Why we offer parental leave
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It's not because I plan to use parental leave. I already have two kids. And it's not only because I'm glad to see these policies help other people out, though of course that's part of it.
It's that this sort of "perk", rather than foosball tables, beer fridays, and vintage video game machines, give me hope that the industry is outgrowing its insular, "young people are just smarter" culture. That maybe employers are actually interested in sustained careers that will experience the ebb and flow of life, rather than just a period of extended adolescence. Parental leave policies do imply long term thinking.
Almost every developed country has done the math and has realized that having children is part of having a society and that paid leave for people that have children is on balance a good thing. Ditto anti-discriminatory hiring laws and laws that state that it is illegal to ask a woman directly or indirectly whether or not she plans to have children during the hiring process.
Here is a nice map illustrating the various times available per country:
http://worldpolicyforum.org/global-maps/is-paid-leave-availa...
There is a limit to the number of people this planet can sustain. There is a limit to the size our societies can grow to before they start fundamentally changing, and not for the better. Those issues should be considered before making policy decisions that reduce the burdens of reproduction beyond the replacement rate. In my opinion, couples should have support in the form of parental leaves, daycare, and such for the first two children. After that, you are on your own.
Society has entered a coffin corner where we need to increase the numbers to sustain the previous generation, obviously that isn't going to be a long term viable strategy and some very clear headed thinking will be required to see if we can still work our way out of that. But that's a different issue altogether than the one at heart of the debate here. Not entirely unrelated, but unrelated enough to be seen as a separate item.
Most developed countries are today only maintaining growth through immigration, if at all, and China is set to peak and start contracting in the next couple of decades. India is lagging, as is many African countries, but even that is unable to prevent the world population from peaking towards the end of the century.
That is with encouraging reproduction this way in large parts of the developed world, and with substantial easing of restrictions in countries like China.
Ironically, the US, with the worst maternity leave policies in the developed world, has one of the highest reproduction rates of the developed world, while most European countries today are below replacement rate.
Policies to limit support beyond the first two children may sound sensible, but would likely have a negative effect: The countries which today have extensive maternity or paternity leave for the most part will run into substantial problems of aging populations unless they manage to push reproduction rates up and/or increase immigration numbers over the next few decades. Given the political resistance to high immigration rates most places, that's not likely to fly.
The "payoff" of holding back of maternity leave to limit reproduction rates would also be minimal because the countries with good maternity leave for the most part have a low enough reproduction rate that budging it some small percentage rate further down would not really do much.
More and more countries are making the transition to low reproduction rates, and if it continues we will eventually be in a situation where population decline will be the major problem.
Make birth control cheap or free, have some sort of family planning education and humanity will reproduce below replacement rates very quickly. See Iran for an example.
With the Earth's population way larger than it ever has been before, reproduction at the current rate is not particularly important or desirable. However, lots of parents will usually participate in it as a choice.
Do you think it is the employers right to not be forced to subsidize the reproduction of their employees?
The employer side is that some employers will not be able to afford this luxury and will be unable to hire a temporary replacement. The result is decreased productivity, which hurts the economy.
It should be the employers' choice if they want to offer that benefit. If it is such a benefit to the employer, then all employers will do it. As we continue to pile mandates on employers, you raise the cost of hiring. Economics 101 says if you raise the cost of something, you get less of it. More mandates=less jobs.
Agreed. My parents didn't have me until they raised enough money to take time off. Likewise, I don't plan on having a child (if any) until I have that cushion.
Quite frankly, I don't begrudge the government or corporations for not providing such benefits. I don't consider it their responsibility.
It's the right and duty of the government to try to maximize the wellbeing of their people - if they decide that the best way to maximize that wellbeing is by having less restrictions and thus a more active economy, then that's a valid option. if they decide that better working conditions will have a larger impact than the specific number of jobs lost, then that's a decision that they can and should make.
The employer's choice is to check if they want to do business with the people, laws and infrastruture provided by the country, or go elsewhere; the people's choice is to evaluate if they (not the employers!) would benefit from a lower or higher cost or hiring.
