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Comment by pacamara619 | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile the Swiss people voted to have two weeks of paternity leave instead of one day. The icing on the cake is that the actual initiative asked for four weeks but the parliament made a counter-proposal of two weeks after which the intiative committee withdrew their proposal of four. 60% of the voters were in favor.

Two weeks in one of the highest gdp per capita countries of the world. Two. Measly. Weeks. It was just one single day up until now. Let that sink in.

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It’s zero in all but ~10 US states if your employer has fewer than 50 employees. And even then, the leave is unpaid.

> the leave is unpaid

All employer-paid employee benefits ultimately come with a reduction in salary. The reason is simple - companies do not look at your salary when deciding if it is worth hiring you. They look at total compensation (salary + benefits). The larger the benefits, the lower the salary.

Me, I prefer minimal benefits and maximal salary.

Some states (and other countries) offer paid family leave (not only applicable to births) via payroll taxes, i.e. wealth redistribution.

Me, I prefer a society where children have a higher probability of being attended to by their parents even if it costs me some money.

payroll taxes on employers = less salary

A bit less money but a healthier society is still an improvement in the way of life. If you only measure everything in money, you're going to miss out on a lot.

Chances are that if your employer isn't willing or able to pay for benefits they're also not willing or able to pay for a maximal salary though. You're probably just missing out on benefits rather than being paid the value of them. The companies shareholders and owners make more profit though, so if you're getting compensation in stock you are benefitting indirectly.

Pay is set by supply & demand curves.

However, the calculation done by a company is:

a. what is the total compensation paid to the employee?

b. how much value will the employee produce?

If `b` is less than (`a` + opportunity cost), then "no hire". What percentage of `a` is salary is simply irrelevant to the business decision.

Your supposition is only correct if the business manager is winging it and has little idea what is going on financially in the business. The field of "cost accounting" is devoted to figuring these things out. Getting a good handle on it is key to running the business efficiently.

This is wrong because many benefits are like insurance.

It costs the company $100 per employee to offer rarely used $10000 benefits to everyone.

To be fair, slow to decide[1], but then actually implemented once decided[2], is a common swiss political pattern. Consider how late universal female suffrage was, and how many female presidents, from how many different parties, we've had since them.

[1] Did Einstein really say "if the world were going to end at midnight, then I'd want to be in Bern, because they'd get around to it sometime around 1:30"?

[2] This is said to be a characteristic of Quakers as well. Maybe all consensus-prioritising systems?

As a Swede who just moved to Switzerland, who has a child coming up and will be affected by this, I find it pretty reasonable. Of course, I'd prefer to take more time off to be with my child, but I don't expect tax-payers to finance that — that's between me and my employer. The other side of the story is that in Switzerland you make so much that unpaid leave is usually quite feasible. If you're in tech the compensation is probably less than 50% anyway.

The Netherlands is the same. Two years ago it was two days. Since July it's two weeks. This is the worst in all of the EU.

In Denmark we also only have two weeks paternity leave. But then between 7-12 months to split between mother and father. However, the most common (in my experience) is that the mother uses the full leave.

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