I literally worked for most of my child's 8 month life, from her ICU room, I worked the morning of her 9 surgeries, I worked through the genetic diagnosis, I worked through being told my child has brain bleeds, neuroblastoma, is deaf, re-intubated, etc... if my insurance wasn't tied to my work, I would've quit in a heartbeat.
I'm convinced I'll go to my grave with working that time being my biggest regret in life. I had benefits, but was saving the limited time for when my wife returned to work... to only lose it when my child passed.
I couldn't advocate more for maternal/paternal leave.
As a company owner(20 FTE), I've had several staff take leave for catastrophic health issues in their immediate family.
It's been incredibly costly for my small company to keep paying them indefinitely beyond their accrued and used holiday/sick leave, but it's been worth it in the long run.
It has engendered the kind of effort, loyalty, and performance that can't be bought, only earned.
From the company's perspective, it hurts a lot up front but it makes sense ethically, morally, and I think financially as well.
Here in NZ, we have paid parental leave. Mostly taken by mothers, but with some nudging for fathers to take some of it as well.
When we had our children it was 12 weeks total combined paid parental leave.
It has since been extended to 26 weeks combined paid, with up to another 26 weeks unpaid.
> It has engendered the kind of effort, loyalty, and performance that can't be bought, only earned.
Hot take: it can be bought -- you bought it with paid leave!
Ok, I know what you're trying to express. But I don't think it's dirty at all to acknowledge that taking care of your employees generates loyalty. It's a competitive advantage to offer benefits like this -- that's why all the big tech co's do it.
I Germany it's 14 months total (if both parents take at least 2 months, otherwise it's 12) & it still felt like too little! I wish I could have spent more time with my kids when they were babies but I had to go back to work.
I can't edit this post, but I just want to add that I feel incredible lucky that I was able to work from my child's bedside at all.
We met many other parents in the ICU who worked jobs that weren't remote, crane operators, waste management professionals, mill workers, etc. I imagine they share the same sentiment as me.
Sorry to hear - you did the best under circumstances - you could not help her medically or otherwise but did the only thing in your control - make sure the insurance coverage was there.
With complete respect, I feel I must add however: Society on the other hand did not do the best it could have done – sheltered and cared for the people in this situation. It isn’t even efficient at any scale or context to just let it ride like this. This breaks people. Grief and burnout burns people up.
They shouldn’t have had to keep powering the treadmill, shouldn’t have to had to do anything to ensure insurance coverage didn’t run out. Earnestly and calmly speaking, I honestly think it’s most useful to view the practice as… barbaric.
it's so depressing working a good job in the imperial core and having it be like this. The generations of exploitation and extraction we've waged against the natural world and the people outside of the imperial core would at least make some sense if we all got to have the good stuff stuff but we don't.
I've heard it stated as: you're always 3 terrible months away from being destitute, but you're never 3 great months from being a billionaire. Let this inform who you have class solidarity with.
Did you ask for an extended leave of absence? Many employers are a lot more humane than a lot of employees give them credit for, whether they're bound by law or not.
I created a throw away for this, but during a recent family emergency, my small 100 person company decided to fire me rather than allow my request for 3 months off without pay. They could easily have supported it, and I was a good employee, but instead I heard now they've replaced me with an Eastern European contractor for cheap. So rather than help me in my time of need, after I had saved their ass from some other crappier contractors in the preceding year, they took it as a chance to cut costs. They had also just gone public and have a huge war chest from that, so it isn't like they were strapped.
I'm not going to respond to those comments, inevitability, that will say there's more to this story, because there isn't, I was a good employee and understood my job, but they just saw a replaceable body. I'm never going to dedicate more than the minimum effort to a company ever again.
I too think it would be proper to share that information if you feel it would not impact your job search (and let's be frank, if they would do what they did they can't do much worse). Protecting abusers is not a good policy.
Unfortunately, due to a legal agreement I signed to get them to pay for medical benefits for a few additional months and have a small separation payment, I cannot do so. If I did, they could sue me for several times the amount of benefit I gained, and I'm not in a good position for that now.
Yeah, you pretty much hit the nail for me, too. I was worried of that exact situation. I'm a great employee, with a great team/manager, but it's a F500 company, where I'm just a replaceable body.
The best thing I could do for my child is to not rock the boat.
A slightly more sophisticated strategy - dedicate more then the minimum effort to a company...but only after they demonstrate decent devotion to good employees. So "Tit for Tat", very roughly.
US? FMLA? Just curious if you felt you couldn't take it due to company culture or if it just didn't apply to you? Either way, a horrible experience for you I know. I’ve been fortunate to work with folks that are family friendly when things like this arise. I can’t even imagine opening my laptop while in the hospital and in that headspace.
Yeah, in the US. I had 2 weeks-ish off total and random days/hours when there were big procedures, but was "saving" the rest for when my wife returned to work. My child was chronically sick (but worse than I/we knew), and I had no idea what the future had in store for us, I was worried if I "used" it all, then I'd be forced to work from home and care for my child.
I have a great manager, who would've been ok with whatever, but there's only so much I was entitled too. I also had bills rolling in, so anything unpaid was out of the question. I'm sure I could've survived with being unpaid, but living off GoFundMe donations didn't sit well with me. Ultimately GoFundMe paid for her funeral.
Unfortunately, insurance doesn't provide any pay for sick leave, but rather, makes medical bills less than they would be otherwise (in general). Lots of folks are stuck with unpaid leave from jobs they need for the health insurance, and it really is a shame.
It’s insane to me that our absurd health care system has routed around insurance systems shortcomings by literally begging friends, family and strangers to help us afford basic living.
And the insurance companies are laughing all the way to bank.
It's an alarming sign of political and social rot, IMO, that this has become so normal that barely-computer-literate people out in my flyover part of the US regularly launch healthcare-related GoFundMes, if their kids get seriously ill especially, and there hasn't been an overwhelming "holy shit, this is very not OK, drop everything and fix this now" reaction.
> It's an alarming sign of political and social rot
For some people, charity replacing government social safety nets is a feature, not a bug, since they want to control where "their" money goes. Sure, it sucks when you're not photogenic[1] enough to hit your GoFundMe targets, but look at the bright side: we'd have avoided wasteful government spending.
GoFundMe healthcare is a fractal representative of hypercapitalism/Capitalism with American Characteristics: people use GoFundMe as a last resort while healthcare organizations make absurd profits, then you zoom in and realize GoFundMe is a for-profit that gets a cut of the donations.
That’s unfortunate, as is the whole situation. My thought was it should protect your job/insurance and you’d have to still just pay your normal premiums. Potential loss of income depending on how your company handles that (my and my wife’s company has always opted to pay us). We paid the out of pocket maximum, something like $10K and that was it, realize that’s a substantial amount for some. I’d agree with the overall sentiment of the discussion, we should move towards a system that is predictable and humane and not so heavily tied to your employer at the moment. I work in healthcare industry for past 20 years (corp finance) and am continually perplexed by how silly things are.
If anyone else reading is ever in a similar situation talk to your HR department. I help HR departments negotiate things all the time. A common thing is taking an LOA and the company will pay your COBRA premiums. They don’t have to, it’s technically unpaid time, but if you have some savings and insurance is your barrier this is actually kind of common. But again, I’m in healthcare industry so YMMV.
It's times like this that I'm happy to pay my taxes for the NHS. Everyone gets ill, cares for someone who gets ill, or is someone who is just very unfortunate in life.
Our health is the most important thing we have, and we should look after that
I hate evoking empathy/sympathy, but with my child being gone, I really think it's important to share the real story and things that made our/my situation worse.
I don't want sympathy or want to invoke empathy. I've heard enough "I'm sorry for you loss" to last me many, many lifetimes.
I just want to share my 2c on how my/our situation was made worse, now my girl is gone, I feel like it would be a disservice to her if I sugar coated my experience. I would've loved to never have worked a single moment during that time. Also, I'm a British guy who used the NHS extensively before I moved here. So there's that.
> if my insurance wasn't tied to my work, I would've quit in a heartbeat.
This is something I just don't get to grok about the US. Here in Mexico we are supposedly "copying" the best of the US (sigh), having the option of paying for "major" health insurance with insurers like NewYork Life, along with other local ones (GNP, AXA). A year of mayor medical insurance costs around $3,000 USD a year. Sure, it is by no means a small amount, but it is definitely doable in case of an emergency.
There´s even something called "excess insurance" that you can buy as a individual while you are working. It covers any spending "on top" of whatever your companies' insurance covers, and serves to "exhaust" any cooling-off periods, so that if you are out of your job at some point, you convert it to full private insurance and get all the benefits.
I really cant understand the logic of forcing women back into work after 2-4 weeks.
Its just not beneficial for anyone.
The mum is utterly frazzled.
The employer gets half an employee back
Society is conditioned to think that the only practical way to raise a baby is to give up on work/get live in care.
now, to look at it from a "my mum managed, I don't want to undermine the american nuclear family" point of view:
Yes, mums working is an anathema, but given that exceedingly difficult to own a good house, have good health insurance and have an economically inactive partner at home, I suspect the problem here isn't the mum. I suspect its the salami slicing of wages to the average joe/joelle.
Even if it undermines the american nuclear family, having such a big obstacle to the "correct"[1] type of family having babies is going to undermine the "correct" family having babies. Which means one's chosen view of family dies out with inflation.
Given that _every_ other "civilised" country has some sort of rudimentary care for new parents, which doesn't acutally cost that much, I can't see any reasonable objection to not having it.
[1]I'm not going to define what correct is, its divisive and allows people to project what they think is wrong with "the other side" who ever they might be, rather than engage with the specifics at hand.
I think the core of the problem has a few basic parts:
* the average person/family is trying to live a little beyond their means
* “work needed to do” is like a gas, it expands to fit the hours worked
* rent seeking elements expand to keep #1 true
The takeaway is that there is a lot of “work” being done in the economy that doesn’t need to be done because prices will always rise a little past what people can pay comfortably so… people work too much and think that they need to.
If you cut the lifetime hours worked by half, the standard of living probably wouldn’t change much.
The solution to this is radical modification of the markets which leech away extra income.
One such method would be to control real estate prices by enacting huge taxes on rental property and profits simultaneously making it extremely difficult or impossible to acquire large loans for real estate (owned or rented out). Making owning s home that isn’t your primary residence a huge financial liability and removing the ability to sell it for high prices would crash the market and remove the rent paid to landlords or “rent” paid to banks for mortgages. Both betting industries that take far more value than they give back.
Renters are paying all the costs imposed upon landlords. Many people have perfectly valid reasons to want to rent housing rather than being coerced to buy by bearing the impact of huge taxes on rental property.
I’m not a landlord, but I rented 6 different places for a total of about 13 years after college plus my time during college. I’m glad those places were available at prices I could afford.
This was attempted in New York City and failed miserably.
Property values rise in locations that are highly desirable regardless of government or market intervention. It has more do to with the surface area of the earth than any particular policy.
A government system will result in similar issues - Look at the retirees and trust funder tenants living in mostly-empty 4 bedroom rent controlled apartments in NYC.
