Google increases parental-leave policy to nearly 6 months
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I am also acutely aware that I am a small slice of a pretty privileged group (highly paid knowledge workers) and that these benefits are not available to the average American.
I wish this was something that the American government would pay for (instead of spending billions on weaponry and corporate tax giveaways).
We are an incredibly unequal society with little to no safety net for anyone other than the wealthy, and it is a damn shame given how rich we are.
So kudos to Google, and kudos to other companies that are following suit (I think Spotify was the first company to have 6 months of parental leave) but I wish this would become federal policy.
To be perfectly clear before I'm attacked and downvoted- I'm not arguing against society benefiting from people having children or wanting parents to be stable and supported or anything of that nature.
But there is a huge double-standard here about what a job is and how compensation works. Am I being paid for the value I'm creating with my labor or am I receiving an ongoing entitlement for having passed an interview? Why is a VP paid $500,000 for taking care of their child for 6 months but an entry level employee is paid $50,000 for taking care of theirs?
Would it be more fair, inclusive and equitable to allow employees to choose between compensation structures that either paid higher hourly wages without the benefits of paid time off or lower hourly wages with paid leave, such that all employees ultimately received equal pay for the labor they provided?
However, a least in some countries where they pay for parental leave, it's capped.
For example, it appears that in Germany a VP making EUR 500K/year isn't eligible to receive any Elterngeld.
And in Denmark it maxes out at DKK 4,465/week = USD 669/week = ~$35K/year -- both the VP and entry-level employee in your example will get the same benefits.
You can't look at a VP's output the way you'd look at a factory worker's. The VP is being compensated for the work they'll provide over the time spent at the company. They might have no output for 6 months then provide outsized output during the next 2 years (as organizational changes they've made start paying off).
Their compensation is based on this lifetime output. Them taking parental leave in average once every 4 years is taken into account in this formula.
People that never have children are still a minority, so they get lost in this calculation. Yes, they're definitely being "underpaid" in that sense the same way someone leading a healthy lifestyle is "under-benefitting from his tax contributions".
I've taken parental leave twice at Google and used the full amount. No ill effects, as far as I can tell. Everyone I work with and my management chain was fully supportive.
Google still has a ways to go.
$400k/yr with no social safety net, no national healthcare, and obscene housing costs so you end up in an area with good schools, work like a dog with little actual labor laws etc, no pension etc.
€60k/yr with 1-2 years leave and generous vacation, actual labor laws, good public education, good equitable walkable neighborhoods etc, a pension etc
I exaggerate a bit but the reason people want to earn so much in the U.S is because a large amount of that money goes to building a personal safety net that is guaranteed in most other developed countries.
The average German working class worker probably lives a happier, more fulfilling life than a so called "professional" in the U.S.
Just save the extra income from the Google job, and you can take years of vacation, not just ten more days.
I speak of what I do and have.
I don't/won't have kids either but it doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me?
But also, what a depressing zero sum world view. Not everyone wants or has kids but we can still be happy about people having some time off if they do