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Comment by cmars | Hacker News Reader

Require equal paternity leave, and the author will be forced to consider married men just as risky a prospect.

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.

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Even better solution: don't penalize any employers for their employees' reproductive choices.

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.

> 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.

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.

If he's not being compensated for the cost of finding and retraining an employee, then the state isn't really paying for the whole thing.

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.

This makes no difference. He would still have to find and retrain an employee if he just fired pregnant employees instead of them taking paternity leave.

"And I'd encourage everybody to be open about their plans to have kids or not."

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 am definitely not an expert on US discrimination law, but I believe that is actually the case to some degree-many of those laws only apply to companies with more than 15 people (eg Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964).

I know that some only apply once the company goes past 50 people; I was working for a startup as employee #4 and was looking at the rules for paternity leave (with respect to my then imminent second child) around the time the company passed 50 employees, and it at least kicked in some features of California law, if not Federal law.

Indeed, OSHA is another. That is why a lot of small businesses, mechanics and machinists for example, purposely stay small. They can't afford to grow because of the increasing regulations. There were several studies at the time of the early-1990s recession and again about the time of the dot-com crash about this, investigating the causes of "non-growth", because most new hiring usually occurs in mid-size companies. I don't really understand why anyone surprised that the economy (especially unemployment) is still screwed-up this long with the hammering mid-size companies have taken in the past decade.

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