The economy is an abstraction which we care about only to the extent that it tracks people's aggregate happiness. So if you're going to consider the harm to "productivity" on one side of the ledger, you ought to also consider on the other side of the ledger the harm to people's happiness caused by a world in which parenthood and sustained livelihood come into conflict. (And you ought to consider this not just to whatever extent happy employees are more productive employees, but rather because happiness is the fundamental goal to which productivity is a means, not vice versa)
Optimally, those workers will be well educated - and numerous studies have shown that the more involved a parent is in their childs life, the better (particularly when they are very young).
So, perhaps it isn't fair that employers subsidise this - but what's the alternative?
If that's the case then it seems like this would penalize people in the child bearing age even when they are not planning to have children.
On the other hand, not offering paid leave means that women are always going to be at an inherent disadvantage when they are bearing a child.
Of course, you could argue that having a child is really a choice (at least most commonly) and those who wish to have children should plan accordingly. Others might say that having a child is something that everyone should be able to do. I definitely don't belong in that group but I also don't plan to have kids so maybe I just can't understand.
Either way, I'd love to hear your or anyone else's thoughts on why this should be law when it's such a complicated issue and thus one that I bet law makers would screw up.
But there are differences in implementation per country, some countries pay the interim out of tax revenues and the companies only have the requirement to re-instate the person that took leave after they return, in some countries it's only the women that can apply for leave like this, in others it's both the men and the women and so on.
But those are implementation details, as a rule it is generally considered to be a good thing, even by the employers because they no longer have to fear that if they play nice they'll be undercut by competitors that have decided to go for an all-male cast.
Sometimes these laws actually discourage hiring women. For example, you say:
> companies only have the requirement to re-instate the person that took leave after they return
This is a great example of why these laws are more complex than they appear. For example, in that case I'll need to hire somebody to fill in for the person on leave while they're away. So I'm paying for that training, paperwork, etc for the new person. Then when the first person comes back from maternity leave, I've got two people for one job. Either I have the unpleasant business of firing somebody who hasn't done anything wrong (and may actually be the better employee!) or depending on how the laws are written I may be forced to continue to employ both, despite a lack of need. What if I've downsized or pivoted, and no longer need to original person? Do they accumulate benefits and paid vacation while they're gone? All this can be an employer's nightmare.
A post by a Hungarian entrepreneur partially on this topic went viral last year. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that maternity leave is a bad thing, I just feel that paining it as a simple issue is unproductive.
http://andorjakab.blog.hu/2014/03/02/this_is_why_i_don_t_giv...
Maternity leave is generally going to be a lesser problem for most businesses than churn of people leaving and cost of hiring replacements, or other unexpected loss of staff.
And no, you don't "have the unpleasant business of firing somebody" as that somebody would normally have been hired on a short term contract to cover for the maternity, knowing the position is temporary.
> All this can be an employer's nightmare.
It's an economic risk that is fairly straight-forward to estimate and amortize the cost of over your staff, and most of the concerns are risks that any responsible business needs to plan for anyway.
But the whole point of these policies is to prevent the workforce from trending toward the all-contractors-no-benefits situation, in which maternity leave could be avoided all together.
If you're so casual about suggesting that the replacement be hired on as such a contractor, then why not suggest the original employee be so hired as well?
Over here parental leave is common and expected, so it is always factored in. It is a very common way to enter the work force or try another job, as it is short term by nature.
But that's not what the GP was describing, in which firing someone is no big deal because "we hired them on a short term basis anyway". But if you accept that as legit, I claimed, why are you even complaining about maternity leave, since you seem to be okay with people being hired on short term bases with no such promises, which is somehow all okay because "hey you made it clear from the beginning"?
IOW, the GP seems to be saying "Don't treat workers as disposable! You can just get a disposable worker to fill in for them!"
That's definitely not true. Let's say I run a dental practice. I have a fixed number of dental chairs. Therefore, I have a fixed number of patients I can see per week. Which means there's an optimal number of employees. If I hire more or less than this I will go out of business.
That already happens now.
If you are hiring the right people that fit your company's needs, team, skills, etc, this is not an issue. I've hired half a dozen female employees in the past four years, and living in Europe, this "issue" didn't cross my mind. Three of them had kids later on, we hired substitutes who covered for them during maternity leave, and no biggy.
