Without parental leave I might be dead
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm convinced I'll go to my grave with working that time being my biggest regret in life. I had benefits, but was saving the limited time for when my wife returned to work... to only lose it when my child passed.
I couldn't advocate more for maternal/paternal leave.
As a parent, your post is incredibly impactful.
As a company owner(20 FTE), I've had several staff take leave for catastrophic health issues in their immediate family.
It's been incredibly costly for my small company to keep paying them indefinitely beyond their accrued and used holiday/sick leave, but it's been worth it in the long run.
It has engendered the kind of effort, loyalty, and performance that can't be bought, only earned.
From the company's perspective, it hurts a lot up front but it makes sense ethically, morally, and I think financially as well.
Here in NZ, we have paid parental leave. Mostly taken by mothers, but with some nudging for fathers to take some of it as well.
When we had our children it was 12 weeks total combined paid parental leave.
It has since been extended to 26 weeks combined paid, with up to another 26 weeks unpaid.
Hot take: it can be bought -- you bought it with paid leave!
Ok, I know what you're trying to express. But I don't think it's dirty at all to acknowledge that taking care of your employees generates loyalty. It's a competitive advantage to offer benefits like this -- that's why all the big tech co's do it.
We met many other parents in the ICU who worked jobs that weren't remote, crane operators, waste management professionals, mill workers, etc. I imagine they share the same sentiment as me.
With complete respect, I feel I must add however: Society on the other hand did not do the best it could have done – sheltered and cared for the people in this situation. It isn’t even efficient at any scale or context to just let it ride like this. This breaks people. Grief and burnout burns people up.
They shouldn’t have had to keep powering the treadmill, shouldn’t have to had to do anything to ensure insurance coverage didn’t run out. Earnestly and calmly speaking, I honestly think it’s most useful to view the practice as… barbaric.
Thank you.
I'm not going to respond to those comments, inevitability, that will say there's more to this story, because there isn't, I was a good employee and understood my job, but they just saw a replaceable body. I'm never going to dedicate more than the minimum effort to a company ever again.
The best thing I could do for my child is to not rock the boat.
Thank you for sharing this story, I'm so sorry this happened to your family.
I have a great manager, who would've been ok with whatever, but there's only so much I was entitled too. I also had bills rolling in, so anything unpaid was out of the question. I'm sure I could've survived with being unpaid, but living off GoFundMe donations didn't sit well with me. Ultimately GoFundMe paid for her funeral.
And the insurance companies are laughing all the way to bank.
If anyone else reading is ever in a similar situation talk to your HR department. I help HR departments negotiate things all the time. A common thing is taking an LOA and the company will pay your COBRA premiums. They don’t have to, it’s technically unpaid time, but if you have some savings and insurance is your barrier this is actually kind of common. But again, I’m in healthcare industry so YMMV.
Our health is the most important thing we have, and we should look after that
This is something I just don't get to grok about the US. Here in Mexico we are supposedly "copying" the best of the US (sigh), having the option of paying for "major" health insurance with insurers like NewYork Life, along with other local ones (GNP, AXA). A year of mayor medical insurance costs around $3,000 USD a year. Sure, it is by no means a small amount, but it is definitely doable in case of an emergency.
There´s even something called "excess insurance" that you can buy as a individual while you are working. It covers any spending "on top" of whatever your companies' insurance covers, and serves to "exhaust" any cooling-off periods, so that if you are out of your job at some point, you convert it to full private insurance and get all the benefits.
Its just not beneficial for anyone.
The mum is utterly frazzled.
The employer gets half an employee back
Society is conditioned to think that the only practical way to raise a baby is to give up on work/get live in care.
now, to look at it from a "my mum managed, I don't want to undermine the american nuclear family" point of view:
Yes, mums working is an anathema, but given that exceedingly difficult to own a good house, have good health insurance and have an economically inactive partner at home, I suspect the problem here isn't the mum. I suspect its the salami slicing of wages to the average joe/joelle.
Even if it undermines the american nuclear family, having such a big obstacle to the "correct"[1] type of family having babies is going to undermine the "correct" family having babies. Which means one's chosen view of family dies out with inflation.
Given that _every_ other "civilised" country has some sort of rudimentary care for new parents, which doesn't acutally cost that much, I can't see any reasonable objection to not having it.
[1]I'm not going to define what correct is, its divisive and allows people to project what they think is wrong with "the other side" who ever they might be, rather than engage with the specifics at hand.
* the average person/family is trying to live a little beyond their means
* “work needed to do” is like a gas, it expands to fit the hours worked
* rent seeking elements expand to keep #1 true
The takeaway is that there is a lot of “work” being done in the economy that doesn’t need to be done because prices will always rise a little past what people can pay comfortably so… people work too much and think that they need to.
If you cut the lifetime hours worked by half, the standard of living probably wouldn’t change much.
The solution to this is radical modification of the markets which leech away extra income.
One such method would be to control real estate prices by enacting huge taxes on rental property and profits simultaneously making it extremely difficult or impossible to acquire large loans for real estate (owned or rented out). Making owning s home that isn’t your primary residence a huge financial liability and removing the ability to sell it for high prices would crash the market and remove the rent paid to landlords or “rent” paid to banks for mortgages. Both betting industries that take far more value than they give back.
I’m not a landlord, but I rented 6 different places for a total of about 13 years after college plus my time during college. I’m glad those places were available at prices I could afford.
Property values rise in locations that are highly desirable regardless of government or market intervention. It has more do to with the surface area of the earth than any particular policy.
A government system will result in similar issues - Look at the retirees and trust funder tenants living in mostly-empty 4 bedroom rent controlled apartments in NYC.
You have to allocate the limited space somehow. You cannot fit more people into one square meter of land without building higher or denser, and building higher is not always a simple option.
-cease preventing density by legal fiat
-support density with infrastructure
-cease encouraging home cost inflation via the tax code, socialized lending institutions, and bank capital regulation
-put in place a property tax systems that encourages the most valuable use of land
-eliminate parking mandates and free parking
-broaden the commutable footprint by building excellent mass transit systems
That’s not perfect but if it’s far from nothing.
After the prerequisite step is taken, then the tax code should be changed to fix that rent seeking, in houses yes, but generally too. Seeking rent is not an overall economic good, but a wealth transfer mechanism from the poor to the rich.
I'm personally a proponent of parental leave, but I'll answer this one point.
"Forcing women" back into work after pregnancy is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases. All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood.
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/motherhood...
And from a "nuclear family" point of view, most cultural traditionalists I know would argue to me that it's good for kids to be in multiple-parent households. When people talk about stereotypical traditionalist nuclear families, these are very often families that have extended support structures of multiple people involved in child-rearing.
