2 reason shouldn't even be on the list, and #1 is essentially the same as #3. In other words, "unfavorable atmosphere" is the #1 reason for choosing not to take available paternity leave. This is no different from American companies that offer "unlimited" vacation time but create a toxic work culture where everyone feels guilty for using it.

I would be curious if these companies put similar pressure on women to forego their maternity leave, or if the pressure is only directed against men.

If “maternity leave” means the 20 years to raise 2 children to adulthood with no pay or benefits, these companies are likely enthusiastic promoters.

Maternity leave refers to a specific employment benefit. We’re you genuinely confused or trying to make some other point? In the latter case, is it relevant to this thread?

I'm not going to comment on 'pressure', but I've noticed that companies with formal vacation policies seem to be better for women on mat leave because they can stack their accrued time on top of the mat leave policy.

Anecdotally, my female Japanese friend outright rejected the idea of going back to work after having a kid and said that lots of her friends feel the same way. There seems to be a strong cultural thing around women becoming stay-at-home mom's instead of rejoining the workforce.

I worked at various companies over there and bluntly asked why no one used up their PTO and/or took vacations longer than a day or two. The reply was always: taking any non-trivial amount of time off is perceived to be the sign of a lazy person, I don’t want to make waves.

This lines up quite well with their expression, “the nail that stands up gets hammered down.” Don’t stand out.

There have been cases where people taking a full week off were let go due to this perception of ineffectiveness. Obviously there is societal pressure going on here, but I truly hope it changes.

Is there an abundance of competent workers over there? Companies can easily replace people? It just seems like bad economics to fire people for taking a week off, even if they're perceived as lazy in the short term. It is usually a lot more expensive to hire and train replacements. (I thought)

It's called "being made an example of"

The labor market in Japan works very differently than in the U.S. Once your fired or forced to quit from your salaryman job it's much harder to find a replacement than in the U.S.

That must mean there are few options to earn income (with an acceptable level of risk) in order for employers to have that much negotiating power over the employee.

The acceptable level of risk is, of course, subjective and what is unacceptable in certain societies might be fine in other societies.

Japan has traditionally moved people forward lockstep. For example, you and 19 other people join Very Large Company on April 1st (their fiscal new year). You will all be inserted into a department and work there for 3 years. You will all be promoted at the same time. You will all revolve around to new departments in 3 years.

If you are an outlier and get ousted from Very Large Company you are now unable to join a new company lockstep with college graduates. You are a mid-career outcast, and now need to start considering other options.

To be fair, I feel like the IT industry is a little more lenient in this regard. I met a lot of incoming mid-career folk at the game company I worked at, for example.

I think as a society this is changing, especially now that the younger generation is more inclined to "do their own thing" - work part time jobs, not work, rotate through jobs, etc., but it may take some time to deeply change until the previous generation rotates out of the work force (which won't happen soon, something like 60% of the workforce is over 50 right now).

>Of those who did not take advantage of it, the third most common reason given was an “unfavorable atmosphere” in the workplace.

This brings to mind stories of workplaces in the US that officially offer unlimited vacation time but no one ever takes it because actually using it is viewed so negatively.

There is no such thing as unlimited vacation time. If you want to know how much vacation time you have, ask your HR manager at your “unlimited vacation” org how much vacation they’re required to pay out by law if you separate from the org.

I interviewed with such a place and started questioning them about what this really means. How much do people take on average? What would be unacceptable? The response was pretty much something like "You can take off when the workload and your projects allow it" and they didn't give any hard numbers. It made me wonder if people there actually take less vacation than the usual few weeks.

In my experience it leads to less vacation for most workers. But some people take advantage of it without raising suspicion.

The average worker has no baseline for what amount is appropriate. They think they are always too busy. Their boss thinks they are too busy.

But some people get more by being untransparent. If I’m going on a fishing trip, I don’t tell anyone. If something comes up, “I’m out of the office, I can meet when I get back or do a call.” Nobody knows if I’m traveling for work or vacation.

> But some people get more by being untransparent.

Untransparent...mmm...I think I like I that word :)

Opaque...? :)

Ah, yes, the tyranny of structurelessness and shifting the burden of the answer on the employee.

By giving a vague answer the allow themselves the option of pretending like the workload and projects did not allow it at the time you were going to take your vacation.

It's dishonest at best and a devious dark pattern at worst.

So true. It's also interesting to me that many companies have switched from "Unlimited" PTO to "Flexible" PTO...

I had a co-worker recently who started counting up the time they'd taken off in the last year, realized it was much less than the industry average, and took off for Australia. Seemed like a very reasonable response to me.

But that's the point. People in the comments here seem to think that the unlimited vacation policies are about guilting people into not using any vacation. While that may be a secondary effect, the primary reason is actually to remove unpaid vacation days as a liability from the books, since that's quite expensive especially with the increase in software engineering company salaries in the past decade.