I don't know what it is, but US companies seem to have a real issue with taking a "European" approach to this work-life balance matter.
> if you forced companies to pay through their leave
The first 20 weeks or so are paid by the company 100%. Those 20 weeks are also your rights as parent by law to take off. Then you can take more time off (there is a maximum discretionary number of weeks), and in that case the company doesn't pay for that leave, but the government subsidises x% of the income. Maybe since our last maternity leave the law might have changed slightly, but not materially.
And if your company is too small to have that kind of money to throw around? What about tough financial times?
As much as I admire and believe that some of these laws/regulations do good, and mean well. I have to stress to individuals that they all have an effect on the economy/market. They skew things one way or the other, with constraints and incentives. E.g. The example above, it unfairly discriminates against companies that are unable to provide government-mandated perks to parents, or people interested in having children.
Then, how can you assure me that a male hire won't take paternity leave too? They have a legal right too, and you can't stop them.
Additionally, they are further not "free" to hire the right people, because the right people might end up being "all white guys", or whatever is cheapest at the time, etc. And we all know what a public lynch mob that would create if it ever came to light. That's assuming your country doesn't have laws against it in place already.
If you hire on the probability of someone getting pregnant (or their partner), good for you, that's your choice. I hire employees who I (and my team) believe have the right technical skills, have initiative, are responsible and trustworthy, etc. I guess we have different hiring priorities.
I'm sorry you base your hiring decisions on "failing companies", and imply that I have "have money to blow on it"... Well, we do have money to spend on the right hires, but we definitely do not have the money to spend on the wrong ones. To you sir, I wish you a good day too.
If a company is unable to provide government-mandated payroll to its employees, shouldn't it be considered a failure?
Nope.
This is clearer if you consider another government mandate which also has entrepreneurs running scared: minimum wage.
Is the government discriminating against companies which cannot pay minimum wage to its employees? Or are companies that choose to do business in a jurisdiction where a minimum wage is written into law simply failures?
This simply sets a different bar for hiring any employees at all, and that's a fair bar that's equal for all companies. The very cheapest package of hired work that you can buy includes a minimum wage, social taxes, safe working conditions, paid vacations, overtime pay and maternity leave. If you can't afford the minimum package, then you can't afford to hire people, period. The people have voted that if your business is only able to provide sweatshop-style employment below that minimum level, then you should take that kind of business out of the country.
This brings to a whole new level the meaning of "alienated".
Maybe not for you (Is your maternity leave government paid? This isn't.), but for many european entrepreneurs this is a very big issue. See the first few paragraphs of the "This is why I don't give you a job" post, which went viral a while back (linked below). Even when leave is government subsidized, you still end up with massive problems on employer's side since managing labor supply is suddenly very complicated. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that maternity leave is a bad thing - I just think your "It's not a problem for anybody, Americans are irrational" attitude is unrealistic.
http://andorjakab.blog.hu/2014/03/02/this_is_why_i_don_t_giv...
You are preaching to the choir.
I'm a little confused by this. HN seems genuinely divided on the issue, with lots of posts from both perspectives. How is this the choir?
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/preach+to+the+choir
Furthermore, as I said in my post, I'm not saying that maternity leave is a bad thing, I just feel that paining it as a simple issue is unproductive.
I don't make hiring decisions based on talent. I've highly talented people who can't collaborate at all - I wouldn't hire them. I make hiring decisions based on expected ROI, what I can afford, legality, as well as other personal factors (one of which is increasing diversity, both of gender and cultural background).
My definition of talent is the same as your hiring decision. I used the word "talent" simply not to go into a long list of obvious employee traits :)
>"because in most of the developed world, it's accepted that when you are building a company, you are helping to build a better society" [Citation Required]
Citation request aside, I thought that it was understood that that's what taxes and the state is for? Whether it achieves that is besides the point. Additionally, I'd argue that the current prevailing opinion of society is that "corporations" and "businesses" are greedy, evil and generally not in it to benefit society. The opposite of what you suggest is the prevailing opinion; perhaps you're projecting your values onto a society whose collective opinion does not agree with you?
