Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

There are many positive things about living in the US, but having a child here absolutely blew my mind. Not only is the act itself incredibly expensive (I'll spare everyone yet another health insurance rant...) but leave for both mother and father are woeful. Did you know there isn't even a federal requirement for maternity leave at all? In some states women get to claim disability for six weeks and that's it.

Anyway, to get a little more on-topic: lots of us tech company employees are incredibly blessed when it comes to parental leave. Take. Every. Day. Not only is it practically a physical requirement (I don't care what you think, if you're heading into the office with a two week old baby at home you're not getting enough sleep to do anything productive) it's also an amazing opportunity to bond with your child. Your coworkers might moan or judge you. If they do, they're assholes. And who cares, you will move jobs in a few years anyway. You don't owe your employer anything. Take the leave.

I worked for a company in America in the past that had a woman that came to work the next day after giving birth as their was no parental leave whatsoever. We were at a lunch after a charity fundraising event and the CEO laughed about it and said that "she was born to breed."

I feel like you are completely ignoring the FMLA. It mandates 12 weeks unpaid leave within the first year of childbirth.

Unpaid is a huge qualifier. A lot of people simply cannot get by taking three months off with no pay.

Probably a lot of small businesses can't get by with paying people who aren't working.

That would be why in many other systems a public entity picks up the tab, not the employer.

There is no public entity, it is the taxpayer. Just say it so, "that's why you pick the tab".

and so what? the tax payer pays for a lot of things that it makes sense for the tax payer to pay for. at least with health insurance you can bemoan paying for other people's irresponsible lifestyle but with maternity leave almost everyone withdraws from the trust in the same way?

Presenting facts: reality in my country tells that universal maternity and paternity leaves are the most abused systems and tax payers are not happy with this. The low income people have a huge number of children (2 sisters with 33 kids in total were most discussed) just to live on taxpayers money, they never worked between childbirths. Also there are so many people pay huge taxes and never qualify to get anything in return (have no kids).

Many people here believe that caring for your kids should be the parent's responsibility, not anybody else's.

>Presenting facts: reality in my country tells that universal maternity and paternity leaves are the most abused systems and tax payers are not happy with this.

googling "canada paternity maternity leave abuse" gets no matching hits. show me

>The low income people have a huge number of children (2 sisters with 33 kids in total were most discussed) just to live on taxpayers money, they never worked between childbirths.

average number of children in canada in 2011 was less than 2.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2014002...

how many standard deviations away from that mean is ~16 children? so you're talking about decrying a social policy that overwhelmingly improves outcomes for women, children, and communities

https://www.milbank.org/wp-content/uploads/mq/volume-96/sept...

because some poor person somewhere once had a bunch of kids.

these are distorted facts (or what we in /my/ country, like to call fake news).

Well, here there are 2 categories of people (with exceptions, of course): people that have 1-2 kids and take a very short leave and people that have 5-15 kids just to live on the checks they get for the kids. You don't have that yet because we started a long time ago, but it does not mean you will not repeat the history, again and again. So yes, you are right, it works now in Canada, we were there 30-40 years ago. Look where we are today before answering.

This is far from universal. In my state (California) the cost is distributed among all employers as part of an “unemployment insurance” scheme. Everyone who employs someone pays a small amount each month to cover things like family leave. (Yes, labor economics tells us that this really means that all employees are paying this amount.) but it’s not all taxpayers, and it’s not a progressive tax (meaning everyone pays about the same, rich people don’t pay more as they do for other government programs).

Given your other comment, though, it sounds like your concern isn’t “taxpayers” paying for family leave, it’s you. So yes, ultimately, you, productive member of society, might be paying for other, “unproductive” members of society (as defined by you) to have kids.

You sound grumpy about this arrangement. Of course, as an upstanding citizen, you’ve never taken advantage of incentives or benefits paid for by other taxpayers, right? And of course you’ve never had the assistance of a government program, or it was different because it was for something “not in your control” — unlike having kids.

This attitude rubs me the wrong way, hence my less-than-civil response. It’s like the people who hate public transit because they only drive, not realizing that public transit takes other cars off the road and improves their own commutes. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

This is part of why it needs to be in law, to level the playing field. If it's mandated, then your competitors can't undercut you by firing all their pregnant employees or refusing them leave.

To be fair, in America, if you haven't been able to save enough money before having a kid to last three months unpaid, I'm not sure how you plan to survive after having a kid.

Well, yes and no. Not if you work for a small company - I can't remember the numbers, but x employees within x range. I'm pretty sure some larger companies wind up not having to follow FMLA.

And as others have said, it is unpaid. If you are poor, unpaid leave is basically no leave, even if it is protected. You can be too poor to take leave.

I'll also mention that FMLA is only for full time employees, so part time workers can still get fired for attendance, though they are likely to get some unemployment.

This goes doubly true for multiple births (having had a single then twins, it was more than twice the difficulty). You have enough to worry about with just keeping them alive and all the questions on early development. Work can wait.

Someone from the states came on to our local tech slack to try to recruit and bragged about their 16 weeks' maternity. Didn't have a great response to "you realize the legal minimum is 6 months, right?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com