You have to allocate the limited space somehow. You cannot fit more people into one square meter of land without building higher or denser, and building higher is not always a simple option.
Regulations must be altered to encourage building sufficient housing where it's wanted.
After the prerequisite step is taken, then the tax code should be changed to fix that rent seeking, in houses yes, but generally too. Seeking rent is not an overall economic good, but a wealth transfer mechanism from the poor to the rich.
I'm personally a proponent of parental leave, but I'll answer this one point.
"Forcing women" back into work after pregnancy is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases. All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood.
I wonder how much this would change if parental leave was also granted to fathers at similar or equal rates. The article mentions postpartum issues -- this is stuff that isn't really mitigated by having one parent alone care for a kid. If you're struggling with depression by yourself in the house with a kid... it's nice to have more people around to help. Even if you're not struggling with depression, having people around to help with care can let you avoid the worst parts of the whole 3 hours of sleep a night thing.
And from a "nuclear family" point of view, most cultural traditionalists I know would argue to me that it's good for kids to be in multiple-parent households. When people talk about stereotypical traditionalist nuclear families, these are very often families that have extended support structures of multiple people involved in child-rearing.
Opponents to parental leave (even feminist opponents) are in some ways attempting to equalize the time-off risk between mothers[0] and fathers. And that can be done by reducing the mother's time off to zero to match the father, but it can also be done by letting fathers get involved in early child-rearing and giving them more time to help their partners.
----
[0] And nonbinary/transgender/adoptive/etc parents too of course, but I'm just using a shorthand here.
Some European countries require the parental leave to be shared to some degree.
Here in Sweden each parent gets 90 days of parental leave each, and the remaining 300 days can be split in whatever way the parents choose. You also don't have to take all the parental leave at once, you can spread it out over a few years (and 96 of the days can even be saved until the child is between 4 and 12 years old if you want).
Yeah which doesn't make any sense, how can you motivate to have two adults full time only to care for your own children. Sure I agree with the parent that "it's nice" but come on, it's extremely privileged. And it's commonly abused in Sweden to take several month long vacations abroad with the whole family, which literally nobody else can do, unless you have children. It's a privilege not available to single people at all.
Yes, it is a privilege that won't be available to me (since I don't plan on having any kids), but I believe these benefits are good for the children, which is ultimately good for society.
And sure, as a non-parent I can't take a multi-month long vacation every year, but even as a recent graduate I get 25 paid vacation days per year (5 of which can be saved for a few years). So long vacations aren't a pipe dream for non-parents.
And with the way the economy currently works and the gradually increasing life expectancy, increasing the birth rate is a good thing, and generous parental benefits are a way to encourage that. I personally think it would be best if society/the economy wasn't dependant on an increasing population, but that's a separate conversation.
> It's a privilege not available to single people at all.
And getting more than 3 hours of sleep a lot is a privilege that's not available to recent parents.
I don't know the exact details of what policies are correct for paid time off, but the fact is still true that we have a strong societal incentive to handle situations like this in a way that's beneficial both to the parents and (especially) beneficial to kids -- at least if we believe that parental presence helps early development, which seems reasonably well supported.
I say this as a single person with no plans to ever marry or have children, but the reality is that being single or having kids each carries its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and I'm not sure that fairness between parents and childless individuals is necessarily the best lens to look at policy through.
There's a lot of middle ground here between status quo and what GP describes, but even in that case raising a child is still an 18+ year commitment; I don't think that a single family vacation significantly changes that.
Of course single and child less couples don't get this privilege. We are trying to create incentives to having children.
In the US, we have a program called WIC, to help women with infants and children with nutrition. If you are a poor man or poor single woman, this program is not available to you. I would not consider that a privilege. We are trying to help foster the next generation and improve society.
Yes exactly. The only way to close gender gaps is to force men to do less work outside the home, not women more. (Men doing more work inside the home and women less follows from that more easily than in the other direction.)
Better childcare / pre-k can help too, but there musn't be a gap between when at least partial leave ends and childcare begins.
Good thing we all work to much already, so reducing total "public sphere" labor hours is not a huge issue.
They attempted that in Sweden and it backfired massively.
The more you try to force people into what they don't naturally gravitate towards (eg. women in STEM and engineering, men in nursing / teaching roles) the more the difference grows.
I can vouch from personal experience that I did not enjoy my paternity leave at all and I'd much rather work.
Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.
There are tons of possible explanations to explain a delta in salary between men and women. Men generally tend to negotiate better and women tend to take more time off when a son is born.
You can also slice subsets of data, to show whatever you want.
For example, if you look at women in their 20s, they are outperforming men on both salary and education.
There might be a middle ground here between forcing men to spend less time at work and offering them the opportunity to spend more time at home if they want to. Everyone is unique, but I know a number of fathers who would have liked to take more time off for their kids and would have chosen to if they had the opportunity, I suspect the ratio here may be higher than you expect.
> Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.
The gender gap was the explanation mbesto gave for why paid family leave for women might be opposed even by women. If the gender gap doesn't exist, and unbalanced paid time off between genders won't drive increased wage differences, then it seems like it might be fine to ignore mbesto's worry and just offer women that time off regardless of what paternal leave policies are.
I generally agree, keep in mind the idea is to force everyone to work less, distributing the non-domestic labor more evenly across the board. The idea is very materialist, in that domestic labor needs to be done, and it's not even that "all men" don't want to do it, but that bosses have more power than husbands and ultimately we need to stop the work hours/effort rat race to free up the free time to re-figure out what families and domestic labor ought to look like.
The current trend is capitalism reaches deeper into the family. Restaraunts are displacing cooking for more social strata, Pre-K is less controversial than paid family leave which brings intensified economies of scale to child rearing.
I'm not against either of those things --- at least there will be a villages (of wage-workers) to raise kids again and more social time --- but I don't want them to happen for the wrong reason of employers sucking up more and more of our time for no good reason.
My employer privately gave me tons of paid parental leave. I took a portion of it at the beginning and ended up using the rest of it to work every other day for the remaining year - and my partner used the chance to work on her stuff.
It definitely helped us economically (it's nice to have so much paid holiday) but it forced me into a nurturing role which my partner was definitely better suited for.
I ended up being quite depressed by the entire situation and had a series of mental health issues + lost most of my friends.
At the same time I am definitely better at negotiating than her and I am earning more - so without that artificial incentive we would have naturally gravitated toward the best solution.
I agree two parents households work great, but you don't really need two parents hands-on with kids all the time. I find it great in limited doses but I would go completely insane if I had to do it all the time, while I can tolerate work just fine. My partner was getting incredibly stressed at work but with kids it seems like she found her balance.
She's looking forward to go back to work once all the kids go to nursery / school in 3 years, but not in a typical employers / employee setting, more like running the family software business.
> All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood.
Citation needed. It's PART of the discrepancy, but the evidence is far from conclusive. Even the link you pasted shows otherwise. Women without children still peak at 90% of relative wages to men without children, which themselves are lower than wages of fathers (presumably because being in a stable relationship allows a working father to focus on their career with someone taking care of the home)
Perhaps this is a case of metrics getting ahead of reality. Some circles have taken as an axiomatic truth that any disparity in wages between males and females is an intrinsic scandal. Perhaps there are some reasons for that, for example the tradeoff between forcing mothers back into the workforce vs. giving them ample time (order of 12 months) to recover and take care of the new born. For the not parents out there, a new born requires feeding every 2-3 hours. Expecting a mother to feed on that schedule and perform as an employee is inhuman.
> Some circles have taken as an axiomatic truth that any disparity in wages between males and females is an intrinsic scandal.
All babies are created by two humans.* Why should the career of one of them be penalized for it? Why not instead create as a society the tools so that both can share the upbringing and care of the baby while the mother is recovering?
* (although the parents are not always the same persons who have biologically made it; yet it is a good idea that the solution for such a case is the default behaviour).
Your question: "Why should mothers take care of infants?" A passing familiarity with mammal biology is required. FYI, babies do not subsist on hamburgers and fries.
Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable. Unless we can agree to a minimally reasonable set of differences between men and women in the reproductive realm, before and after birth, we won't get very far.
PS. There is nothing "penalizing" in taking care of an infant. It is a fundamental part of life. Some even see it as rewarding.
Pumping exists. Formula exists. And it isn't like we see balanced childcare responsibilities once children are weaned. The disparity in expectations for men and women in childcare roles extend far beyond the biological realities of childrearing.
"The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that infants be exclusively breastfed for about the first 6 months with continued breastfeeding along with introducing appropriate complementary foods for 1 year or longer." https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/index.htm
Pumping is challenging, if not downright degrading. Ask a working mother. It also doesn't work as well as you might think, both the baby and the mother need breastfeeding 2-3 hours apart, or else the lactation may stop. Formula is suboptimal, according to AAP and common sense.
This is exactly how the singleminded focus on one metric (equal wages or bust) goes awry. Both mothers and infants suffer the pressure on mothers to compete on equal footing with males at all times. Is it really that hard to give mothers the space (and financial support) to chose the well being of their infants and of themselves, and accept that course of action will inevitably lead to a small decrease in lifetime wages?
Even the ancients were well aware of the dangers of attempting to equalize everyone to the exact same standard. See the story of the Procrustes bed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
If I were trying to argue that my ideas were not sexist I probably would not appeal to "the ancients," who also had ideas about, for instance, the unwisdom of letting your wife leave the house on her own.
> Your question: "Why should mothers take care of infants?"
Admittedly, you can't read properly, because that's not a question I asked.
> Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable.
Speak for yourself if you want to introduce straw men in the discourse; no one else did. Here we adults are talking about participation in society in equal conditions for all humans, irrespective of debilitating conditions that may temporarily affect them, whether due to illness or strenuous exertion.
Excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere because some of them have a higher biological burden in reproduction is anything but a libertarian ideal. Having men participating in equal terms in the responsibility and joy of raising their children should be seen as a right as well as an obligation. A society that is unable to guarantee that right and claim that duty is a society that has lost its way.
1. The proposal is to offer mothers a 12 months leave, at the very least as a social expectation, even better paid by a state run insurance, see e.g. unemployment, to take care of their infant children.
2. Mothers rather than fathers because mammals feed their infants with milk, and milk is produced only by mothers. Human mothers need to feed their infants every 2-3 hours. As long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question.
"The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that infants be exclusively breastfed for about the first 6 months with continued breastfeeding along with introducing appropriate complementary foods for 1 year or longer." https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/index.htm
3. This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers. Specifically their wages will be smaller compared to same age fathers.
Working the chain of reasoning backwards, anyone that axiomatically insists no wage gap should ever be measured between men and women, sadly a very popular stance, is (willfully?) ignoring the motherhood aspect. Men and women are not fully interchangeable.
I don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from. As stated above, there is at least one critical area in life, specifically infant care, where men and women are not perfectly equal. Not being perfectly equal does not imply men and women must be maximally different to the point of "exclusion from the social sphere".
Until we drop the pretense that men and women are perfectly equal, we are going to produce inhuman outcomes. This is not even a new observation, the ancients had the story of Procustes holding people equal by the standard of his iron bed and fixing any deviation from his equal norm via blunt force.
