It shouldn't even be a perk, it should be standard and law.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
>"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?
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 :)
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.)
> 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.
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.
That already happens now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.