Much of it is because US companies pay a higher proportion of the costs for things like parental leave (if they provide it at all) since the government does not pick up the bill. In some cases, the government mandates that companies pay for work-life benefits, but provides no funding to support them. If you are a large, stable company with predictable revenue, this may be ok. If you are a small company or a startup without significant outside investment, it is a different matter entirely.
The question of parental leave is easy when the government picks up the bill and that society as a whole has agreed to subsidize child production.
I'm not arguing one way or the other. My heart says we should codify parental leave of some sort. But, my brain has trouble figuring out a system that is fair to small employers (short of only mandating large employers provide leave, which doesn't seem right either).
It is common to treat parental leave through a similar (or the same) insurance system as sick leave, in which case the employer pays the temp just like in other extended leave type of situations.
(An employer pays model leads employers being unnecessary wary of employing. I know several countries practice it, but it has clear drawbacks.)
Sure, as long as those substitutes don't want kids or job security...
If you replace "new people" with "works of art" and "parents" by "artists" you have logic that applies equally to a universal subsidy for all artistic activities. This might be nice, but it's something that most people would recognize as impractical and idealistic. But when children enter the picture people lose all rationality and revert to a need-focused mindset instead of a resource-focused mindset.
An actual economic argument would be much simpler than the one your propose. The production of children must be subsidized if and only if it is an objectively valuable and necessary activity (which it is) but insufficient people are dedicated to the task (which is plainly not the case, as evidenced by the stable population of the US).
Reasoning based on who enjoys the benefits of an activity is not economics, it's philosophy.
There are plenty of other rebuttals to the argument I gave, though. For example: 1) Negative externalities from having children (crowding, etc.); 2) Deadweight losses caused by the taxes used to pay for the subsidy; 3) Calculation problems: deciding the proportion of internalized vs socialized benefits from children seems almost impossible to calculate even on average; if you get that wrong, your subsidy could easily do more harm than good; 4) Government power: even if this particular subsidy is efficient, if you give your government the authority to tax and subsidize broadly, they are likely to make plenty of bad decisions, which could partially or totally offset the benefits
This is the most selfish, short sighted and downright Satanic point of view I have read here in a long time. Why would you want to live in a society where even parents cannot be bothered to pay for their own children!!!
This is "Homo homini lupus" taken to the extreme, and unless you are the Biggest Baddest Wolf in town, simply irrational.
I find it very interesting that this proposal seems more objectionable than the version where the childbearing subsidy is paid out of general taxes. Is it really more moral and less selfish to force _everyone else in the country_ to pay the cost of raising you than to force you to pay for it yourself?
I think it is part of the natural order of things for humans to work and provide for their kin. This certainly include teenagers and senior citizens in good health. The recipients should be first and most obviously children, but also include the elderly and the disabled. Of course if the family is prosperous enough that only a subset of "working age" members can support it, there is no inherent obligation (or prohibition) for all who can work to do so.
Also, there is the social custom that if you are prosperous enough, you should extend the same provisions to non-kin. The is a wide degree of variation between being merely a cheap neighbor and being an abhorrent misanthrope, so you have lots of options regarding on how generous you can afford to be (or not to be).
Enter the government here. The secular liberal worldview that most people around here would identify with says that you pay taxes in return of the services that you receive from the government (other cultures or life situations dictate that it is your divine duty, or that they kill you if you don't, but let's not talk about that here).
So, the question is... what is the meaning for a government to extract a fee for a person to have the right to be born and raised? Does it mean the government can dictate who has the right to exist? And, by extension, not have such right?
Of course, in practice, the government can charge you money for whatever reason they can come up with (my personal favorite is in 19th century Mexico, where they charged on the number of windows your house had... and the people began simply to wall off their windows). It also can expend the money however they see fit. In the particular case of the US, they already give money to people with children, they give food stamps, they give free public education... and all of that money comes from taxes... they just don't charge you for "the right to have been born and raised".
Besides, people who object to taxes at least have the freedom to turn into a life style that do not require such payments (even if the personal cost is too high). By example, you are free to not hold a job if you object to income tax. What are you going to do to those that do not pay for having been born? Kill them? Turn them into slaves?