> don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from
You don't see it because you make chains of reasoning backwards leading you to absurd conclusions because you leave thousands of alternative explanations along the way, such as "as long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question" (then how is it possible that many women do exactly that, breastfeeding and working?) or "This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers" (no shit Sherlock, that's why there are proposals being made to fix precisely that effect. Of course it won't be fixed if you do nothing and keep the current status quo.)
> Men and women are not fully interchangeable.
And that is the starting point of my reasoning. The only option you see from that point is "as a consequence, women have a lower salary", completely blind to the possibility of "let's put means so that this biological difference does not represent a burden, on the basis of sharing the upbringing of children" that you keep ignoring over and over again.
We seem to disagree with a very specific point about breastfeeding. One perspective is supported by reasonable authoritative sources (AAP). What is your recommendation for the care and feeding for an infant in their first year of life?
Preferences are not identical between men and women. 72% of fathers say they would ideally work full time, only 20% of mothers do [1]. 50% of mothers say they would ideally want to work part time, 29% not work at all. Furthermore, mothers that work full time are less satisfied with their parenting than part-time and non-working mothers. Crucially, 70% of mothers that currently work full time would rather work part time or not at all. Most mothers with full-time careers don't want to be working full time, and this disparity is more than a 2:1 margin.
I think it is instructive to compare this case to disability. There are perfectly rational reasons, from a cold economic perspective, that an employer would not want to hire any disabled employees, or that a business would not want to build amenities to accommodate them as customers. But we've decided that it is not to society's benefit to have a system wherein the disabled are routinely discriminated against, so we don't allow you to do those things. Why is this case different?
This is an orthogonal point. I don't see any provision mandating wages or promotions for periods when people are on leave, abled or disabled.
The argument assumes that all people receive the same pay and promotions for the same work. Wage differentials between people from the same age cohort appear because gap years, which are the human approach for infant care, lead to small but measurable delays in the mother's careers.
BTW, this is not an argument that all wage differentials that are observed in the real world are, or should be, explainable this way. It is simply a pushback against rigid Procrustean axioms that risk doing more harm that good.
> is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases
There's a lot of evidence around wage discrepancies, but I have never heard anyone claim that it's the _mothers_ who are forcing themselves back to work. That seems like a huge stretch and doesn't align with anything I've seen before.
I should probably clarify and reword. I don't think mothers are explicitly forcing themselves out of maternal leave - I'm saying that it's not culturally acceptable to do so. The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases.
The cultural components manifest themselves different ways:
As a biz owner: Why would you give a raise to someone who hasn't contributed anything to the company in the last 2-4 months?
As an employee: how would you (man or woman) feel if your equal peer didn't contribute anything for 2-4 months and got the same raise as you?
To whatever extent time out of the workforce is a driver of future wage discrepancy, it seems like at least some women would make an entirely economically rational choice to minimize that time out of the workforce. (I’m not claiming it’s a good or bad thing, just that there exists a strong force that would motivate people in this direction.)
> Subsidize me until they are in public school and I’ll high five you.
I know this is an exaggeration, but it drew my interest. This expects that the rest of us have to work to subsidize you having children for five to six years.
I'm wholly on board with helping parents raise children. Children are our future. But at some threshold of subsidization this equation tips and actively offloads the entire burden onto those without children.
Both of my parents had jobs when I was growing up. Why are we suddenly expecting this to change? Childcare can be paid for at rates under minimum wage in aggregate. Look at our school system and daycare businesses. Just because you think your child deserves only the best does not make it economical, and lots of people make this work. Thousands of years of child rearing has happened in suboptimal conditions.
Raising children has been an incredible chore more often than not throughout history. It's only been briefly punctuated by moments of ease, and even then, it wasn't evenly distributed. Children are not easy.
I think modern parents are seeing their childfree peers and remarking on the delta in quality of life.
I honestly don't mean this as an attack. I'm just interested in the varying perspectives on this.
What has changed is that due to labour mobility and contemporary society generally the extended family has become a non-thing for so many of us.
If we're expected to move wherever for work, then that wherever needs to provide support. Because right now I'm hours from my sole remaining inlaw and a whole country apart from my own parents and brother, and it's been hell raising children like this. And not just young children; my teenagers' mental health would be much better if they were to have their uncle and grandma nearby.
> This expects that the rest of us have to work to subsidize you having children
We can obviously unpack all the ways that this is abused, but generally speaking children are necessary for the continuation of the species. Children are also absolutely a burden on the parents, physically, emotionally, and financially.
So yes, broadly speaking, I would expect the childfree to disproportionately contribute into a societal pool to offset for the fact that they are existing in human society but not contributing their part to it's ongoing propagation.
Ultimately though, you're right - no parent should expect to have the same lifestyle as their childfree counterpart. Not with free time, disposable income, or even day-to-day "happiness".
> Both of my parents had jobs when I was growing up. Why are we suddenly expecting this to change?
Mine too. Here's what I think has changed: in that era (and for much of human history), it was assumed/expected that it "took a village" to raise children. Families stayed closer together - the previous generation was around to help with childrearing. And in general, communities took care of everyone's children in a pool that would be considered completely outlandish today. Heck, the concept of a Wet Nurse [1] is something that would probably explode most people's minds today. I bet at least one person will read this comment and not realize that this was something that was completely ubiquitous and standard for much of human history. Can you imagine that existing today? It would be inconceivable. Not that we need it since the advent of formula, but the point is simply that societies helped take care of children more in the past than they do now.
Today, people move further from home from work (losing direct family access), have children later in life (less energy to contribute/harder to tradeoff career responsibilities), and build fewer local community social bonds (online relationships may be meaningful but they don't help babysit).
This is more than a personal choice, it's a reality of our economy and the social / economic mobility is a net positive. maybe some of this will change with wfh movement
what do you mean by that? the most common jobs (retail, food, medicine, construction, etc.) exist pretty much everywhere there's a critical mass of people living. you don't need to relocate to get the kinds of work most people do. the people that benefit most from relocating are specialists who already get paid above the median and/or want to follow their niche passion. good for them! but I'm not sure it's something that deserves to be subsidized further.
+1 My wife and I both moved away from our families long before we had kids. I think the age of having kids also plays into the moving away for work as it's something that's just not on your mind.
Anyways, the difference between our family unit and our friends who have local family & ties is night and day different.
It sounds totally bonkers if you’re not used to it but this is actually the norm in other countries. Both of us had comparatively long parental leave for both kids. Both kids went into really nice state kindergarten before they were 18 months. Before that if we were poorer we’d have our childcare subsidised. Both kids get things like a sports club grant each year, free dental care and free healthcare. There are state run after school clubs and so on.
The amazing thing to me is you think the OP was asking for something unbelievable.
I'm trying to find reasonable thresholds and weigh the societal pros and cons.
> The amazing thing to me is you think the OP was asking for something unbelievable.
The five years that OP alluded to is a really long time to not be working. That's 5/40 years for any given career (for a single child), meaning one eighth of a childfree person's productivity has to cover for it. At least at this extreme scale.
> Both of us had comparatively long parental leave for both kids.
How long was it? I'm genuinely curious.
Again, I'm not against subsidizing childcare and supporting children. Some of the expectations of parents seem to be really high, especially to someone whose parents both worked throughout my early childhood.
The current costs of childcare in my area are $80-$250/wk for infants unless you're going for something super Bougie for your baby.
My friends and coworkers who’ve lived in the US describe pre-school childcare as dystopian. Even when expensive.
If you think of it as 5/(40 * 2) or if you had two kids relatively close together 7/(40 * 3) the math is significantly better. It’s also very telling that caring for kids is not seen as being productive.
Where does the 40*3 term come from? I'm assuming the 5/(40*2) is 5 years of subsidy out of two 40-year careers. I can't figure where the 3 term is coming from unless it's 2 children from 3 total people or something else that I'm missing.
Yes it’s three careers. I say just before it if you have two kids close together. Two years is a normal gap. So seven years of subsidy out of three forty year careers. The mother and two children each have forty years of “productivity”.
(I think) That only works if neither child is eligible for this leave during their career.
If you imagine Adam and Betty have two kids Charlie and Debbie who have two kids Earl and Felicia who have Gary and Helen… each generation receives N years of leave income from (2M - N) years of work income. You can’t take Betty, Charlie, and Debbie’s work income (or total productivity) against just Betty’s leave income.
I think you take Adam and Betty’s combined leave against their combined M years and M years minus N years of leave, C&D’s N against their 2M-N, etc. (you can time-shift it however you like if you want to think of some generation paying for a different generation, but the long-run math doesn’t change for replacement rate births)
In your example, this seems like 7 years of 73 years (9.6%) is going to this program, not 7/120 (5.8%)
It’s quite hard to follow what you mean there so I’ll assume the extra detail is correct. If you wanted to model more detail think about the growth of the effect if those children have children. That really starts to drive down that percentage.
My point was to show roughly that worrying about the cost of productivity loss when having children is the only way to sustain human productivity doesn’t add up.
> But at some threshold of subsidization this equation tips and actively offloads the entire burden onto those without children.
True, but on a long enough timeframe one could also view it as a repayment from the people who (with or without children) were once children-being-subsidized themselves.
The taxes of people without children already subsidise schooling, healthcare and social welfare (benefits for parents).
The point stated was that there needs to be a threshold. You have introduced another topic entirely, and the person you are answering implied nothing about your topic.
> offloads the entire burden onto those without children
Are you including "people with children over the age of five to six years" in this group? Because it seems like they would be helping to raise others people's children (in your words) but would also have benefitted.
According to the first Google result I found it looks like in 2018 only 15% of women age 50 were childless. A first-order approximation assuming younger generations have kids at the same rate and it's the same for both genders (neither of these are guaranteed but it's a starting point) would lead me to believe that more than most people have children and would benefit from a policy like this over the course of their lives. People without cars help pay for roads, people without children pay for public schools...I'm not really seeing much here to suggest there's an undue burden on those without children.
It was my impression that the OP wanted subsidized parental leave until age 5 so that they could spend 1:1 time with their child and family needs.
Public school is typically less than $50/day per student. I vaguely suggested minimum wage stipends for an extended parental leave (1 year+), and this would be more than we spend on public schooling.
Lots of poor families make childcare work on shoestring budgets and have done so all throughout history. My parents did.
You are asking for an incredibly high amount of welfare, essentially "everyone else in society should pay me for 5 years because I chose to have a kid". I'm choosing to have a kid too, but I'm taking the personal responsibility path of saving and paying for it on my own. Perhaps there is some middleground, but 5 years is absolutely absurd.
I see what you're saying there, but perhaps look at it this way:
our comfortable retirement is dependent on a good crop of reasonably successful children being born now, or in the previous 5 years.
It benefits us that those children are brought up to be balanced, rational pragmatic people. Perhaps extended child care might be the thing that does it?
I suspect that five years is indeed too much.
However perhaps the answer is one year "off" plus cheap, good quality child care from 1 year plus?