Opponents to parental leave (even feminist opponents) are in some ways attempting to equalize the time-off risk between mothers[0] and fathers. And that can be done by reducing the mother's time off to zero to match the father, but it can also be done by letting fathers get involved in early child-rearing and giving them more time to help their partners.
----
[0] And nonbinary/transgender/adoptive/etc parents too of course, but I'm just using a shorthand here.
Better childcare / pre-k can help too, but there musn't be a gap between when at least partial leave ends and childcare begins.
Good thing we all work to much already, so reducing total "public sphere" labor hours is not a huge issue.
As an example, they could add extra parental leave days that are earmarked for father classes.
I can vouch from personal experience that I did not enjoy my paternity leave at all and I'd much rather work.
Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.
There are tons of possible explanations to explain a delta in salary between men and women. Men generally tend to negotiate better and women tend to take more time off when a son is born. You can also slice subsets of data, to show whatever you want. For example, if you look at women in their 20s, they are outperforming men on both salary and education.
It definitely helped us economically (it's nice to have so much paid holiday) but it forced me into a nurturing role which my partner was definitely better suited for. I ended up being quite depressed by the entire situation and had a series of mental health issues + lost most of my friends. At the same time I am definitely better at negotiating than her and I am earning more - so without that artificial incentive we would have naturally gravitated toward the best solution.
I agree two parents households work great, but you don't really need two parents hands-on with kids all the time. I find it great in limited doses but I would go completely insane if I had to do it all the time, while I can tolerate work just fine. My partner was getting incredibly stressed at work but with kids it seems like she found her balance.
She's looking forward to go back to work once all the kids go to nursery / school in 3 years, but not in a typical employers / employee setting, more like running the family software business.
Citation needed. It's PART of the discrepancy, but the evidence is far from conclusive. Even the link you pasted shows otherwise. Women without children still peak at 90% of relative wages to men without children, which themselves are lower than wages of fathers (presumably because being in a stable relationship allows a working father to focus on their career with someone taking care of the home)
All babies are created by two humans.* Why should the career of one of them be penalized for it? Why not instead create as a society the tools so that both can share the upbringing and care of the baby while the mother is recovering?
* (although the parents are not always the same persons who have biologically made it; yet it is a good idea that the solution for such a case is the default behaviour).
Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable. Unless we can agree to a minimally reasonable set of differences between men and women in the reproductive realm, before and after birth, we won't get very far.
PS. There is nothing "penalizing" in taking care of an infant. It is a fundamental part of life. Some even see it as rewarding.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2007/07/12/fewer-m...
The argument assumes that all people receive the same pay and promotions for the same work. Wage differentials between people from the same age cohort appear because gap years, which are the human approach for infant care, lead to small but measurable delays in the mother's careers.
BTW, this is not an argument that all wage differentials that are observed in the real world are, or should be, explainable this way. It is simply a pushback against rigid Procrustean axioms that risk doing more harm that good.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/your-employment-rights-in...
There's a lot of evidence around wage discrepancies, but I have never heard anyone claim that it's the _mothers_ who are forcing themselves back to work. That seems like a huge stretch and doesn't align with anything I've seen before.
The cultural components manifest themselves different ways:
As a biz owner: Why would you give a raise to someone who hasn't contributed anything to the company in the last 2-4 months?
As an employee: how would you (man or woman) feel if your equal peer didn't contribute anything for 2-4 months and got the same raise as you?
> The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases.
Strongly agree with the above.
Subsidize me until they are in public school and I’ll high five you.
I know this is an exaggeration, but it drew my interest. This expects that the rest of us have to work to subsidize you having children for five to six years.
I'm wholly on board with helping parents raise children. Children are our future. But at some threshold of subsidization this equation tips and actively offloads the entire burden onto those without children.
Both of my parents had jobs when I was growing up. Why are we suddenly expecting this to change? Childcare can be paid for at rates under minimum wage in aggregate. Look at our school system and daycare businesses. Just because you think your child deserves only the best does not make it economical, and lots of people make this work. Thousands of years of child rearing has happened in suboptimal conditions.
Raising children has been an incredible chore more often than not throughout history. It's only been briefly punctuated by moments of ease, and even then, it wasn't evenly distributed. Children are not easy.
I think modern parents are seeing their childfree peers and remarking on the delta in quality of life.
I honestly don't mean this as an attack. I'm just interested in the varying perspectives on this.
If we're expected to move wherever for work, then that wherever needs to provide support. Because right now I'm hours from my sole remaining inlaw and a whole country apart from my own parents and brother, and it's been hell raising children like this. And not just young children; my teenagers' mental health would be much better if they were to have their uncle and grandma nearby.
We can obviously unpack all the ways that this is abused, but generally speaking children are necessary for the continuation of the species. Children are also absolutely a burden on the parents, physically, emotionally, and financially.
So yes, broadly speaking, I would expect the childfree to disproportionately contribute into a societal pool to offset for the fact that they are existing in human society but not contributing their part to it's ongoing propagation.
Ultimately though, you're right - no parent should expect to have the same lifestyle as their childfree counterpart. Not with free time, disposable income, or even day-to-day "happiness".
> Both of my parents had jobs when I was growing up. Why are we suddenly expecting this to change?
Mine too. Here's what I think has changed: in that era (and for much of human history), it was assumed/expected that it "took a village" to raise children. Families stayed closer together - the previous generation was around to help with childrearing. And in general, communities took care of everyone's children in a pool that would be considered completely outlandish today. Heck, the concept of a Wet Nurse [1] is something that would probably explode most people's minds today. I bet at least one person will read this comment and not realize that this was something that was completely ubiquitous and standard for much of human history. Can you imagine that existing today? It would be inconceivable. Not that we need it since the advent of formula, but the point is simply that societies helped take care of children more in the past than they do now.
Today, people move further from home from work (losing direct family access), have children later in life (less energy to contribute/harder to tradeoff career responsibilities), and build fewer local community social bonds (online relationships may be meaningful but they don't help babysit).
I don't think we have adjusted accordingly yet.
Sounds like personal choices to me
Anyways, the difference between our family unit and our friends who have local family & ties is night and day different.
The amazing thing to me is you think the OP was asking for something unbelievable.
> The amazing thing to me is you think the OP was asking for something unbelievable.
The five years that OP alluded to is a really long time to not be working. That's 5/40 years for any given career (for a single child), meaning one eighth of a childfree person's productivity has to cover for it. At least at this extreme scale.
> Both of us had comparatively long parental leave for both kids.
How long was it? I'm genuinely curious.