I have already mentioned the "natural order" of human existence. And I am aware that not everyone believes there's such thing, but still. I think the natural order of Nations is to preserve their people and their culture. And you can only do that by raising newer generations. There are many people in every country that need assistance, and we can debate on the worthiness or unworthiness of each claim... but to deny the claim of the children is exactly the same as eating the seeds for next year sowing. It is the telltale sign of a corrupt society.
This is already done, though it is never admitted for obvious reasons. A portion of the gender pay gap, especially in tech, is due to employer perception that hiring women who might have children is risky.
Federal law already allows employers to charge their employees higher health insurance rates if they are smokers [1]. And why not? Employers have an incentive to do this because they are required by law to provide health insurance to their full time workers (if they have > 50 employees, anyway). If you are paying for a significant portion of someone's healthcare, and they are making voluntary choices which will cost you more money, any kind of working market will lead to increased healthcare costs in such a situation.
Childcare, as you mentioned, is usually a voluntary decision. Maybe, as a society, we decide that we want to subsidize procreation as is done in many European countries and have the government foot the bill for parental leave, but if we decide to leave it up to employers (who don't care if you have kids or not) we shouldn't be surprised if parental leave is lacking.
The entire U.S. health and insurance system (I certainly wouldn't call it a "market") is rotten to the core. The bulk of the costs are typically paid by employers, so employers--whose incentives most definitely do not serve their employees' health--get to set the policies under which an individual's healthcare may be provided. It's absurd.
The only two sensible systems are a completely individualized system with no employers as middlemen, or a completely socialized one where the government accepts ultimate responsibility (and therefore control) for the health of the people. What we have is a monstrous catastrophe that would have already bankrupted other nations.
[1] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obamacare-penalty-could-...
If the government wishes for the people to have more children, the only reasonable payer for the costs is the same as with all goverment spending - the taxpayer. Handing out a proportion of your salary as the maternity or paternity benefit will also make the it more equal and not cripple the incomes of better paid people.
I applaud the leave policy and would love to work at a company that offered that benefit. My bar is fairly low though -- I'd love to have a 401k or some other tax deferred savings account (an HSA doesn't count in my book).
EDIT: If someone brings up the ability for a company to contribute a match of some sort, it should be straightfoward to have that computed and deposited directly to the IRA account through the payroll process.
"What is your startup's parental leave policy?"
In my country 6 months leaves (with full payment) are mandatory for mothers. Mothers also gain job stability soon as they get pregnant and cannot be fired due to their time off. I live in a 3rd world country and it really blows my mind developed countries allows such short leaves. In my company we give the mandatory 6 month leave, we also pay medical bills if there are any and 12 month health insurance for the baby (some employees choose their own insurance plans, some don't cover pregnancy). There is an option to give only a 4 month leave, but it's very expensive and most companies don't even consider that.
I'm a father of one (and expecting the second). I think 6 months is not enough. Yes, paying salaries for employees on leave adds costs, but this is diluted in the company cost and there are tax breaks over it.
A typical natural birth procedure alone in the US, with the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) around $10K. If you go to C-section due to typical child birth complications (can happen to even the most well-prepared and assiduous couples), it triples and can easily hit $40K. If there are additional complications, it can easily hit $100K and rapidly go up from there depending upon the specific set of complications.
If your startup has fewer than 50 participants in the company group health plan, even a completely normal natural child birth in one year will cause a rate rise the next year that is higher than it normally would be. On top of that, there are the costs of supporting parental leave: none of the expense is granted favorable tax treatment at the federal level (and not at the state level in my state).
For businesses with very high revenue per employee like in the tech industry, these intersecting facts don't sink the feasibility if the business leadership makes a commitment from the outset and plans their budgeting with the commitment in mind. I'm glad that AeroFS is publicizing this, adding to the trend of similar family friendly policy stories out of other tech companies in recent years.
But for small businesses in other sectors and even more marginal tech companies, these realities on the ground are just brutal on the odds of such policies making out of "gleam in the eye" stages. From a statecraft perspective, I'd be really interested in finding out if front-loading the expenses of encouraging family formation via tax breaks and incentives to mitigate the costs that employers currently bear, would compare favorably to the back-end costs (including externalities, where most of the back-end ramifications come from, starting with costs of monetary policy decisions partly made in reaction to a greying population) of dealing with an inverted population pyramid. That opens a whole other can of worms of whether or not an inverted population pyramid is desirable or not in the first place.