Uhh, it's 3 years where I live (though the welfare money for the last one and half year is very low and lots of mother go back to work before that)
I would say 3 year is pretty good as kids starts to gain a lot from socializing after that age.
Why would this be absurd? It's perfectly normal. Looking after a toddler is hard 7/24 work with little time to spare. Of course you can go to work and instead pay for a house cleaner and a baby sitter to look after your house and your kid because.. work is more important? Or what is your argument here?
I believe in taking time away from work to raise kids. In fact, I am taking several years away from work now for that purpose. What I disagree with is who should pay for it. I'm paying for my living expenses and raising my child from my savings that I earned at my generous paying job. I think the government should pay for up to perhaps 3 months for raising kids (and it shouldn't be based on your salary, but tied to some universally agreed upon basic living wage), but any more than that should be self-financed. There is a set amount of handouts society can give out before it implodes, and there are far better uses for that money than giving you the privilege of a plush lifestyle while you choose to stay at home with your toddler.
Yeah this makes perfect sense. Paid parental leave is just a welfare system like any other, and has the same drawbacks as always. People act as if it's some invention to create free time out of thin air.
I see your point but it smells like kids should be a privilege of the generously paid and financially intelligent.
In Europe the baby boomer generation reached retirement and in the meantime the number of kids per household decreased. There is not enough people to pay the pension of the old and many governments are motivated to increase the number of kids by any means - like making it a financially acceptable or even desired to have 3+ children.
I mean it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. If we decoupled health insurance from FTE, then maybe there would be more part-time options that would allow for some flexibility. Hire a biweekly housekeeper and a nanny for 4 hours a day 4 days a week, still get to spend lots of time with your kid AND have some meaningful engagement with other adults and contribute to society according to your skill level.
That's basically my plan, but running a business/contracting/freelancing is not for everyone. Sooo thankful I have my own insurance though.
This actually highlights a major misunderstanding in parental leave discussions: Most government-sponsored paid parental leave programs in other countries aren't paying 100% salary during the leave.
Sweden has one of the more generous programs that pays up to $41K/year (USD equivalent) or 80% of your income, whichever is lower. That amount is actually quite good if you're living modestly, but it may not be what people earning $100-150K have in mind when they see "paid parental leave".
I think parent asked for subsidy, not total compensation of expenses.
I have two kids, 2.5 years apart, and there was one year in NYC where a small family daycare was running us ~$5k per month in childcare. We'd been aiming for the kids to be a bit further apart, partly for financial reasons, but shrug, it didn't happen that way (first kid took a lot longer of trying than the second). We're fortunate in that we can afford that, but it did impact our long-term savings and eventual home ownership.
I honestly don't know what the working poor do. I guess you're not aloud to move away from extended family.
My word choices might not have been the best here.
But consider if everyone was able to take the first year at some percentage less of regular salary. Then public funded care available with learning included?
My wife would have preferred this to having exhausted fmla just before giving birth because of early complications.
Returning to work was not an option for her, 6 years later returning to work was one of the most emotionally draining experiences for her.
Maybe we should look at why three sectors of the economy have had insane cost growth for three plus decades (housing, healthcare, education) and fix that instead of trying to band aid the negative consequences?
Is this kind of thing supposed to persuasive? You’ve presented no argument whatsoever. Is the idea that if use an emotionally laden term like “barbaric” you think it will browbeat people into falling into line with your opinion?
It was meant to illustrate that we're talking about separate things. "Fixing" three things getting more expensive doesn't in any way negate the barbarism that is no parental leave. Even if you think that them getting cheaper will mean the return of a stay at home parent (assuming they actually want it), it's still barbaric not to give the other parent an opportunity to spend time and help with the infant.
Of course not. Nothing needs to be explained or justified anymore. We have an entire generation so fully confident in the absolute correctness and obviousness of every single iota of their many strongly held moral opinions that even asking for an explanation offends them.
And they can’t understand why they keep on failing to achieve their policy goals.
PS: I don’t think there were too many <= 19 year olds signing up for hacker news in 2011.
> Of course not. Nothing needs to be explained or justified anymore. We have an entire generation so fully confident in the absolute correctness and obviousness of every single iota of their many strongly held moral opinions that even asking for an explanation offends them.
Just to be clear hear, we're talking about parents being able to take care of their newborns and not being forced back to work after "2-4 weeks" as the OP stated.
Be time-idempotent; imagine if you were talking to someone from the 15th century and they were SURE they were right about their crazy opinions.
The meta-stable way to be reasonable is that as long as someone seems to be honestly asking the reasoning for your beliefs, and your principles, you should try to explain yourself, rather than just shut them down by repeating your assertion of correctness.
Otherwise, how will you find out about the likely beliefs you hold right now, which our descendants will consider insane and evil? Forcing yourself to self-introspection is a good practice. I don't expect anyone to change their mind about this, but being able to explain to others your reasoning can also clear up your own views, and help convince your adversary much more effectively than the "just repeat your position" argument style.
You mean there's a choice?! Cool, I'd be happy if we simplyjust fixed all the massive, complex problems of the entire economy over just having parental leave.
For healthcare, the last time I heard about bending the cost curve was during the Obama administration.
For education, I’ve never seen any politician suggests we try to reign in cost growth—-just proposals around who should eat the costs.
For housing, governments at all levels have been pulling every policy lever they can find to increase costs. Falling costs are wildly considered a national emergency.
Why is it that progressives’ solution to everything is to dump money out of the air? Are there no structural improvements to be made anywhere?
Free Money is popular with voters; be that in the form of cut / "no new taxes" or handouts.
Want to fix that? A true multiparty system, IRV, and eliminating gerrymandering as possibilities. The last one would mostly be by eliminating geographic boundaries generally; instead representation would be decided by proportionally voting in representatives from the IRV list, which might be preferenced by area specific politicians first and could then fall back to those who represent other types of interest focus.
Similarly the relative representation power of each voter in a body such as the senate should be resolved by merging similarly leaning smaller bodies until each voter is within relatively the same representation strength as other voters.
For example in 1820 the top three most populace states were all around 1 million each. A core belle-curve hump ranges from around 600K down to 150K, and about 5 states have less than 100K. Senators representing roughly ~500K, ~250K, and 50K respectively, a weight difference of only a factor of 10 rather than a number approaching almost a factor of 100.
For the later proposal (where districts are replaced by a mixed bag of candidates and issues) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_STV might be a good way of determining the membership of a body.
It looks like research into proportional voter representation is still ongoing, with important new papers released even this year.
Of course there's a choice, there's a singular reason for the rising cost of all those things. Government intervention and injecting money into those markets. Costs will rise to absorb availability of funds. Give people virtually unlimited finding for higher education?? Expect costs to rise at a similar rate. Force everyone to buy insurance through a rigid process and heavily subsidize the worst possible coverage. Makes perfect sense that prices rise and quality deteriorates.
Have the government lend trillions of dollars at low interest with minimal qualifications for housing.
Expected outcome is realized.
Same is happening with childcare. Government increases child care credit. No surprise that daycare has raised the rate $30 per week.
> Almost every Western country without fail requires dual incomes to afford a basic lifestyle
It will be remiss not to mention that America stands alone among western countries in not providing livable subsidies/incomes to recent parents, and expects them to be back in the workforce after a couple of weeks. The rest of the western world is far less aggressive in "forcing" women back to work.
Biggest costs of life are housing, food and transportation. With one person staying at home, both the cost of transpo and food go down (because: one less person commuting to job, everything can be home cooked and the person staying at home have time to shop smartly and save a lot thanks to it).
This lives housing costs. Here, it's all about location. In many areas (assuming renting), you can have a house or apartment suitable for a family of three for less than $1000 a month.
Before taxes. That's in the area of 2400/mo after taxes [1]. My family of 3 pays around 600/mo for health insurance after employer subsidies, so call it 1800/mo. So after rent now you're living (with an infant!) on 800 a month. That's brutal.
My newborn burns nearly that much just on formula, diapers, and life-critical medicine.
Generally subsidies don’t apply if you’re getting an employer subsidy, and they drop off quickly as you rise over the poverty line.
I have no clue how the math works on average in terms of 35k jobs offering a subsidy at all, vs the marketplace subsidy. But even at a 50% subsidy it’s still not much money to raise a family on.
Healthcare for a family of 4 averaged to $1777/month in 2020[1]. The higher up the income ladder, the more the employer pays that. On the low-end, the employer doesn't pick up much of that tab. So that's the largest expense… unless it's sacrificed in order to maintain a roof, food and transportation.
And we're assuming zero contributions towards retirement, here.
So... no, it is NOT easy to live on that amount of money anywhere where there are opportunities to grow one's job/career.
On average in the US, 1 in 2 bankruptcies are due to medical debt. I think it's disingenuous to include the "biggest costs of life" and omit what is arguably the largest for an american citizen.
3000 gross is more like 2-25 net depending on the state. I haven't been in many industries where an employer is going to be covering healthcare costs for an $18/hr employee. So for a family of 3, that's another $1,000 a month for insurance.
>" On average in the US, 1 in 2 bankruptcies are due to medical debt. I think it's disingenuous to include the "biggest costs of life" and omit what is arguably the largest for an american citizen."
If one's income is as low as the parent described, they would likely be eligible for Medicaid.
That leaves 0 margin for error. If your kid breaks a bone and you have to pay for $X000 ambulance ride to an out of network hospital you're screwed for years.
A single family member earning a wage as a low income worker is not making enough to pay for the health insurance for a family with newborns, on top of rent, food, transportation, clothing, all the costs of having a child, saving for emergencies/future/education, and some semblance of entertainment and having a life.
This is correct, and something that needs to be said. Having both parents work is not an inevitable state of affairs. As little as 50 years ago, it was not unusual for one parent to stay at home and raise children. In contrast, the Soviet Union had long since moved to a two working-parents model because of financial pressure, and Soviet women regarded the American housewife with astonishment[1]. Whatever the merits and tradeoffs may be, we need to recognise that significant change has taken place.
Reality. Way too many people only can make ends meet by both partners being full-time employed - and in some cases (such as shown by a recent Last Week Tonight episode) even that is not enough to prevent being homeless.
Most people being unable to afford taking even a moderate amount of time off is the deeper problem. The sustainable answer is to fix the underlying economic problems - end this trickle up financial treadmill that has caused the majority to become so poor and disempowered [0], rather than creating a patchwork of allowances for specific system-legible purposes. For example bringing it back into the emotional realm - even if there were a comfortable 12 weeks of guaranteed parental leave, that itself wouldn't help a family who had lost their baby. Nor would it help someone who had to care for a terminally ill parent, nor after losing them and needing to deal with their estate. Nevermind the myriad of unenumerable reasons someone might need months off.
[0] If you cannot afford to unilaterally walk away from employment for several months, you have no economic power regardless of your churn rate. Sorry to break it to you.