Again, I'm not against subsidizing childcare and supporting children. Some of the expectations of parents seem to be really high, especially to someone whose parents both worked throughout my early childhood.
The current costs of childcare in my area are $80-$250/wk for infants unless you're going for something super Bougie for your baby.
True, but on a long enough timeframe one could also view it as a repayment from the people who (with or without children) were once children-being-subsidized themselves.
The point stated was that there needs to be a threshold. You have introduced another topic entirely, and the person you are answering implied nothing about your topic.
Are you including "people with children over the age of five to six years" in this group? Because it seems like they would be helping to raise others people's children (in your words) but would also have benefitted.
According to the first Google result I found it looks like in 2018 only 15% of women age 50 were childless. A first-order approximation assuming younger generations have kids at the same rate and it's the same for both genders (neither of these are guaranteed but it's a starting point) would lead me to believe that more than most people have children and would benefit from a policy like this over the course of their lives. People without cars help pay for roads, people without children pay for public schools...I'm not really seeing much here to suggest there's an undue burden on those without children.
This is exactly how society works for ages 5-18 and we call it 'school', how is 0-4 different?
Public school is typically less than $50/day per student. I vaguely suggested minimum wage stipends for an extended parental leave (1 year+), and this would be more than we spend on public schooling.
Lots of poor families make childcare work on shoestring budgets and have done so all throughout history. My parents did.
How much money is enough? How much is too much?
* Subsidize them with 15 years of child care for a relatively small amount now, and they will become productive members of society.
* Do nothing now, and in 15 years be forced to subsidize them via crime, the justice system, and outreach programs for the remainder of their life.
our comfortable retirement is dependent on a good crop of reasonably successful children being born now, or in the previous 5 years.
It benefits us that those children are brought up to be balanced, rational pragmatic people. Perhaps extended child care might be the thing that does it?
I suspect that five years is indeed too much.
However perhaps the answer is one year "off" plus cheap, good quality child care from 1 year plus?
I would say 3 year is pretty good as kids starts to gain a lot from socializing after that age.
Why would this be absurd? It's perfectly normal. Looking after a toddler is hard 7/24 work with little time to spare. Of course you can go to work and instead pay for a house cleaner and a baby sitter to look after your house and your kid because.. work is more important? Or what is your argument here?
That's basically my plan, but running a business/contracting/freelancing is not for everyone. Sooo thankful I have my own insurance though.
Sweden has one of the more generous programs that pays up to $41K/year (USD equivalent) or 80% of your income, whichever is lower. That amount is actually quite good if you're living modestly, but it may not be what people earning $100-150K have in mind when they see "paid parental leave".
Definitely better than nothing, though!
I have two kids, 2.5 years apart, and there was one year in NYC where a small family daycare was running us ~$5k per month in childcare. We'd been aiming for the kids to be a bit further apart, partly for financial reasons, but shrug, it didn't happen that way (first kid took a lot longer of trying than the second). We're fortunate in that we can afford that, but it did impact our long-term savings and eventual home ownership.
I honestly don't know what the working poor do. I guess you're not aloud to move away from extended family.
We don’t need this tied to an employer like health insurance as this is something that benefits us all.
But consider if everyone was able to take the first year at some percentage less of regular salary. Then public funded care available with learning included?
My wife would have preferred this to having exhausted fmla just before giving birth because of early complications.
Returning to work was not an option for her, 6 years later returning to work was one of the most emotionally draining experiences for her.
We could have a society were children goes to public school as soon they can take formula.
Be time-idempotent; imagine if you were talking to someone from the 15th century and they were SURE they were right about their crazy opinions.
The meta-stable way to be reasonable is that as long as someone seems to be honestly asking the reasoning for your beliefs, and your principles, you should try to explain yourself, rather than just shut them down by repeating your assertion of correctness.
Otherwise, how will you find out about the likely beliefs you hold right now, which our descendants will consider insane and evil? Forcing yourself to self-introspection is a good practice. I don't expect anyone to change their mind about this, but being able to explain to others your reasoning can also clear up your own views, and help convince your adversary much more effectively than the "just repeat your position" argument style.
For healthcare, the last time I heard about bending the cost curve was during the Obama administration.
For education, I’ve never seen any politician suggests we try to reign in cost growth—-just proposals around who should eat the costs.
For housing, governments at all levels have been pulling every policy lever they can find to increase costs. Falling costs are wildly considered a national emergency.
Why is it that progressives’ solution to everything is to dump money out of the air? Are there no structural improvements to be made anywhere?
Want to fix that? A true multiparty system, IRV, and eliminating gerrymandering as possibilities. The last one would mostly be by eliminating geographic boundaries generally; instead representation would be decided by proportionally voting in representatives from the IRV list, which might be preferenced by area specific politicians first and could then fall back to those who represent other types of interest focus.
Similarly the relative representation power of each voter in a body such as the senate should be resolved by merging similarly leaning smaller bodies until each voter is within relatively the same representation strength as other voters.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_pop...
This is an issue for E.G. California (~20M/senator) and Texas (~15M/senator) compared to Vermont (~310K/senator) and Wyoming (~240K/senator).
In the past the senate started out FAR more balanced by state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
For example in 1820 the top three most populace states were all around 1 million each. A core belle-curve hump ranges from around 600K down to 150K, and about 5 states have less than 100K. Senators representing roughly ~500K, ~250K, and 50K respectively, a weight difference of only a factor of 10 rather than a number approaching almost a factor of 100.
Have the government lend trillions of dollars at low interest with minimal qualifications for housing. Expected outcome is realized.
Same is happening with childcare. Government increases child care credit. No surprise that daycare has raised the rate $30 per week.
It cannot possibly be riding expenses for daycare operators.
A modern Western lifestyle. Almost every Western country without fail requires dual incomes to afford a basic lifestyle.
The working-dad stay-at-home mum has long gone.
It will be remiss not to mention that America stands alone among western countries in not providing livable subsidies/incomes to recent parents, and expects them to be back in the workforce after a couple of weeks. The rest of the western world is far less aggressive in "forcing" women back to work.
The median personal income in 2019 was $35,805 (cf. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N). I think you'd be hard pressed to live on that with a family of 3+ people.
And what about the 50% of people who have a personal income less than the median?
edit: that stat was for 2019, not 2020, my bad
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/17/archives/in-soviet-union-...
Rents are too high, and wages are too low.
[0] If you cannot afford to unilaterally walk away from employment for several months, you have no economic power regardless of your churn rate. Sorry to break it to you.