On the topic of distorted costs, I nearly flipped out last night when I got the statement for my recent polysomnogram. The sticker price, if I walked in uninsured, would have been $8750. My insurance company is paying $616, and I am paying $15. I think it is abhorrent that the facility just ignores 93% of the sticker price just because I have insurance. I saw similar massive write-downs on my arm surgery. I imagine a C-section is the same.
One visit can generate three or four bills from different people and institutions. Some of these bills they'll tell you to ignore if you call about them because insurance is covering all or part of it, but they sent the bill before that was sorted out, for god knows what reason. Don't worry, you'll get more, corrected (hopefully? maybe?) bills later. Then explanation of benefits letters arrive, which look sort of like bills but aren't. Almost certainly, at least one of the billing people and/or the insurance folks screwed something up and you'll get to spend most of a day on hold with insurance and a hospital or test processing company or whatever sorting it out. If you miss anything in this mountain of mostly-useless paperwork you may find late notices in your mailbox a month or two later.
Now you get to try to figure out whether the charges on those late notices were legit, or whether they're the result of some seemingly-alway-incompetent hospital billing department's error. While racing against the date on which it goes to collections, and while fees and such accrue.
By four months out you finally, maybe, know what your total costs were/are, after hours of dealing with it and filling half a filing cabinet drawer with documents.
Now, consider that most procedures will include several visits generating a similar number of bills in the months leading up to it. You'll being bombarded with this garbage non-stop for months on either side of the Main Event. You'll also have some follow up appointments and/or tests. Fun!
Basically everyone involved either doesn't care about doing their job correctly or is actively trying to steal your money. Half the time they don't know WTF is going on. You or your loved ones get to deal with that while you're sick or recovering. We call this health care. Some people prefer to pay a premium for this "service" instead of having single-payer or a national healthcare service because... that would make us less free?
That's how bad it is with insurance. Without is, I'm sure, much worse, though probably less complicated.
I was barely out of college at the time so had my parents look over everything and it was as far as we could tell correct. But still a mountain of paperwork, and I did miss a legitimate bill and end up paying a $30 late fee on a < $100 bill, which was frustrating.
So yeah. A mess, basically :)
The trip to A&E would cost you your petrol money or cab fair. The treatment in A&E, and the hospital is free at the point of delivery[2]. The hospital might send you home with a month of medication which would again be free atpod. A regular prescription would cost £8.05 per item per month although there are many exemptions and many people don't have to pay for meds.
If you wanted to pay for your hospital visit you can. You get your own room and a free telly, maybe a bit more nursing and a few more HCAs. (In the NHS beds you possibly have a telly that you pay to use.)
The weird thing is that we get all this while we spend less per capita on healthcare than the US government. Free healthcare is cheaper than the US system. And you don't need to get rid of private provision either - so anyone who wants to pay at the point of delivery can.
[1] more people attend A&E in summer. But the people who attend in winter tend to be iller and to need a hospital admission.
[2] see how I nearly avoided "it's not free you pay for it in tax" comments
The employee is doing best in their interest, but what about the company? A large profit margin company can go out and hire another employee, tech sector is great about this. Low profit margin companies will be unable to address this.
Here we have a situation where well-to-do companies are badgering middle to low profit margin companies into a government move. The European companies are hemorrhaging jobs because of the worker benefit packages (France, Greece, Spain) to China where the wages and benefits are lower. The middle to low companies leave and the barrier to re-entry is made worse by movements like this. Yourapostasy brings up a good point about front loading government tax breaks to encourage children.
Also, I think gender equality is an important one on many aspects: - Bonding with the child(ren) should not only a motherly privilege. - The mother's career may be more important to concentrate on. - The father may be interested in doing his share. - I'm not certain but from the point of view of the child(ren) there can be advantages to have both parents involved the same way.
Ideally I'd like to see certain amount of time allocated to the "family" that can be used/divided by the parents as they see fit.
The fact that they didn't include a question mark at the end of the sentence doesn't change the fact. The correct answer is still "No, Of course not." It's then up to them to decide whether it's worth firing you for giving the sensible answer to their silly request.