- specific allowances (paid parental leave, paid sick leave) for obvious reasons
- "blanket" paid time off outside of federal holidays for recreation and stuff like parents dying
- extra PTO or working hours reduction to take care of sick/terminally ill relatives
- wages big enough to allow everyone working full time to save a meaningful amount of money
Most developed countries outside of the US have realized this. All countries in Europe have the first two points already covered (paid parental, sick and general time off), Germany has the third one covered since 2012 ("Familienpflegezeit").
The only thing we all seem to be lacking after decades of wage starvation and neoliberalism is the last one - but COVID-related disruption is likely to incite a massive paradigm shift as the market goes from an employer market to an employee market and companies are pulling production back on-shore for a myriad of reasons.
So yeah, the nuance to my comment is that the first things you list are important for social reasons - keeping your same position in the face of these additional burdens. I admit that my above comment is addressing the social problem purely through economic means (if an employer doesn't engage with your needs, walk away and find a new employer when you're available again). Unfortunately what we're offered in the US is mainly this economic lens, both policy and politically.
I don't know that I agree with the specific optimism in your last paragraph. Apart from the basic death toll, I think most of what is driving the "labor shortage" is people knocked out of situations where they were barely treading water, and retreating to lower rent areas and living with family. So wages will only rise enough to get people moving back onto the rent treadmill, and won't necessarily give away surplus wealth to increase their bargaining power. I'd love love to be wrong about this, of course.
IMO what is really needed to fix the economy is for the government to stop feeding the asset bubbles (aka giveaway to the upper class) through this ongoing combination of ZIRP plus austerity. Raising interest rates would lower asset prices, making home ownership more obtainable (despite the short term pain). And government-spent stimulus will cause distributed price inflation that will hopefully make the Fed raise rates, as opposed to the past few decades of runaway asset-only inflation that they've been able to conveniently ignore.
It doesn't need to be veiled, that's already the official policy: people are responsible for providing for their children. You have to have money to have kids. It's just a little less.
On some level you have to encourage people to somehow try to support themselves and their children, and to adapt their footprint to match their contributions.
Poor people have more children than rich both per capita and in aggregate
Also, I never said only rich people should be able to have children. However at the end of the day raising children requires money. Hence the newly introduced children tax credit.
There may be some effect of the very poorest people having children for the purposes of benefits, but the vast majority of women will have fewer kids once they get access to birth control and financial independence.
Birthrate isn't my point. Per your chart birth rates are down for everyone. The fact remains that poor people have more children. And more to the original point, people aren't being forced to leave their children.
My point is lack of access to contraceptives and lack of women’s financial independence might be the reason poorer women have more children. My conjecture is their higher birth rates have little to do with them being poorer.
This is the real answer. Nothing else is going to change that. A basic lifestyle isn't that expensive and it's exponentially better than 99% of people's lives 50 years ago. Just making smart shopping decisions can literally double or more your buying power.
I really don't get the point of doing something you don't enjoy for 8-12 hours a day just so you can have expensive things.
as a society we should not allow people to get paid so little that even a full-time salary is not enough for them to have children.
that is what's wrong.
if we want a balanced society then we need to enable everyone to have children, not just those who are able to get well paying jobs.
in austria and germany this is solved with giving parents tax breaks and unconditional extra money for each child to offset the higher cost of raising children.
to follow the existing examples, every child gets government money regardless of income. it's like UBI for minors.
and if you get a minimum wage job as an animation assistant doing inbetweening work, then the laws should make sure that the minimum wage is high enough that you can afford your living costs.
combined both measures will allow you to have children.
if you are self-employed and you are not earning enough money from your art you need to apply for unemployment benefits with all the conditions related to that.
Yeah and also, most (upper) middle class families in the US are making a lot more money so can actually afford much more time home with their children, compared to the paid leave that Europe has. So that's actually better from one point of view, the only "downside" then is traditional gender roles. Who cares about 1 year maternal leave, when you can already afford 10 years maternal leave?
Would be very interesting to see actual time spent not working, and caring for children at home, in relation to amount of paid leave. And across income brackets. Would not be surprised if it comes out to more time with children in many cases even though paid leave is less..
"forcing women back into work" - I think it is simply a matter of money, not forcing. If you can afford it, you take the time off, if not, you go back to work.
This is not what happens. No one is being "forced" to do anything. Rather, free individuals (speaking from a U.S. centric viewpoint) make a choice to become pregnant and birth a child. It seems reasonable to me that the result of this private choice should not be the burden of others. Note that FMLA (again, U.S.-centric) grants unpaid leave. In other words, you can't be fired for certain finite length absences resulting from certain medical occurrences. But you're not entitled to payment for non-work.
So, when Mom gives birth, she absolutely has the right to say, "You know what, I can't/don't want to work." She just isn't entitled to force a company to pay her for the privilege of her non-work.
I may be in the minority on this, but I find it really weird how people, more and more nowadays, believe the consequences private, personal choices should be borne by everyone else. The entitlement is really hard to stomach. This idea seems to be coalescing with a belief that "stuff just happens". But the reality is, the economy–any economy–is powered by labor.
People need to work. If enough people don't, we go back to the default state of reality: poverty, starvation, etc etc.
> The employer gets half an employee back
This is a self defeating claim. Under your (implied) proposal, the employer would just not get any employee back for an even longer period of time. Or, worse, they have to hire a temporary employee to fill in, and are now paying two sets of wages, all as a result of decisions over which they have absolutely influence!
>>I may be in the minority on this, but I find it really weird how people, more and more nowadays, believe the consequences private, personal choices should be borne by everyone else
Starting or not starting a company is a completely private decision, yet we as a society have recognized that having entrepreneurs and a functional business culture is very important and actually profitable. So most governments, even the American ones, give grants and support to new companies to prop them up. Even though again, they are the consequence of someone's personal choice - yet the taxpayer bears the burden. Sounds familiar?
Bearing children is a benefit to the society as a whole - someone has to work, someone has to pay taxes, etc etc. So as a society we support mothers by allowing them to take maternal leave, even if having a child is very much a personal choice.
Also I don't see anyone advocating that companies pay mothers through entirety of maternity pay - in most countries it's the public budget that does after some short initial time period.
>>People need to work. If enough people don't, we go back to the default state of reality: poverty, starvation, etc etc.
And within reason, people need to have children or the country you are part of won't have enough citizens to support it within few decades - that's the reality of life.
> So most governments, even the American ones, give grants and support to new companies to prop them up
To what grants, specifically, are you referring? As someone who is active in the business formation space in the U.S., I’d absolutely love to get some free capital.
Humans have been giving birth since the very beginning. The phenomenon of insisting companies fund child birth is a brand new idea. As in, only the last 30 or so years. Societies have arisen and persisted since long, long before then. How is it that all of humanity managed this long without paid family leave?
Some pregnancies are not planned. Some sex is not consensual. Unless we have free abortions available, people with uteruses are sometimes not free to decide not to be pregnant.
The decision to support pregnant people is a decision to support the baby. At some point, everyone reading this was a pregnancy, everyone reading this was helpless. One of the core functions of society is to protect helpless, young humans. Full stop.
If you are under the impression society exists for a purpose other than pooling resources to protect the citizens from outside threats of hunger, violence, or famine, I urge you to reconsider.
Moralizing about how better decisions should have been made is Monday-night-quarterbacking at best. The reality is there is now a small human. The small, helpless human should get the best shot we can give them, because otherwise, what the fuck are we doing.
Name something we should spend money on that's more worthwhile than a helpless baby not suffering.
For policies like the ones being discussed, assumptions are being made that everyone involved is making their own decisions. I’m refuting the claim that every pregnancy is the result of informed decisions.
Other gray zones include things like “either my marriage is over or I’m going to try to get pregnant”, or even “I was told I was infertile”, because those are going to truly muddy the issue.
> It seems reasonable to me that the result of this private choice should not be the burden of others.
Wow, clearly you are not a parent, and probably thats good for society. You know, parenting isn't a past time hobby of the privileged, but activity via which all of us came to existence. If we stop it, society, states and whole human civilization will collapse in 1 generation.
Nobody paying for social/medical/police etc services old ass xibalba would enjoy when retired.
But sure, lets maximize profits, lets raise a messed up generation with lack of strong parental touch in first years, child psychologists all agree there is no harm in that, right. I am sure that... 3%? 4%? extra income will make up for that.
As much as I admire the positive aspects what makes US so great, the negative aspects are such a horrible fucked up mess I politely say 'No, thank you' anytime offer comes from across the pond. Can't imagine raising family and growing old in such system, not once I've experienced what many western Europe countries offer.
Side info - recently Swiss improved paid paternal leave to 2 weeks. Just about take it off for my daughter. My company counted it into our social security dues. The added 0.05% of extra costs from each salary mean nothing, absolutely nothing, for anybody. It means the world to me. Thank you, Swiss.
An extremely impractical solution for majority of Americans who don’t want to uproot their life.
Surely we can show some empathy and demand better benefits for all. You know youre included in that pool too! I’m sure most folks on their deathbed will be glad they spent more time with their children then at their desk.
This isn't practical advice for most people and a significant fraction of the people affected are not looking at anything like a 3x pay cut, especially when you factor in the significantly greater amount we pay for healthcare, which parents will likely use more than they previously did.
I think lumping together all European countries like that is not really helpful: not many european countries have a median income one third of the american one, and some are even higher than the US one.
I'm against it. Why give people less responsibility and less freedom, as they get smarter and more educated. And why revert to a more costly and inefficient public sector to achieve this. Seems like moving in the absolute wrong direction to me. Socialism and "free stuff" is something that I'm absolutely against in every way. And people have full control over having children. I see no point whatsoever in having paid parental leave, what's the reason why? "it's nice"?
I disagree. There are plenty of people without access to birth control, abortion, or even proper sexual education in the US.
I've spoken with so many people who are at once against sex ed, abortion, contraception and parental benefits. That is wanting to have your cake and eat it, too. Without the first three you're going to need the last one. Not everyone has a good familial or social safety net. Not everyone is independently wealthy. Exceedingly few can live completely pastorally.
It's like asking for a software product fast, cheap and high quality. Pick two.
Same with society: you can have a healthy, free and educated populace, able to fulfill personal/social obligations (ie child rearing, taking care of aging parents, building lasting friendships), and/or working at peak economic production/efficiency. But I doubt you can have all three at the same time without massive subsidization or regulation. An individual's time and resources spent on one are the opportunity cost of the others. I'd be interested to know counterexamples of societies that were able to achieve all three.
By your logic the state shouldn't pay for school for children either. It does though because it's an investment, the country is better off for having an educated and literate population. I suspect that one day free childcare will be viewed similarly as free education—something that may cost money but is widely accepted as "worth it" for the sake of society. Anyway I always struggle to understand the all-to-frequent hyper-American hyper-individualistic opinions that are often found on this website. Always seem utterly detached from reality and lacking in basic empathy.
Tbh if you really want to be logically coherent then I encourage you to try to defend ending free education for kids.
The country would be even better off with a financially literate, empowered population that could be responsible for their own lives, and could come to these conclusions themselves.
Why are you surprised that an american centered website have just the opinions that are current de-facto policies in america? And why are you surprised that highly educated people that work in for-profit organisations prefer to be independent and manage their own lives?