- specific allowances (paid parental leave, paid sick leave) for obvious reasons
- "blanket" paid time off outside of federal holidays for recreation and stuff like parents dying
- extra PTO or working hours reduction to take care of sick/terminally ill relatives
- wages big enough to allow everyone working full time to save a meaningful amount of money
Most developed countries outside of the US have realized this. All countries in Europe have the first two points already covered (paid parental, sick and general time off), Germany has the third one covered since 2012 ("Familienpflegezeit").
The only thing we all seem to be lacking after decades of wage starvation and neoliberalism is the last one - but COVID-related disruption is likely to incite a massive paradigm shift as the market goes from an employer market to an employee market and companies are pulling production back on-shore for a myriad of reasons.
Ah, here we go. This is a veiled "only people who have enough money should have children" argument.
> And people can and do stay at home with their children at all income levels.
I am sure that disproportionately favors certain income levels.
Would be very interesting to see actual time spent not working, and caring for children at home, in relation to amount of paid leave. And across income brackets. Would not be surprised if it comes out to more time with children in many cases even though paid leave is less..
This is not what happens. No one is being "forced" to do anything. Rather, free individuals (speaking from a U.S. centric viewpoint) make a choice to become pregnant and birth a child. It seems reasonable to me that the result of this private choice should not be the burden of others. Note that FMLA (again, U.S.-centric) grants unpaid leave. In other words, you can't be fired for certain finite length absences resulting from certain medical occurrences. But you're not entitled to payment for non-work.
So, when Mom gives birth, she absolutely has the right to say, "You know what, I can't/don't want to work." She just isn't entitled to force a company to pay her for the privilege of her non-work.
I may be in the minority on this, but I find it really weird how people, more and more nowadays, believe the consequences private, personal choices should be borne by everyone else. The entitlement is really hard to stomach. This idea seems to be coalescing with a belief that "stuff just happens". But the reality is, the economy–any economy–is powered by labor.
People need to work. If enough people don't, we go back to the default state of reality: poverty, starvation, etc etc.
> The employer gets half an employee back
This is a self defeating claim. Under your (implied) proposal, the employer would just not get any employee back for an even longer period of time. Or, worse, they have to hire a temporary employee to fill in, and are now paying two sets of wages, all as a result of decisions over which they have absolutely influence!
Starting or not starting a company is a completely private decision, yet we as a society have recognized that having entrepreneurs and a functional business culture is very important and actually profitable. So most governments, even the American ones, give grants and support to new companies to prop them up. Even though again, they are the consequence of someone's personal choice - yet the taxpayer bears the burden. Sounds familiar?
Bearing children is a benefit to the society as a whole - someone has to work, someone has to pay taxes, etc etc. So as a society we support mothers by allowing them to take maternal leave, even if having a child is very much a personal choice.
Also I don't see anyone advocating that companies pay mothers through entirety of maternity pay - in most countries it's the public budget that does after some short initial time period.
>>People need to work. If enough people don't, we go back to the default state of reality: poverty, starvation, etc etc.
And within reason, people need to have children or the country you are part of won't have enough citizens to support it within few decades - that's the reality of life.
To what grants, specifically, are you referring? As someone who is active in the business formation space in the U.S., I’d absolutely love to get some free capital.
Humans have been giving birth since the very beginning. The phenomenon of insisting companies fund child birth is a brand new idea. As in, only the last 30 or so years. Societies have arisen and persisted since long, long before then. How is it that all of humanity managed this long without paid family leave?
Some pregnancies are not planned. Some sex is not consensual. Unless we have free abortions available, people with uteruses are sometimes not free to decide not to be pregnant.
The decision to support pregnant people is a decision to support the baby. At some point, everyone reading this was a pregnancy, everyone reading this was helpless. One of the core functions of society is to protect helpless, young humans. Full stop.
If you are under the impression society exists for a purpose other than pooling resources to protect the citizens from outside threats of hunger, violence, or famine, I urge you to reconsider.
Moralizing about how better decisions should have been made is Monday-night-quarterbacking at best. The reality is there is now a small human. The small, helpless human should get the best shot we can give them, because otherwise, what the fuck are we doing.
Name something we should spend money on that's more worthwhile than a helpless baby not suffering.
I don’t disagree about abortion, per se, but it’s a separate issue.
Wow, clearly you are not a parent, and probably thats good for society. You know, parenting isn't a past time hobby of the privileged, but activity via which all of us came to existence. If we stop it, society, states and whole human civilization will collapse in 1 generation.
Nobody paying for social/medical/police etc services old ass xibalba would enjoy when retired.
But sure, lets maximize profits, lets raise a messed up generation with lack of strong parental touch in first years, child psychologists all agree there is no harm in that, right. I am sure that... 3%? 4%? extra income will make up for that.
As much as I admire the positive aspects what makes US so great, the negative aspects are such a horrible fucked up mess I politely say 'No, thank you' anytime offer comes from across the pond. Can't imagine raising family and growing old in such system, not once I've experienced what many western Europe countries offer.
Side info - recently Swiss improved paid paternal leave to 2 weeks. Just about take it off for my daughter. My company counted it into our social security dues. The added 0.05% of extra costs from each salary mean nothing, absolutely nothing, for anybody. It means the world to me. Thank you, Swiss.
> you are not a parent, and probably thats good for society
> old ass xibalba
You really undermine your credibility when you go ad hominem.
Surely we can show some empathy and demand better benefits for all. You know youre included in that pool too! I’m sure most folks on their deathbed will be glad they spent more time with their children then at their desk.
wrt duration of maternity leave, western europe is pretty much at 3-6 months, while some of the eastern countries go longer. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave)
Giving a special benefit that will for the most part only be exercised by women discourages hiring women. You can still think its worth it, but don't pretend like you're baffled by anyone who would object or question how this impacts women.
How its taken is up to the parents. The people that I know who've taken it have split it fairly evenly. (I know I know sample size.)
I did not take any, as I was not eligible at the time.
As someone who does a lot of recruiting, I don't think "hmm I'm going to have to pay this woman for mat leave" because frankly that's bollocks, who knows who's going to be here for six months, 1 year or 8?
From a purely business point of view, the women that have come back from maternity are normally bargains. They don't ask for more pay, they are flexible and are loyal, assuming we have made the correct allowances for being parents.
also being a parent in tech allows people to deal much better with the toddler tantrums/playground fights that seem to be common in this industry.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
This graph shows women's employment rate trending up in the UK:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap#/media/File:OEC...
Seems like countries with paid leave have comparable or higher rates of labor participation and (on average) lower gender pay gap.
I don't think we should incentivise families with two working parents and young kids. It increases the pool of workers keeping wages down, benefiting employers, and increases stress in the family, likely contributing to the epidemic of broken families we're looking at - which have negative effects on these generations' mental health and crime history.