Am I missing something or were you involved somehow?
I simply asked a question prompted by this bit:
"Keep in mind that they didn't "tell" you that you'd be on call every night. They asked, and you said OK."
GGP did not suggest in any way that there was a dialogue, he simply said that he was told that he had the bad shift and that was that.
So either JasonKester knows more than is apparent from the comment or I don't understand where he got that knowledge, it's not as if walking out was on the list of viable options for the GGP.
Please indicate why you think I'm hostile, or is asking questions the new hostility?
Repeating though, in case it wasn't clear: When your boss says "Yeah, we're going to need you to come in on Saturday... yeah, we lost some people this week, and now we're gonna have to sorta play catch-up. And yeah, we're going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too". That's a request. It's something you can (and should) say "No" to.
It's entirely possible that there may be ramifications for standing up for yourself in the face of silly demands from management. But there's absolute certainty of bad things happening if you don't. (Namely, the terrible thing you've just been asked to do, as well as dozens of repeat performances now that you've declared yourself as somebody who can be walked over.)
The best course is always to remain professional, stand up for yourself, and ensure that you remain on equal footing with your employer. If they do choose to fire you for working the hours you agreed to work when they hired you, there are worse things than being a skilled developer in the single best market for talent in history.
So I don't see this as a request at all, a request is something that you practically can say yes to, which doesn't appear to be the case here and does not come in the form of an order.
They do indeed have places where an employer can reasonably ask an employee to sacrifice his entire life for the company. Those places are nearly all called "Japan", and the employer/employee relationship is very different to that in the USA.
Try enslaving your workers here (or firing them for refusing to be enslaved), and you face an unpleasant lawsuit.
Mom, dad and son are all doing great now.
> SMP for eligible employees can be paid for up to 39 weeks, usually as follows:
> the first 6 weeks - 90% of their average weekly earnings (AWE) before tax > the remaining 33 weeks - £138.18 or 90% of their AWE (whichever is lower)
That adds up to less than 30% of median income for the latter 33 weeks of the 39 weeks statutory maternity pay.
Suppose you're running a startup and you have 12 employee-months worth of runway left before you'll need to show a concrete proof point to close the next round of funding or, preferably, get to cash-flow breakeven/Ramen-profitable.
Your product is inherently labor-centric. Your employees/team-mates are your best and only hope to produce the product.
In that situation, would you rather be using your last 12 person-months of runway paying your employees to work on the product or paying them to not work on the product and instead raise their own infant child?
Would your company be materially less likely to succeed if one of your employees had a new child and took 15-30% of the remaining runway while providing no benefit to the product? Probably.
What's the mechanism by which a company would be financially ahead with such policies? Would you personally be willing to work for less pay in order to work at such a company? I can agree that employees who use such policies might be much more likely to stay, but I wonder if employees who carry the load while the new parent is on leave (but their position not filled, so all the burden falls to the rest of the team) might be less loyal?
I'm a parent of 2; my wife took the statutory maximum FMLA leave with each of them; her employer had a generally generous paid leave policy, and I'm not anti-kid by any means. I am anti-regulation in general though...
These policies may be breakeven or profitable in the long-run; I don't know. I do know they present a period of unprofitability in the short-term. And when they are gender-specific or even primary-provider-specific, they can manifest themselves as hiring biases against those people most likely to use the policy.
Drawing from a deeper talent pool; building a more loyal workforce; improving morale. All of which help your existing hours be more effective and the latter two mean staff are more likely to do extra work.
Having had kids (and being aware of the law and I'd like to think not an utter asshole), I'd sanction anyone on my team who raised such a concern in a hiring discussion, but I'm quite sure that it happens all the time.
Even with a policy, there would be a rational/economic basis for bias against a mid-30s newlywed (of either gender) as opposed to a fresh college grad, or a married father of 3.
Your best control/counter against such a bias is that great developers are extraordinarily valuable, and so if I knew I could get someone great, as opposed to minimally bar-clearing, I'll wait through multiple paid parental leave terms...
It is to your colleagues, to the founders, and to the investors, all of whom have a significant vested interest (no pun intended) in seeing the company succeed and have all taken various kinds of risks to invest in the company and product.