Anecdotally I worked at VMware and Dropbox when they rolled out these policies. I took about the same vacation time as I had used previously and the difference was mainly that I wasn't owed any vacation money when I resigned.

This is false; you're misunderstanding the concept of accrued vacation. If you work for a company with accrued vacation (aka accrued PTO), you must be paid for it when you leave...for any reason including involuntary termination. But at a company with unlimited vacation, you don't accrue vacation days, so they don't need to pay you anything for vacation when you leave. Companies do this because they don't have to treated accrued vacation as a liability in their financial statements, so their financials look better.

The flip-side is also that they can't cap your vacation time, and indeed capping your vacation time could trigger a DoL investigation. Additionally, in some states like Illinois, the company must make vacation payouts equal to the amount of vacation the employee could have taken. (No guidance on this but lower level rulings suggest that it's at least the "capped" amount.)

There's also FMLA issues with unlimited leave most startups don't realize. (If you have unlimited vacation, you must pay out 12 weeks under the FMLA. If you offer paternity/maternity leave and accrued vacation, you only have to pay out pursuant to your leave policy.)

I work remotely for one of those companies in the US that offers unlimited vacation time. As far as I can tell, it's a real thing - some of my coworkers have taken 30+ day vacations with no negativity from the rest of the team. I've never taken a long absence myself - I enjoy my daily work.

There is a very prominent disclaimer that any employee will tell you... "don't fuck up". That means...if you have a pending deliverable; don't vacation. If someone else is depending on you for their deliverable; don't vacation. Basically, support the company first and foremost and your extended absences are OK.

tldr; I work for a SDN provider with unlimited vacation and high expectations of employees

I knew coworkers who worked for another company in the US that switched from 3-4 weeks of vacation time to unlimited vacation time. He said that people now generally took less than 1 and a half weeks of vacation because it was quietly frowned upon to be taking vacation time while other people are working. He said he had been better off with fixed vacation time because it wouldn’t come with this guessing game and stigma.

Depends on the company.

My employer offers unlimited vacation time. And people use it. My boss has taken off 3.5 months in the year since she started (not all at once). Other people in my department have racked up nearly 2 months of vacation in the 8 months since they started.

Our company encourages it, and HR has been diligent with managers about enforcing employees' rights to take vacation as long as it doesn't interfere with their work. As part of that, they require managers to structure assignments so that employees can take time off between projects if they would be too busy to take time off during a project, i.e., by requiring staggered staffing.

It really depends on the culture of the company. In my company (95% Japanese/non-gaishiki-kei) it’s the norm for people to take a couple months off when there’s a new addition to the family. I took 6 weeks when my son was born and nobody batted an eye. My friend, who also had a child around the same time me, couldn’t take parental leave, but said he’d be working remotely a lot instead.

I’m optimistic it will change, but probably not for another long while.

I work with a guy who took it for three months without having worked a day at the place besides orientation. The company knew about his situation prior to hiring him and were totally fine with it - they even arranged gifts etc. The place I work is Japanese but takes a lot of pride in shunning the work culture commonly associated with Japan.

I love reading these kind of stories about Japanese companies. I hope there are more and more of these as the current work culture over there is pretty depressing to me.

To me, the most surprising factoid in this article is that Estonia offers 86 weeks of maternity leave! That's so much! And with such a low cost of living... goodbye, Bay Area.

Iceland basically made paternity leave 'mandatory':

> The country passed a law that granted three months of non-transferable parental leave to both mothers and fathers; an additional three months of leave was granted to the couple to share as they chose.

> By most measures, the law was a rousing success. About 90 percent of Icelandic fathers take leave. In 2007 (the most recent year for which I’ve found data), fathers in Iceland took 101 days of parental leave—almost exactly 1/3 of the family’s total benefit days.

* https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/paternity-leave-in-...

Of course fathers can choose to take zero, but then that time is basically lost. Further changes (ibid):

> The law was such a success that Iceland recently went a few steps further with a 5-2-5 policy: Mothers and fathers will soon each be entitled to five months of non-transferable leave, with an additional two months of shared leave.

Anyone from IS that can comment on this policy?

I worked for a US law firm in Tokyo for a number of years; my paternity leave was 3 days and I was expected to field emails as and when needed.

It is a race to the bottom, my friends - believe it.

It's probably because of the work culture. Many people won't leave work at the end of the day until the boss leaves.

They just need to do like me! Start seeing their wife as the boss!

This is a reality even my boss cannot argue against. He understands it far too well. Don't jeopardize your relationship for something as temporary as a job, you can work as hard as you can all your time there only to be let go at the drop of a hat and replaced by two much cheaper college graduates.

when i request vacation the email reads "boss says i won't be at work between the following dates."

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