If you're middle class and you manage well your spending and are willing to relocate / look into alternative career paths, it's possible to maintain a family on one career and I firmly believe it's better for the children. If you're having kids you can either outsource your kids early years education to the government or do it yourself. There are some studies (albeit I find social studies to be murky and hard to rely on) finding correlations between UK government programs paying for nurseries and increase in teenage crime roughly 15 years later. Study or not, I think that kids before 2/3 should not go to nursery, the social trauma of being unattended with other bigger kids needs to wait a bit longer, once they're ready.
In our family, we didn't send the kids to nursery before 2.5/3 years and my partner didn't work (for an employer, she kept working on her own personal projects, for "entertainment"). They integrated in nursery very well, we never had detachment problems and they're fairly well behaved. We're both developers, so maintaining the family on one salary is trivial, but I've met people from all walks of life who managed to do it.
Sure, some people are simply not creating enough value for society to break even on one salary and that's suboptimal. I'd advise to sort their life out to earn enough to support a new family, before making babies.
There are plenty of studies that link stable family structures to success and unstable family structures to crime and mental health issues.
The last time the government meddled with families, it didn't end up well for the black community: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/03/the_decline...
And nowadays the stats for broken families, across all ethnicities, is higher than ever.
(C-sections are somewhat more predictable on the physical recovery side...but do not lack for issues of their own.)
I sat down with my boss about a month or so ago and told him I'm intending to take parental leave. "No problem" he said, I told him my intention was to take the full 8 weeks I'm entitled to. He didn't say anything right away to that... eventually it was more of a "...that's not typical for the guys around here"
We did a bit of back and forth. (I think he went to HR to find out he can't really deny that) and we've come to an agreement that works for both of us.
But honestly... I'm quite shocked at just how atypical it is for fathers to ask for, and get time off to care for their newborn. Not even just the child, the mother needs support early on too.
I've given a lot of myself to this company, and they've done a tremendous amount for me as well. So I do have a small sense of loyalty to them and don't want to leave them hard up on my absence. But if this helps my boss understand that we should hire extra hands for the times when I'm not available, this is a long term benefit overall as I see it. I'm hoping 8 weeks leave help me reset and address some of my anxieties about the work load. I hope it lets my coworkers understand exactly what level of shit I help shelter them from.
...and if none of that works out. I've already got a friend trying to poach me to a new business. Win/win in my eyes.
Thanks for listening to my rant.
I have no loyalty and have just been biding my time. I've been just comfortable enough so far, but things haven't been great in a few aspects. They were not hard up for coverage and my absence, which should have been planned for far in advance, would not have effected the schedule in any manner.
My wife and I get to split 69 weeks, of which neither of us can take more than 61. She's going to take the max, plus her 15 weeks she gets post-birth (76 weeks total) and I'll take 8 right at the start. We get a small amount of government-paid employment insurance, and jobs will exist when we return.
What's important is that here, it's enforced by law, not by company generosity. To punish me (or my wife) for taking this time off is literally illegal. I soon need to have a conversation with my manager (based in the US) to make sure he's aware of the this all. He's a nice guy, but he may be surprised.
I got severely sick when I started working there... like 2 weeks in and I was hospitalized with a brain infection for a week + another couple weeks at home recuperating. They paid full wages during my absence.
When my father was dying from cancer they did the same thing as I helped move him to hospice and handle the estate.
There's been other things as well where they've gone above and beyond what an employer should do, and maybe "loyalty" isn't exactly how I should frame it, I do feel "safe" working there knowing I'm not about to be thrown out on my ass should something inconvenient happen.
You can have loyalty and still understand that there's a social/informal contract in place (and maybe a formal one in some places).
Shortly after I became the manager of my team, one of my reports informed me that he wanted to use 3-4 weeks of paternal leave (out of a max of 6) a few months after the birth of his child (company policy allowed it within 12 months.) He said he'd keep his laptop nearby in case of emergencies. "You're crazy!" I told him, "take the full 6 weeks! And leave the laptop off!"
As a manager, if it's the company policy, then it's the employee's right to take the time off. There should be no amount of brow-beating (assuming sufficient advance notice, of course.) I checked in with HR for procedural details, and overall it was easy/painless from top to bottom.
Which is all to say - if this company in the slightest gives you more negative feedback about taking leave,.. I would, if I were in your shoes, be looking for a new place. They're not showing you any loyalty, so you don't owe it to them.
A twitter thread from Ezra Klein (also recently took parental leave) that might resonate with you: https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1457771021327503360
An important lesson we all need to remember: there are two ways to get the time off which is owed to you, the hard way or the easy way. If your boss is really willing to make it the hard way, it's on him/her to find a train a replacement. Get out of there.
I've also seen this with vacation.... A skilled engineer saves up vacation with a well-known to the boss goal of making a 2 month adventure trip. When it's time to go, he's "too valuable" to "lose" for 2 months. He threatens to quit. Now he's "too valuable" to lose over the situation and he gets his vacation. So stupid.
Keeping yourself ready and able to change jobs is unfortunately necessary, because company loyalty is kaput, and the threat of quitting is unfortunately occasionally needed to get proper to treatment.
Unions or humane work cultures would fix this. Not holding my breath in the USA. Europe is way better.
Why? They already showed they have no loyalty to you. Also, 8 weeks is pretty bare bones as is. 12 weeks is the minimum even in US states that have managed to implement it.
Never mind that in this labor market an open role might sit unfilled for more than 8 weeks!
Those first few weeks present an unparalleled opportunity of becoming a larger part of the rhythm of your baby’s life. My husband took the month after our kid’s birth, and then the transition to daycare at a year old, and that has entrenched wake up/go to sleep as their special time together, no matter how long his work days have ended up.
The child got off the ground well and I think it stems from both parents being regularly present during the first year. Also, being a young parent is stressful, so it's good to share the effort.
If all goes well, my kid will be a productive member of society - so maybe it's not just family friendly, but profitable, too.
In Norway there are a lot of political parties that can matter. All depends on the election. Some grow, some dont, new ones are added, old ones go away.
That is a dynamic that is entirely missing in the US.
We have parties in the European left and we have parties on the European right, parties in the middle, green party etc etc.
I try to get people to understand that we do not have a single party that is far right enough to compare with the Democrats in the US. (Discussing the Republicans is just hard).
There is no left in US politics. and you could say that there is no right in Norway.
The party considered to be "far right" would never think about advocating doing away with universal healthcare.
The same for our main right party (Høyre == Right) would not attempt such a thing either.