Simply put: the product/company will be feeding my family in the success case.
If the cost of carrying an employee -- not a cofounder! -- for three months (how much is that? 50K? 60K?) is going to kill the startup, you a) probably shouldn't have hired the person to begin with and b) don't have much of an startup to begin with.
It's continually amazing to me how, in a capital environment awash with cheap funds and outrageous valuations, this kind of cheapness pervades everyone's thought processes. Stop thinking like broke college students, and start thinking like the people of substantial affairs you claim to be.
Having a child is very much like that. The employee is on an extended sick leave, and then they're back and can be brought up to speed again. The big difference is that you know of this several months in advance and have every opportunity to make up for it and can take the time to train a substitute.
This is a good argument to treat parental leave just like other sick leave and leave it to a similar insurance system.
(To those to think companies' fear of children is rational, do you also think to ask your employees if they scuba dive, or ride a motorbike? That's probably more "dangerous" to the company than being of child bearing age, and the consequences far worse.)
If you only have 12 employee-months of runway, then you should not plan such that you need the whole thing. Parental leave is not the only uncontrollable circumstance that could be disastrous for your company. Your lead developer could get colon cancer. Your salesperson could jump ship without notice. Your co-founder could embezzle 20% of the investment capital. A patent troll could shake you down.
It boils down to a rather simple question. Would you rather fail with your ethics intact, or get money-rich by being an asshole?
Humanity isn't here to ensure the survival of the corporation. We allow corporations to exist. If we decide that family time and bonding with our children is important, which we should, then the corporations need to adjust.
Fathers and mothers should get time measured in months to bond with their children after birth. It doesn't even need to be paid for by the company, we should just be using the unemployment benefits we've all already paid in to. It'll also help the job market as some positions may require temp workers to fill gaps. I'm honestly perplexed how anyone can be against mandatory parental leave and I'm a single guy without any children or any plan to have children in the near future.
Someday most of us won't work, not in the sense we view work in this current day, so why fight the inevitable? We should embrace it and take steps to get it right that is fair and sustainable.
I just dropped down to 4 day weeks.
It was actually easy enough to do. I'd already been gone entirely for a few weeks, then I came back most of the way to full time, then... I just never ramped back up the rest of the way. (I bill by the hour, so there was never a salary discussion to muddy the waters).
That was over a year ago. I'm healthier now than I was then (partly from that extra day of chasing kids around, partly because with 3 day weekends all the time you find extra time in the mix for things like mountain biking). And I seem to be just as productive since I come in to each week with a nice clear mind, without having to have crammed and entire weekend worth of activity into just 2 days.
I toy with the idea of dropping down to 3 day weeks.
It was unpaid. My employer did not force me to take vacation time, which was kind of them.
A month or two before I left, the COO created a parental leave policy, and I was glad to see it codified.
This was a company with under 25 employees, but they could have benefited from this post (and this one, which the OP linked to: http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/its-not-okay-to-n... ).
First 3 years are crucial in development of a child and it makes such a huge difference if the baby/child has an attention, love and contact with her parents 24/7 - or, if she spends day laying in an understaffed daycare with very little incentives to develop her.
Just for comparison, my country (Czech Republic) provides:
* 28 weeks of paid leave that start 6-8 weeks before expected birth date, with a payment roughly similar to average of mothers last year's net salary.
* Birth itself is covered by state insurance. 2-4 years long maternal leave where (any) parent gets a fixed sum of cca 11 average monthly salaries (distributed over the maternal leave period).
* During the above time, state also pays parent's health insurance.
* Also, employer has to ensure that parent can return to his/her position as long as the leave is shorter than 3 years.
You might think that this is expensive, but I see it as an investment in giving children healthy start full of attention and love, no matter their family's situation.
This worked out well for both me and the company. The company was able to continue projects with my input, and I did not feel like a stranger on my "return".
Obviously for the first few days I was completely out, but after that I could handle dropping by the office a few hours each day.
One further step would be to require parents to take this time off. There was a news report about how American employees didn't use much of their vacation time last year. In a competitive company people who take vacation or the full parental leave can be seen as not being passionate enough about the job.
This can lead to an environment where nobody takes vacation and I imagine many will choose not to take parental leave.