I'm rather more surprised at the opposite, to discover that american programmers are actually communists and want to be cared for by the state in every way, and live uniform, identical, slow and inefficient lives. That seems to me like you would be in constant conflict with your surroundings and contradict your own life choices.
People already have. That is what the state is. Society has come together to solve problems through the state. Just like with free education for all children (which sadly you didn't have the balls to argue should be outright abolished, and just ignored the point entirely).
> Why are you surprised that an american centered website have just the opinions that are current de-facto policies in america?
I mean the hyper-libertarianism you espouse is of course popular in the US but it's clearly not dominant judging by how much both Trump and Biden love to blow up the deficit.
>And why are you surprised that highly educated people that work in for-profit organisations prefer to be independent and manage their own lives?
Because not everyone thinks "fuck you I've got mine"? Is there any proof that going hyper-libertarian actually improves things? It's like the magical thinking surrounding "if we cut taxes, tax revenues will magically increase". Or in this case it's "if we cut the state so it doesn't help anyone who is in need, those people will magically be better off". Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so where is it? Where's the proof that leaving vulnerable people to rot is good for them?
>I'm rather more surprised at the opposite, to discover that american programmers are actually communists and want to be cared for by the state in every way, and live uniform, identical, slow and inefficient lives. That seems to me like you would be in constant conflict with your surroundings and contradict your own life choices.
I can't think of anything more uniform, identical and slow than a society which exists entirely to optimise GDP or individual earnings. Hardly distinguishable from communism's obsession with 5 year plans at that point is it? It's an equally mad obsession with wealth and economic growth that is utterly degenerate and uncivilised.
No, using force from the state is a last resort when people really can't use their own judgement, and is avoided as much as possible, this is consensus all over the political spectrum.
And being against parental leave is in no way hyper-libertarisnism and you know it, your argumentation is not made any better by using hyperbole.
Education is only free to the small extent that it's determined to be absolutely necessary. The majority of education that actually benefits society the most is not free at all.
"fuck you, I've got mine" is a funny expression, but in reality everyone always puts themselves first, and only has a limited amount of help for others, which they are very selective with. Nobody lives up the opposite of "fuck me, help everyone else" in reality, and the more you push that, the less effort you get from people. Fuck you, I've got mine gets things done. "why try" doesn't get anything done.
What a pointless comment. It's much more nuanced than giving people free money. Next you'd be saying it's not callous to not help someone out of a burning building unless they paid their taxes for the fire fighters.
To educate people to take responsibility for their lives? Yes, I think that's the right thing to do from a moral standpoint. People deserve freedom and deserve empowerment. I think it's morally wrong to have forced guardianship of adults.
> Given that _every_ other "civilised" country has some sort of rudimentary care for new parents, which doesn't acutally cost that much, I can't see any reasonable objection to not having it.
Giving a special benefit that will for the most part only be exercised by women discourages hiring women. You can still think its worth it, but don't pretend like you're baffled by anyone who would object or question how this impacts women.
So UK maternity leave is shared. Its a year with 6 months "pay"
How its taken is up to the parents. The people that I know who've taken it have split it fairly evenly. (I know I know sample size.)
I did not take any, as I was not eligible at the time.
As someone who does a lot of recruiting, I don't think "hmm I'm going to have to pay this woman for mat leave" because frankly that's bollocks, who knows who's going to be here for six months, 1 year or 8?
From a purely business point of view, the women that have come back from maternity are normally bargains. They don't ask for more pay, they are flexible and are loyal, assuming we have made the correct allowances for being parents.
also being a parent in tech allows people to deal much better with the toddler tantrums/playground fights that seem to be common in this industry.
Solid parenting advice, or a consulting technique: the “wish list” from “How to talk so kids will listen, how to listen so kids will talk”, or putting something that seems ridiculous into the backlog to keep the meeting moving.
Policy changes don't exist in a vacuum. I'm not interested in studies that show something. I'm interested in a mental model that results in employers being indifferent to hiring men or women when statistically women are much more likely to take a considerable amount of paid time off with restrictions set on replacing them.
The model could be that employers are altruistic. Or that employers are dumb and don't realize this. Or they're sufficiently compelled by the law and the penalties and enforcement are strict enough.
And your model also has to account for the system not being a closed system. For instance, its not enough that all employers are altruistic, but any prospective employers that could enter the market would similarly be altruistic.
Again, it could be worth it, but don't pretend that there's no disincentive by this policy.
This isn't a model. its not a study, its a metric collected from the UK for the last 20 years.
The arguments for "not hiring women because they'll just go and get pregnant" have largely been settled in the UK.
shared parental leave is a thing, its just what happens. Employers that don't facilitate it are punished, either by employment tribunal, or people leaving to join somewhere that does.
> This isn't a model. its not a study, its a metric collected from the UK for the last 20 years.
And absolutely nothing else changed in the UK in the last 20 years that may affect this number? Logic would tell you the disincentive exists. Looking at aggregate country data over 20 years doesn't tell you anything about a single policy.
> Employers that don't facilitate it are punished, either by employment tribunal, or people leaving to join somewhere that does.
That's a lot of employers to keep track of. In terms of people leaving for jobs that do offer paid parental leave only works for those wishing to take parental leave. If someone does not wish to have children, she would be willing to take a higher salary in lieu of a company that provides generous parental leave.
> And absolutely nothing else changed in the UK in the last 20 years that may affect this number?
Explain why this matters? The data demonstrates that you can increase parental leave while also reducing employment discrimination and improving conditions. That's the real world outcome.
> Logic would tell you the disincentive exists.
Surely logic would tell you to give more weight to real world outcomes than to imagined mental models about how others "should" behave?
I'd question why you think people should think that way in the first place.
Hmmm, so it seems like the signal we'd expect to see in the time series data is either (1) tiny, and completely buried in the noise, or (2) as you suggest, is large but more than completely canceled out by some other, unnamed, contemporaneous signal(s).
> And absolutely nothing else changed in the UK in the last 20 years that may affect this number? Logic would tell you the disincentive exists. Looking at aggregate country data over 20 years doesn't tell you anything about a single policy.
The main argument against paid parental leave is that is will cause wage gap to grow. I don't see the data backing that up.
Yes, there have been other landmark cases in the courts about equal pay.
> That's a lot of employers to keep track of. In terms of people leaving for jobs that do offer paid parental leave only works for those wishing to take parental leave.
You see this is where I think we differ. Here in the UK parental leave is part of a few measures that are aimed at flexibility. There is the right to flexible working (ie working non standard hours) Working from home (which is implied rather than a legal obligation) All of these in 2019 were part of a movement to make work a bit less shit. I had a number of employees who were childless that we enabled hybrid working. So that they could avoid coming in hungover, or work non standard times from abroad. Or just not come in with a cold and get everyone ill.
When a company advertises its "benefits" (this was pre covid) they used to use parental leave as a signal that they had a more relaxed working atmosphere.
For me, I've found that happy employees are loyal, more productive and willing to forgive mistakes. I have tried to make sure that those I manage feel like they have some level of work security, which rewards me as a manager with better productivity and lower staff turnover.
> she would be willing to take a higher salary in lieu of a company that provides generous parental leave.
again this is not a british thing to do. A right is a right, opting out of a right to get more money undermines everyone. I mean sure you can come back two weeks after giving birth, (I know someone who came back after a month) but you're not going to get more money for it.
It's like that here in Germany. It's a little more complicated but in the end mom and dad can split up to 14 months of paid parental leave time where no one can take more than 12 months.
Now the pay does not replace a full salary of course. It is a percentage of your pay up to a maximum of 1800€.
I know many dads (myself included) that have used this program.
It’s one of my favorite things about Germany. Here in (relatively) socially conservative greater Nuremberg, the split tends to be 12 months Mom, two months Dad, with Dad taking a month right after birth, and another when Mom goes back to work, but that “max 12 months of 14” pushes a lot of dads to take those two months.
Since the pay is capped at 1800, I know a few fathers who didn’t take even their two months because they were living at the edge of their paychecks (yes, it’s possible to live a little too large anywhere, and Germans aren’t immune), and one mother who went back to work at the end of the eight weeks post-birth that we’re absolutely forbidden to work (but are paid quite close to our pre-maternal net pay) because she was the primary earner. It’s also rougher on single mothers than partnered ones, of course, but at least isn’t as harsh for them here as it is back in the US, and for low earners, 2/3 of your previous net + 200 child benefit is not much less than net + child care (subsidized for big earners, highly subsidized for lower earners) + general costs of working.
“But you could have saved even more than that over the past few years if you didn’t have to pay really high German income taxes!” Yes, we certainly could have, and would have, given our behavior even with taxes the way they are.
However…
Most people wouldn’t/couldn’t, and because the benefit is so widespread, employers expect you’ll take it and have policies in place to accommodate it. The fact that a maternity year is normal makes it less of a career risk, and the same with several months away for fathers.
Give the benefits to dads too. 4 weeks for the first kid is challenging. It could be different for 2+ kids, but remember that every child has a few complications when they are born, that. Fade away after a while.
Maternity/parental leave is typically paid by the state, not by the employers. If both parents can take a leave, then it does not discourage hiring women.
Yeah, sure. Only the american libertarian knows how things really work.
All those other countries are stupid, and because of their stupidity, look at them, all the women are out of the labor market.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar.
Please also don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes and certainly not by getting nasty about them. Your comment was correctly downvoted because it was a major step further into flamewar.
Ok, I admit the edit could have been done better. I'll stop pursuing this path :).
However, it was downvoted before the edit for expressing an unpopular, but IMHO factually justified (i.e. anti-natalist) position. I think that was a fair point to make in a discussion of paid parental leave. Again, I don't care about points. I want to hear from people who disagree with the original comment ;)
Parenting is one of the most emotional topics that exists, which means it's flammable material in internet discussions. If you lead by comparing parental leave to "hangover leave", that's already a provocation, and if you throw in more provocative words like "indulging" and "hobby", at that point you're posting flamebait. You're going to get flamewar responses, not a reasonable conversation, and that's against the site guidelines.
If you really want to have a reasonable conversation about a divisive, inflammatory topic, you need to sand off all such sharp edges. That's not a moral or ethical point, just an empirical observation about internet dynamics, which are relatively predictable. That's why we have the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - not as a moral code but as a set of heuristics for more interesting conversation.
For the record, I only downvoted after I read the smug self-satisfied edit, and only then because discussing your fake internet points is exceedingly boring (not to mention violates the site guidelines).
You might not have to "keep saying it" if you gave a little more context and detail as to what you're on about. That, and explain the acronym for those that are under, oh, about sixty years old.
Yes? You also know that something as momentous as a constitutional amendment doesn't happen in a vacuum either, right? It still had the effect of nearly doubling the size of the workforce, and now ~50 years later we're now seeing what it means to have a dual-earner family income.
The middle class is rapidly shrinking and the dream of owning a house for many newlyweds is fast receding in the rear view mirror, but hey, equality! Right?