I think people spend more time consuming the news than becoming familiar with the actual policies and laws of countries.
In case you anyone misunderstands my claim, these are the facts: the US has more progressive taxation both on income tax and corporate tax, a minimum wage, and more liberal abortion laws (case vs planned parenthood ruling).
Taxes are in general higher, for example the VAT is 25%.
I'm not particularly an expert on Norway though, I might be off a bit and basing this more on countries like Sweden/Switzerland/Germany, etc.
I don't think it's too far fetched to say that the US does not really have a "left" party, quite a few intellectuals would be saying this as well (e.g. Chomsky or Briahna Joy Gray).
For the rest of the states some are some are not.
States https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/overview-abo...
vs
Norway https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1975-06-13-50
For immigration, the US has much higher figured if you add it all together. US also offers many more way to move there.
If you look at asylum however the US takes in 0.02% per population per year. Whereas Norway has taken over 0.7% per year.
The US population is made up of 14% vs Norway at 15% immigrants The immigrant population in Norway is far more diverse than it is to the US.
https://www.faktisk.no/artikler/z4nyj/norge-er-et-av-landene... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat... https://www.faktisk.no/artikler/z4nyj/norge-er-et-av-landene... https://www.imdi.no/tall-og-statistikk/
Minimum wage is true, in that the US has one and Norway does not. However the negotiated wages between the unions and the business sector have been "almengjøring" which means they dictate what wages need to be, even when the company you work for is not a direct part and even if you as an employee do not belong to a union. That is backed by Norwegian law
This is per sector. Most sectors now have it Some dont. Where it does exist, it is far higher than the US minimum wage. You cannot live on minimum wage in the US. So it is below what is reasonable and humane.
A big problem is in the construction business were the builders love to hire Eastern European migrants for a lot less than what the law dictators. This is illegal but very common
As far as taxation goes I dont have time right now to really dig into it. I know I pay about 42% taxes on my income. 25% VAT on most things, but there are exceptions, for healthy food and many other things.
I paid a lot less in the US :)
Europeans can understand the Republican party through their own history. They're basically just corporate fascists. Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece all had very similar corporate fascists governments for many years and their policies, politics and backers very closely tracked those of the contemporary American Republican party. Whereas the Dems are a better spoken, slightly more watered down and cuddly version of the same.
Literally all the fascist regimes in the countries you listed were Military coups in their origin and were all fairly economically inept regimes. They also included all out media censorship, political prisoners, prisoner torture and interrogation, political assasinations, and genuine terror across civil society.
Could it be a matter of comparing Policies vs strategies/tactics?
Unfortunately the US will never have the level of political diversity that is the norm in parliamentary democracies because FPTP heavily favors two party rule, and the two parties will never let go of FPTP for fairly obvious reasons. So the issue is, how can we make our system more dynamic given that the best solution, a change to our elector system, is probably out of reach?
I guess you can force people to take parental leave, but then that just further encourages discrimination against people of child bearing age.
Even if the federal government picks up the bill, it's still a discontinuity in business, something an employer would want to avoid.
> Withholding paid family leave isn’t just bad for parents and babies, it’s bad for business.
If this were true businesses wouldn't have to be forced to provide parental leave. You can point to a study that "proves" that parental leave is good for business, and obviously it makes sense as a benefit. Some companies pride themselves on their parental leave and use it to attract candidates. But obviously it doesn't make sense for many businesses, otherwise they would all be doing it.
It's like one of those things that promises everything to everyone. Like veganism. Proponents tell you it tastes better, is great for your health, is better for the environment, and is cheaper. Obviously it can't be better in all dimensions otherwise everyone would be doing it. You see the same thing with minimum wage. How paying people more is great for everyone and the business. Sometimes it is, but there are trade offs and someone that doesn't run a business can't do a "study" and tell you the optimal policy for your business
When you can't even have a conversation in good faith about the tradeoffs in a policy, nothing will change.
Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. There's no clear solutions
Your argument makes me think about this satiric article : https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...
I live in a country where it's exactly what we do, and it's fine. I took a 7 months paid parental leave as a dad recently and my company congratulated me for the birth.
In fact, Mexico has 12 weeks. And Greece has 40. I'd rather be a parent in the US than Greece or Mexico. Policies don't exist in a vacuum.
It's a tradeoff. It might be a better tradeoff for society as a whole but this idea that there aren't some cons to doing it that way is just false.
Personally, I think if your company was able to do without you for 7 months then they don't need you as an employee. My guess is that your salaries are much lower than someone would receive in the US.
I truly don't understand this, and each time I see the stats on it sit in even greater disbelief. Why would anyone turn down the opportunity to spend, for an awful lot of companies, fully paid time off work to spend time with their new family?
Guessing I'm much less "career-minded" than of lot of these guys, but it makes zero sense to me that you wouldn't stretch this benefit as far as you can do.
Edit: appreciate all the comments! Main themes are to reiterate it's not an easy task by any stretch, and fears (both real and assumed) over retaliation for time out. I'm not yet lucky enough to be father, but I still can't square either of those between work and family time.
I enjoy work and the comradery of my co-workers. I was working from home anyway, so there was no long commute. And it gave me something to do. I'm a programmer. I like my work. It gives me an outlet for my creativity and allows me to bond with co-workers. And I care about the product and deliverables I'm working on. I don't like letting my coworkers down as they cover for me.
I took another 2 weeks after my wife went back to work.
Higher level, the value of children to parents is declining based on total fertility rate declines.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/paid-paternity... (Men who receive paid paternity leave in Spain want fewer children, study finds)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... (Does paternity leave reduce fertility?)
I doubt many people shorten their paid time off simply because they love work so much.
I still got a lot of pressure from my bosses to cut it short and work part time while I was out. One of them even questioned my "loyalty to the team" at a holiday party that I attended in the middle of it (I went specifically because I wanted to get face time with people and not be distant).
The way a lot of corporations work, you have the "policy", and then you have management interpreting that policy. Things like leave of any kind might be technically "guaranteed", but they come at a cost of fewer individual contributions to projects and lower billable rates. And, at the end of the day, you report to someone who only cares about his budget, who has control over your project assignments.
So after that, suddenly my first year was only 6 months long (something something fiscal year), and it did count (blah blah blah pattern extrapolation) and I wasn't getting good assignments (constantly set up to fail, and even though I always pulled it off, I'd get terrible reviews for the smallest of issues). Eventually, I got "laid off". Really, I was fired because my billable rates was too low (and my billable rate was low due to retaliation for having slightly more going on in my life than living at work), but the company schedules regular layoffs to axe the lowest x% of employees. I guess that is one silver lining of that awful, Metropolis-esque machine: they gave me a (very small) severance on the way out.
