Simple solution - gender equality for time off related to pregnancy. Paternity leave for the same length of time.
Better solution: make the employment restrictions apply to a company of a certain size. A large enough company should be well-enough equipped to take care of its employees. A startup company isn't.
If the state believes it's a good idea to have a parent at home, the money for maternity and paternity should come out of the state's coffers.
And I'd encourage everybody to be open about their plans to have kids or not. If this results in undue discrimination against people raising kids, offset it with a corporate tax break for employing people with dependents.
This would be really expensive, but probably cheaper than the costs that a destitute single mom or a poorly-parented kid can inflict on society. And at least the costs would be borne by everyone, and both businesses and their employees could be honest and plan realistically.
It does. The state pays for the paternity leave. The author's point is that he still has to find a replacement worker for those three years.
That said, small businesses, and even certain roles in bigger businesses, just can't deal with the kind of disruption this would cause, never mind the money. I think we have to be realistic that someone who wants to take imminent leave shouldn't be in those kinds of jobs, and no government program can fix that.
Maybe I don't have the perfect solution in my pocket, but IMO the right answer can't be that employees lie about (or conceal) their intentions, and employers equally are forced to find plausible reasons not to hire women (or to fire them) just to stay afloat.
I have been asked on two separate occasions by two different bosses making a decision about hiring me on a non-temporary basis about my plans regarding children. I was 18 and 20, and am a woman. No way was I going to say anything other than "I hate kids" regardless of the truth. I don't want an employer making decisions based on my ability to carry children until the day comes that I decide I want a child.
Though I'm happy that no one as disrespectful of their employees and immature as the OP is going to hire me.
(I'd personally guess that culture and corruption have more to do with the large economic differences between Sweden and Hungary than taxation or parental-leave policies do, so I think he's barking up the wrong tree.)
Or perhaps Sweden has a strong enough economy to compensate for the harms caused by this policy, but Hungary does not.
Billion-dollar companies don't have to worry about it nearly as much as tiny ten-man ventures.
Then again you have the legal right to take 25 days of vacation per year, but not all of these have to be paid.
Culture/location/talent/vc $ is what makes a company though and to some extent trumps unfavorable tax/labor laws, this is IMO why SV & California have most of the startups as compared to Arizona/Texas or why Scandinavia>Eastern Europe.
for example, in hard times, or to pay debts, allow to sell oneself into lifetime slavery.
The owner of a 100/1000/10000 people company has much more power than the employee in need of work negotiating his salary/working conditions.
Not everyone is a "rock star" employee that managers are bending over backwards to accommodate.
That doesn't mean that the rest of the hundreds of millions of workers have to work with whatever conditions they can arrange for themselves. If managers could have their way, everybody would be working 18/7 for substinence salary. A society has to make laws to protect the public from that.
Politics used to mean: "a way to protect the common folk from bigger powers".
I think this is a pretty good solution to balance the fact that it's women that need to carry the child - now companies have less of an incentive to penalize them for that.