It is interesting to think about the societal changes that drive or are driven by a constitutional amendment. If the ERA was a 1920s progressivist goal [1] then maybe one could say that it was part of a broader change to formalize work effort that existed in informal household economies. If the ERA reference is to the early 1970s effort [1] then it was a lagging indicator since the economic integration of women into the formal economy was well underway and would arrive at an equilibrium by the 1990s [0].
Exploring the counterfactual numbers: If the workforce gender share remained at the 4:6 F:M ratio of 1972, then a male workforce of 85m would mean a female workforce of 34m instead of the actual 75m. This would lead to a total workforce of 119m instead of 160m, a decrease of 41m or 25%.
Would the USSR have won the cold war if the US had 25% less economic growth over the last 50 years?
There is nothing wrong with parental leave, but I don't see a compelling reason to have it be mandated by law.
If company wants to offer it, good for them. It may help retaining senior employees who reached the phase in their life when they want to have children.
I don't think we should incentivise families with two working parents and young kids. It increases the pool of workers keeping wages down, benefiting employers, and increases stress in the family, likely contributing to the epidemic of broken families we're looking at - which have negative effects on these generations' mental health and crime history.
If you're middle class and you manage well your spending and are willing to relocate / look into alternative career paths, it's possible to maintain a family on one career and I firmly believe it's better for the children.
If you're having kids you can either outsource your kids early years education to the government or do it yourself. There are some studies (albeit I find social studies to be murky and hard to rely on) finding correlations between UK government programs paying for nurseries and increase in teenage crime roughly 15 years later. Study or not, I think that kids before 2/3 should not go to nursery, the social trauma of being unattended with other bigger kids needs to wait a bit longer, once they're ready.
In our family, we didn't send the kids to nursery before 2.5/3 years and my partner didn't work (for an employer, she kept working on her own personal projects, for "entertainment"). They integrated in nursery very well, we never had detachment problems and they're fairly well behaved.
We're both developers, so maintaining the family on one salary is trivial, but I've met people from all walks of life who managed to do it.
Sure, some people are simply not creating enough value for society to break even on one salary and that's suboptimal. I'd advise to sort their life out to earn enough to support a new family, before making babies.
There are plenty of studies that link stable family structures to success and unstable family structures to crime and mental health issues.
I don't think companies should be involved in people's personal lives at all, it's out of scope. The state is the only one that can subsidise a particular constellation of family life. You would open up to all kind of different excuses for why people should get special treatment in the work place because of their private life.
Old family wisdom: There is no "normal" for normal (meaning non-C-section) childbirth. A mother's physical and mental recovery timelines will vary (possibly widely) with each birth, and assumptions that it'll just keep getting easier tend to end badly.
(C-sections are somewhat more predictable on the physical recovery side...but do not lack for issues of their own.)
I sat down with my boss about a month or so ago and told him I'm intending to take parental leave. "No problem" he said, I told him my intention was to take the full 8 weeks I'm entitled to. He didn't say anything right away to that... eventually it was more of a "...that's not typical for the guys around here"
We did a bit of back and forth. (I think he went to HR to find out he can't really deny that) and we've come to an agreement that works for both of us.
But honestly... I'm quite shocked at just how atypical it is for fathers to ask for, and get time off to care for their newborn. Not even just the child, the mother needs support early on too.
I've given a lot of myself to this company, and they've done a tremendous amount for me as well. So I do have a small sense of loyalty to them and don't want to leave them hard up on my absence. But if this helps my boss understand that we should hire extra hands for the times when I'm not available, this is a long term benefit overall as I see it. I'm hoping 8 weeks leave help me reset and address some of my anxieties about the work load. I hope it lets my coworkers understand exactly what level of shit I help shelter them from.
...and if none of that works out. I've already got a friend trying to poach me to a new business. Win/win in my eyes.
I have an 18-mo old now. My company "generously" offers 2 weeks of paid parental leave. I went through similar conversations as you, only I was merely asking to use 2 weeks of PTO after my 2 weeks of paid parental leave for a total of 1 month of time off. My management and HR refused that request, I was told that my option was take the 2 weeks of paid leave and then you can take unpaid leave (the legally mandated FMLA). Due to "project schedule" they could refuse my PTO but legally they were not allowed to deny unpaid FMLA. Truly a despicable amount of leverage. I was also told by my manager at the time how atypical my requested amount of time was and was asked why I needed that much time since I wasn't the one giving birth. I too am astonished at the typical amount of parental leave used/requested by men in the US. It seems like a very deep cultural issue.
I have no loyalty and have just been biding my time. I've been just comfortable enough so far, but things haven't been great in a few aspects. They were not hard up for coverage and my absence, which should have been planned for far in advance, would not have effected the schedule in any manner.
The US is full of psychopaths. Just look at the comments in this thread. This amount of backlash against even maternity leave would be incredible in civilized countries.
There does seem to be something uniquely perverse and wicked about US society (at least among the developed nations), and I say that as someone who nevertheless broadly admires the US. So incredibly religious and prone to moralising and yet so utterly, utterly indifferent (at best) towards each other. Baffling.
I'm about a month behind you, but the difference is that I'm in Canada. I'll be taking 8 weeks, and most people are asking "is that all?".
My wife and I get to split 69 weeks, of which neither of us can take more than 61. She's going to take the max, plus her 15 weeks she gets post-birth (76 weeks total) and I'll take 8 right at the start. We get a small amount of government-paid employment insurance, and jobs will exist when we return.
What's important is that here, it's enforced by law, not by company generosity. To punish me (or my wife) for taking this time off is literally illegal. I soon need to have a conversation with my manager (based in the US) to make sure he's aware of the this all. He's a nice guy, but he may be surprised.
This is what Americans have never kind of enjoyed about "big government" (i.e. government heavily regulating some society rules): Private companies will always strive to minimize losses, and individuals have pretty tiny leverage force to negotiate. The government is capable of implementing laws fully in favour of such individuals, and maybe also unions could get more leverage, but they are also seen in bad light in the US.
Hey, didn't see your reply until now but you're asking a very good question!
Throughout my life, I pay a small additional tax called "EI"- employment insurance. Everyone does. There's a yearly maximum of around $900 (CAD) and it scales based on income level.
The reward for this is that the government pays us $400/week (a little less I think) for those 69 weeks. That's not much, but it's enough to survive.
Overall in my life I likely won't come out ahead on this 'deal' but I'm okay with that. I'd rather live in a society where everyone gets this benefit than one where no one does. Kids grow up healthier, families are stronger, society is stronger. Lower-income families probably come out ahead overall from this, especially when you factor in daycare prices.
My employer's only obligation is that the job must be there when I get back, and punishment for taking my leave is forbidden. That said, there's nothing stopping them from doing more. My employer tops up my pay to 85% of my base salary for I believe 10 weeks of parental leave (might be 8 or 12, I forget).
It's unpaid leave, with a small compensation paid by the government.
That's how it works in most countries, companies almost never have to pay for maternity/paternity or parental leave. They only have to allow it and take the employee back on a similar position afterwards.
Without knowing your company in detail, based on what you describe and general business practices, I'd be willing to bet that they'd fire you in no time if you ever stopped providing value for them. So why be loyal at all? 8 weeks is crumbs, and you even had to fight for that. I mean if you've been a solid employee for X years, briefly asking for a bit of time off for a life changing event should be absolutely fine, instead of the miserly response you describe. Just a bit of outsider's perspective, but I'd say you're hardly working with people who really respect you beyond their bottom line.
I got severely sick when I started working there... like 2 weeks in and I was hospitalized with a brain infection for a week + another couple weeks at home recuperating. They paid full wages during my absence.
When my father was dying from cancer they did the same thing as I helped move him to hospice and handle the estate.
There's been other things as well where they've gone above and beyond what an employer should do, and maybe "loyalty" isn't exactly how I should frame it, I do feel "safe" working there knowing I'm not about to be thrown out on my ass should something inconvenient happen.
It's a business relationship so I don't see why "they'd fire you in no time if you stopped providing value" is always thrown around as a negative. Of course that's the case. You'd stopped working in no time if they stopped providing value to you too. As it should be, from both sides.
You can have loyalty and still understand that there's a social/informal contract in place (and maybe a formal one in some places).
I don't think it's a negative in absolute terms, it's just an argument against loyalty to a company. Loyalty is a two way street, and is defined by how people treat each other when times are tough.
It is common for companies to expect "loyalty" in the form of working extra hours when the company is in a tight spot or settling for meager raises rather than switching companies while at the same time laying people off at the first sign of trouble. In such an environment, an employee offering loyalty to a company when none is offered in return is setting themselves up to be taken advantage of.
Right, which is why you should never feel loyalty for a company. They're not people, they don't have brains, they don't have empathy or loyalty to you, they will drop you the moment it makes sense to.
Have loyalty for people who deserve it, but never for companies.
If you really wanted to treat it like a business relationship, any employee should constantly be looking for higher paying / better job and leave immediately when that job is offered, not even giving 2 weeks, because that's 2 weeks of additional income the employee wouldn't be getting. Are you in agreeable with that as well? Hard, cold business decisions work both ways.
One can treat an employment contract like a business relationship while also giving some preference to a company they like working for, and vice versa (always bearing in mind that all but very small personally run companies are likely brainless , soulless corporate entities regardless of any PR platitudes to the contrary). Agreed on that. However, in the OP above, the guy describes a situation in which despite being a well established employee, he had to basically claw for even a meager 8 weeks of paid leave for something as important as a newborn baby. Based on that description alone, I'd tentatively say that the employer hardly deserves much loyalty at all. As I already mentioned.
>I don't see why "they'd fire you in no time if you stopped providing value" is always thrown around as a negative.
It seems the whole loyalty thing is always sided heavily in favor of the employer. When both sides eschew loyalty and make cold, hard business decisions, my example is what the employee's might look like. Not very appealing I know, but neither is laying off 25% of your workforce because Zillow decided it wanted to be a real estate investor and failed miserably at it; an example of a cold, hard business decision.
I don't think this is true. I've been given resumes by bosses of people I've worked with before and told them not to interview based on previous interactions, whether they were good to work with or not, etc. You can burn every bridge as you cross it but eventually that will bite you. We software people like to pretend everything is a 1 or a 0 but that's not the case in the real world. Relationships matter.
a fully rational actor would do exactly that, unless he also puts utility value on hard to define 'relationships', but why would he if money in hand has clearly defined utility...?
just another hole in classical economics and theory of rational choice.
You're building up a ridiculous strawman. Why, in your farcical example, does "fully rational" mean by definition maximizing short-term economic gain? Even if it's hard to give an exact value to a relationship (are you quoting something or do you mean the word ironically?) certainly a good relationship is better than a bad one, and poisoning a relationship strictly for economic gain has some sort of opportunity cost.
My former company enacted a paternal leave policy around the time MSFT required suppliers/partners to offer them in order to continue doing business with MSFT.
Shortly after I became the manager of my team, one of my reports informed me that he wanted to use 3-4 weeks of paternal leave (out of a max of 6) a few months after the birth of his child (company policy allowed it within 12 months.) He said he'd keep his laptop nearby in case of emergencies. "You're crazy!" I told him, "take the full 6 weeks! And leave the laptop off!"