So yeah. You can have a company "guarantee" leave, but still will structure a reason to get rid of you.
By indirectly, I mean that when they compare me to the other people they don't seem to be prorating my "stats" for that extra time off.
IMO this as well is something where the DevOps slogan "if it hurts, do it more often" should be applied.
The "discontinuity" of an employee leaving temporarily with months of warning in advance is the easy case. If that is a serious problem for your business, it's a failure of company culture and management. How would you deal with the "Hit by a bus" scenario?
It is an answer. For example, my cousin in England was able to spend a year breastfeeding her daughters without having to go through the arduous process of pumping. Their family is alive and well, and so is the UK.
Also, I have never once heard anybody here complain that maternity/paternity leave is in some way damaging the company/employee/economy - just stuff that happens in the office.
perhaps pentagon should get involved in parental leave policy. they could probably fund it outright out of their black budget.
I mean it definitely is, since 186 other countries in the world do offer paid parental leave. The United States is a huge outlier, especially given its wealth.
That's why many European countries are progressing towards giving fathers the same leave as mothers, and making it mandatory for both (e.g. in Spain mothers used to have much more leave than fathers, but they progressively increased the leave for fathers while also making things more inflexible - fathers used to be able to "give" their days to mothers, but that no longer works, and both must take at least six weeks mandatorily).
I don't think there is a clear-cut optimal solution for the problem and every solution has pros and cons. For example, mandatory equal leave for both means losing flexibility (and there are biological arguments that mothers need more leave). But I think it's a reasonable compromise to mitigate discrimination and bias.
But even then you're right that it's a struggle to get men to take the full available parental leave, often because "just" getting paid 100% of salary isn't enough. Losing X months of career progression is often seen as a bigger deal (and a not unsubstantial part of remaining pay discrepancies between men and women in some countries).
That doesn't mean you can't get significant improvements, though.
I live in the UK, and waking up to the harsh realities of how shitty parental leave provisions and nursery provisions are here compared to Norway where I grew up was not fun...
(And yes, some people will try to discriminate, and some will succeed. )
There is a trade off in all things. Something that is being studied now, Abused children cost society a fortune in missed productivity, court, criminal, medical and social care. What is the cost for those not abused but just where the family is stressed for decades, what missed potential, what of those that fell into crime at the margin.
We forsake the growing of our adults at a cost later on. And 90% of that growing comes from the family unit. So we forsake the family unit at our own cost.
I am not saying we should all be the Waltons, but we should aspire in that direction. Schools, urban environments. Even seemingly crazy ideas like early start support, or therapy for couples every 5 years, all start to look like "stitches in time"
There may be no clear solutions at the level of "who pays for missed working days" but then we are privileging private businesses beyond the level their role in society is I suspect.
Make it mandatory ?
In my country it's mandatory for my employer to let me take my vacation days. They are risking fines if they don't make sure I do and I can't give up on these vacation days either.
The long term interests of society, the employee and ultimately of the business is something that many business struggle to realize or care about.
So we have the government, whose power reigns supreme, who can compel the business to act. Sometimes this is necessary, because business managers aren’t always good at what they do.
My favorite example was something my local conservative radio media went insane over about 15 years ago. The state passed a law that requires employers to, in writing: (a) tell the employee what their job title is, (b) tell the employee what their rate of pay is, (c) tell them what their available benefits are, and what they cost, and (d) tell them what expenses the employee will have and what they cost. (ie, uniforms, tools) Dire predictions of doom were made, small businesses were going to be destroyed, yadda yadda.
Or, despite the fact that they believe so deeply that time off to produce the next generation of workers and consumers is a net loss to their bottom line, they're actually wrong and are yet to discover this.
Parental leave should be a universal benefit for workers, period. Employers should foot the bill.
I think society should foot the bill for society-wide benefits. I do not see any reason to expect small businesses (or even large businesses) to have to worry about the costs of funding parental leave benefits, outside of having the requisite staffing.
It is always citizens that shoulder the burden one way or another.
Self: Pay with your own savings
Firm: Pay with higher prices and lower wages
State: Pay with higher taxes paid to the state
I bet over time that fraction would grow larger as paternal leave got more normalized, especially if the parental leave could be spread out over a few years (like it can in many European countries) instead of over the first few months.
Here's how the percentage of parental leave days taken by mothers and fathers in Sweden has changed over the years [1]. Note that between 2002-2015 each parent had exclusive right to 60 of the total 480 days of parental leave (12.5%), that has since then been increased to 90 (18.75%).
Anyway, businesses have had to be forced to not do things that turn out to be bad for their business, up to and including not killing their customers and employees. "Obviously it can't be better in all dimensions otherwise everyone would be doing it" is the ultimate conservative arguments, since it means nothing could ever change---obviously we have reached the optimum, right?
Ah, the dark side of American exceptionalism. "Other countries do it" is absolutely an answer. We could, if we wanted to, peruse our way through the policies used in other countries and pick the one that best fits Americas needs and demographic situation. But that isn't possible if we put blinders on and pretend that the experience of other countries doesn’t matter.
It is an answer, because it’s been working well for decades in other countries. Right now I have a man in my team taking his parental leave and I as a manager have no problem with it at all. When hiring I just accept this risk and keep in mind possible mitigations (temporary reduction in capacity and expences or hiring substitution or redistribution of workload etc).
I worked with someone from a European company working in the USA. She started her full time job here while she was on an 8 month maternity leave from her old European company (which she didn't plan on returning to afterwards). It would be fucked if her old company had to eat 8 months expenses and then not even have an employee returning back after.
Have you asked any actual women about that?
She supported her point rather well, post pregnancy complications are extremely common and it shouldn't be a shocker to say you should have time to handle those.
I don't think this story shows that. This story involves a call to the doctor. The doctor says it's life threatening. Any person would choose to take off rather than die.
In fact, in my experience the people who die because they didn't see a doctor didn't know how serious their condition was, or didn't know they even had a condition. If anything, this story is a good argument for better patient education. After all, she had time off and still didn't pay attention to her symptoms - symptoms which were almost certainly required to be covered with the discharge instructions. So this is really an example of what paid leave looks like and how patient education needs to be improved.
"post pregnancy complications are extremely common and it shouldn't be a shocker to say you should have time to handle those."
This shouldn't be specific to pregnancy. This same logic can be applied to other medical issues. Is there really any reason to differentiate on causation when talking about medical recovery? There may be childcare issues that could support maternity leave, but those were not really covered here. So I would say this was an article mostly focused on appeal to emotion and theatrics (just look at that intro), not a well reasoned argument.
America's the only county that doesn't offer parental leave, it's not radical to say this leads to poor outcomes.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5g8eq/amazon-denied-a-worke...
You mean paid parental leave? You should be able to take unpaid parental leave under FMLA for medical reasons.
America is not the only country. It depends on if you mean developed country or some other missing adjective. Also, you said parental leave. Many countries only offer maturity leave, and not parental leave (maturnity + paternity). These also have other impacts/reasons than the medical point the original article makes.
I'm not sure why you linked that article. Maturnity leave refers to post delivery. Pre delivery would be prenatal leave, which isn't discussed here. They do discuss some medical leave here, which brings me back to the point about not making this solely about maturnity leave, and that the original article is more about medical side and not the other aspects of parental leave.
Such as an estimated 2.6 point boost in IQ from breastfeeding [1] (95% CI: 1.25; 3.98)
Yes, we (France) get a __mandatory__ 6 weeks paid leave before the baby is born, then 10 weeks after.
Dads get a little less, 25 calendar days after the baby is born.
Form an European standpoint this describes almost everything about the US quite accurate.
The US is in dire need of a social benefits system worth its name. The current situation truly can't be described as anything other than "barbaric".
Sorry for the hard words but it's just the reality.
> OK. So … what do you expect my employer to say about this?
> Congratulations! See you Monday!
Sadly accurate. I worry about my disability getting me fired if I have a bad episode.
- Paid parental leave is inadequate
- Child care is obscenely expensive
- Putting my child through a good school district might make me house-poor.
- I'm not sure I can save my child from crippling Student debt without killing my retirement savings.
- The looming climate disaster that my child might have to go through.
Given all these factors, it doesn't make sense for me to consider having children, I'd rather enjoy the life I have with my partner.
Climate disaster isn't an US thing. And it may strike Europe harder than the US.
But don't get me wrong, I'm all for you not having children. Fewer people is one way to solve our climate issues.
Plenty of women (and men) can and do just stay with their child, paid or unpaid. Many permanently do so.
Such as decreased or erratic milk production, clogged nipple ducts, engorged breasts, all which are greatly reduced when an infant feeds from the breast.
Not to mention the effects of oxytocin on the mother's healing body from having skin to skin contact with the baby.
The effects are extremely complex, I do not even see how you can measure them to claim dropping an infant off at daycare is "without issue".
If you also cared for an infant, you would also know they don't sleep 7 hours, and feed 1 hour. They feed every 2 hours, and they can take anywhere from 10 min to 45 min to feed every time. And every time, the infant will need to be burped, or maybe they will need to poop and the mom has to wait that process out, and then go back to feeding.
And to keep up this production while the infant is at daycare, the mom has to pump every 2 hours. Which means going to the pumping room, taking out the pump equipment, cleaning the pump equipment, storing (refrigerated or frozen) and transporting the breast milk, heating it up.
On one end of the spectrum you have certain European countries where women receive ample maternity leave. The right to have a family is protected by law.
On the other end of the spectrum you have certain countries where married women are not expected to work. The right to have a family is protected by traditional beliefs and customs.
But there is this nasty area in the middle where married women are expected to work but there's few workers rights - having a family becomes a privilege rather than a right.
Thanks to my parents they only went to daycare when they were about 4 years old - the baby section of their daycare took in babies from 6 months old.
To me it looked like those Romanian orphanages you saw after the fall of Soviet era dictator.
That's the baseline and no company needs to bother with any company-specific policy, pseudo-benefit. No company incurs any explicit costs for that.
This is not even the most family friendly country in Europe, btw.
Not really. Yes we have one year parental leave here in Canada, but the $$ value of that is not very high all things considered. It's not enough to live on on its own. Maximum in Ontario right now is $595 CAD a week for the highest income earners and lower than that (2/3rds of pre-leave earnings) for others, and rents and housing have climbed very high, so in reality you still need a working spouse to make ends meet on that.
So, no, we're not laughing, but we do have sympathy.
I will always celebrate the fact that we still have a nation on this planet does not mandate leave days. And I give full wish to people choose to move to countries with longer leave days.
It's a major pay cut if you have a high-paying job, so if you are a developer making $100k, you are going to have a large reduction in your standard of living. The monetary incentive is still very much to work as much as possible.
It's not like there's one pool of money, and some wizard distributes it.
Anyway, it's all short term thinking. We've had two revolutionary type events in the last year, the BLM movement and the Jan 6 movement. We currently have a general employment strike going on. People are pissed. Once they realize that the party divisions are mostly intentional and mostly cultural rather than economic, and everybody wants the same thing, who knows what will happen.
Things like roads (and even then there are many locales with crappy roads) are easy to justify. Things like parental leave and universal health care are hard because the percentage of those utilizing will be low and the disproportionate benefit will inherently fall with a small percentage.
It’s inherently a Ponzi scheme. Not to say that we shouldn’t participate, but it is what it is.
Add in the mindset of maximizing wealth and it makes even less sense because those who need is will be increasingly less fortunate and those who don’t can fund it themselves anyway.
The percentage of society deriving a benefit from a healthy workforce is very high. On the order of 100%.
It is not a Ponzi scheme for a number of reasons.
First, Ponzi schemes use money from new members to pay for older members. This might be a model for retirement spending (it isn't, see my next point) but it has the timeline reversed for parental leave. Parental leave is effectively funded by the fraction of the population not currently using it for the benefit of the fraction that currently is. It effectively serves a few different distributional roles:
a) It moves resources from your own pre-child and post-parental leave career to the period when the child is born. Many people who can easily fund a year of not working from their total career earnings cannot do so in their peak child-bearing years and there aren't any efficient ways of using saving or borrowing to shift that money either. For these people, parental leave uses the risk pooling and payment guarantee capabilities of the state to effectively borrow cheaply against their lifetime earnings.
b) It distributes resources from higher to lower earners, depending on how the obligation is structured there is usually a progressive taxation element which ensures a certain minimum is available.
Second point, retirement schemes are also not Ponzi schemes.
A Ponzi scheme requires an ever-increasing number of new entrants to maintain payouts. Pay-as-you-go retirement schemes require maintaining a balance between payers and payees which can be disrupted by changes to demographics but that does not mean that they are inherently fraudulent, just that in the presence of demographic trends which lead to a change in that ratio, they either need to reduce payouts, or increase payments in, or borrow to bridge temporary gaps. The difference is that in a Ponzi scheme, the changes required to maintain this are exponential and rapidly become impossible. There is no stable state to a Ponzi scheme.
This author's case is extreme, but any child benefits from more developmental time in the earliest stages.