As a manager, if it's the company policy, then it's the employee's right to take the time off. There should be no amount of brow-beating (assuming sufficient advance notice, of course.) I checked in with HR for procedural details, and overall it was easy/painless from top to bottom.
I am sorry to hear this. As a recent father myself, I find the fact that comparatively few fathers here in the US do (or can) take this leave very sad. The act of caring for our newborn is how we form our attachments and love, and it is ultimately a loss for the dads that choose not to participate in the caring. My dad never really took care of me as a baby (in the feeding, diapers, etc. sense) and is squeamish/ not able to do it with our own child now. Again, a loss for previous generations of men.
Which is all to say - if this company in the slightest gives you more negative feedback about taking leave,.. I would, if I were in your shoes, be looking for a new place. They're not showing you any loyalty, so you don't owe it to them.
An important lesson we all need to remember: there are two ways to get the time off which is owed to you, the hard way or the easy way. If your boss is really willing to make it the hard way, it's on him/her to find a train a replacement. Get out of there.
I've also seen this with vacation.... A skilled engineer saves up vacation with a well-known to the boss goal of making a 2 month adventure trip. When it's time to go, he's "too valuable" to "lose" for 2 months. He threatens to quit. Now he's "too valuable" to lose over the situation and he gets his vacation. So stupid.
Keeping yourself ready and able to change jobs is unfortunately necessary, because company loyalty is kaput, and the threat of quitting is unfortunately occasionally needed to get proper to treatment.
Unions or humane work cultures would fix this. Not holding my breath in the USA. Europe is way better.
Why? They already showed they have no loyalty to you. Also, 8 weeks is pretty bare bones as is. 12 weeks is the minimum even in US states that have managed to implement it.
It always surprises me how little companies think this through. They're willing to lose all your knowledge and damage morale over a trifling 8 weeks? Talk about penny wise and pound foolish.
Never mind that in this labor market an open role might sit unfilled for more than 8 weeks!
Good on ya - your partner will be forever grateful, and you’ll thank yourself as well for not trying to work while no one is getting a full night's sleep. Even if breastfeeding works out 100%, having someone else get some of those overnight diaper changes is the difference between holding it together and being a complete wreck.
Those first few weeks present an unparalleled opportunity of becoming a larger part of the rhythm of your baby’s life. My husband took the month after our kid’s birth, and then the transition to daycare at a year old, and that has entrenched wake up/go to sleep as their special time together, no matter how long his work days have ended up.
My major advice on this is to consider splitting into two chunks, one right away and one a little later after the adrenaline wears off, you start bottle feeding, and you can take over the night shift (feeding etc).
I could take 7 month off from my job - all I have to say is when - it's the law and I could not be happier.
The child got off the ground well and I think it stems from both parents being regularly present during the first year. Also, being a young parent is stressful, so it's good to share the effort.
If all goes well, my kid will be a productive member of society - so maybe it's not just family friendly, but profitable, too.
In Norway there are a lot of political parties that can matter. All depends on the election. Some grow, some dont,
new ones are added, old ones go away.
That is a dynamic that is entirely missing in the US.
We have parties in the European left and we have parties on the European right, parties in the middle, green party etc etc.
I try to get people to understand that we do not have a single party that is far right enough to compare with the Democrats in the US. (Discussing the Republicans is just hard).
There is no left in US politics.
and you could say that there is no right in Norway.
The party considered to be "far right" would never think about advocating doing away with universal healthcare.
The same for our main right party (Høyre == Right) would not attempt such a thing either.
In terms of abortion rights, immigration, progressive taxation, and a host of other issues the US is to the left of Norway.
I think people spend more time consuming the news than becoming familiar with the actual policies and laws of countries.
In case you anyone misunderstands my claim, these are the facts: the US has more progressive taxation both on income tax and corporate tax, a minimum wage, and more liberal abortion laws (case vs planned parenthood ruling).
While you might be partially right (I highly doubt immigration), there is still a huge difference in how the welfare state functions. Healthcare is paid by the government. Education is almost free. If you're poor, retirement is paid. If you cannot work you will receive some benefits like housing. There is maternity and paternity leave. There is sick leave. You get five weeks of vacation per year (not including sick leave). The prison system is humane and makes more sense, etc. etc. The list is extremely long.
Taxes are in general higher, for example the VAT is 25%.
I'm not particularly an expert on Norway though, I might be off a bit and basing this more on countries like Sweden/Switzerland/Germany, etc.
I don't think it's too far fetched to say that the US does not really have a "left" party, quite a few intellectuals would be saying this as well (e.g. Chomsky or Briahna Joy Gray).
When it comes to abortion law it seems dependent upon state,
An extreme example right now is TX.
(I think that will be overturned soon but it is still there for now.)
Minimum wage is true, in that the US has one and Norway does not.
However the negotiated wages between the unions and the business sector have been "almengjøring" which means they dictate what wages need to be, even when the company you work for is not a direct part and even if you as an employee do not belong to a union.
That is backed by Norwegian law
This is per sector. Most sectors now have it
Some dont.
Where it does exist, it is far higher than the US minimum wage.
You cannot live on minimum wage in the US.
So it is below what is reasonable and humane.
A big problem is in the construction business were the builders love to hire Eastern European migrants for a lot less than what the law dictators. This is illegal but very common
As far as taxation goes I dont have time right now to really dig into it. I know I pay about 42% taxes on my income.
25% VAT on most things, but there are exceptions, for healthy food and many other things.
It's really strange to think that the American left (AOC, Bernie) are fighting for such radical concepts as social healthcare, free education and paid maternity leave. I'm from the UK, the most capitalist European country and we had all three until we regressed on university fees thanks to our wonderful Conservative party.
> The majority of countries with these socialized services have suffered from the corruption, bureaucracy, and taxation innate with government control.
The majority of these countries rank better on these metrics than the US does.
> This is with the notable exception of a few countries with vast natural resources providing an economic baseline
I can only think of one notable exception on that front, that being Norway with it's oil resources.
> more importantly a relatively small and homogenous population with similar needs and opinions
How exactly do you define "homogenous population" and why do you think "needs and opinions" are inherent to certain types of "population", which you apparently seem to use as a synonym for race?
Scandinavian welfare system is only possible because Scandinavian countries are more or less small and homogeneous. Social stigma is huge part in making sure people do not freeload and do not abuse social safety nets. That social stigma will not work in big, diverse and marred by identity politics countries like the US or even Canada (in my opinion).
> That social stigma will not work in big, diverse and marred by identity politics countries like the US or even Canada (in my opinion).
The social system analogue to the US is not Canada, Canada's policies in that regard are way more resembling of European systems than the US's, that applies not only to welfare systems, but also crime and incarceration [0].
As such, Canada is very much an example of how at least part of these policies can also work in North America, even with its allegedly exceptional scale and diversity.
Scandinavian welfare system is only possible because Scandinavian countries are more or less small and homogeneous. Social stigma is huge part in making sure people do not freeload and do not abuse social safety nets. That social stigma will not work in big, diverse and marred by identity politics countries like the US or even Canada (in my opinion).
Actually, cultural traits penetrate all aspects of their economic system not just welfare system. For example due to social norms business competition between two businesses may not be as adversarial as it is normally seen in the US, unions are not as adversarial in relation to corporations and corporations are not as adversarial toward unions, government bureaucrats are not as adversarial (and boneheaded) toward businesses as in the US and so on.
In a ranking of 11 high income country healthcare systems, Canada ranked 10th. They were only above the US, and I completely agree our system is fundamentally flawed as well.
And that's because of what, there are non white people in Canada? That's a belief looking for a justification. The UK, France Germany and Sweden are also racially diverse.
If you can't understand why people would be more motivated for pay for socialized services when people who consume those services are more like themselves, you need to reflect on your worldview.
Call me crazy, but I think that human beings are fundamentally the same and deserve basic dignity. I believe it is actually you who needs to justify people extending less empathy to people of a different race. That seems like racism to me, and I thought we were supposed to be trying to move past that.
Europeans can understand the Republican party through their own history. They're basically just corporate fascists. Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece all had very similar corporate fascists governments for many years and their policies, politics and backers very closely tracked those of the contemporary American Republican party. Whereas the Dems are a better spoken, slightly more watered down and cuddly version of the same.
I agree with the GP comment that the GOP has no right wing parallel in Europe. But your comparison with European Fascism is both innacurate and historically disrespectful.
Literally all the fascist regimes in the countries you listed were Military coups in their origin and were all fairly economically inept regimes. They also included all out media censorship, political prisoners, prisoner torture and interrogation, political assasinations, and genuine terror across civil society.
> They also included all out media censorship, political prisoners, prisoner torture and interrogation, political assasinations, and genuine terror across civil society
Could it be a matter of comparing Policies vs strategies/tactics?
Charitable, but if we look at it from a policy standpoint, all the dictatorships listed were Economic Interventionists and heavy spenders on public infrastructure. Basically the polar opposite of GOP (except for QE and bank bailout interventionism).
One of my general beliefs is that political competition is necessary for healthy and responsive governance. Everywhere I've ever lived with single party rule has devolved into myopic and unresponsive governance. The exact details vary depending on which party had total control, but the general issues remain. A party that is competing for voters is one that produces new ideas, and tries to persuade voters that they're the best choice. A party that wins by default focuses on base service and winning primaries, which often doesn't worry as much about governing well.
Unfortunately the US will never have the level of political diversity that is the norm in parliamentary democracies because FPTP heavily favors two party rule, and the two parties will never let go of FPTP for fairly obvious reasons. So the issue is, how can we make our system more dynamic given that the best solution, a change to our elector system, is probably out of reach?
The illegal immigrant population alone in the US is estimated to be between 10 and 28 million. The entire population of Norway is about 5.5 million. Perhaps the two countries have very different political realities.
I believe parental leave should be provided, but I don't see how anyone expects employers to shoulder the burden of providing paid parental (in reality maternity) leave without an implicit bias towards hiring men (or at least paying women less). You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time.
I guess you can force people to take parental leave, but then that just further encourages discrimination against people of child bearing age.
Even if the federal government picks up the bill, it's still a discontinuity in business, something an employer would want to avoid.
> Withholding paid family leave isn’t just bad for parents and babies, it’s bad for business.
If this were true businesses wouldn't have to be forced to provide parental leave. You can point to a study that "proves" that parental leave is good for business, and obviously it makes sense as a benefit. Some companies pride themselves on their parental leave and use it to attract candidates. But obviously it doesn't make sense for many businesses, otherwise they would all be doing it.
It's like one of those things that promises everything to everyone. Like veganism. Proponents tell you it tastes better, is great for your health, is better for the environment, and is cheaper. Obviously it can't be better in all dimensions otherwise everyone would be doing it. You see the same thing with minimum wage. How paying people more is great for everyone and the business. Sometimes it is, but there are trade offs and someone that doesn't run a business can't do a "study" and tell you the optimal policy for your business
When you can't even have a conversation in good faith about the tradeoffs in a policy, nothing will change.
Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. There's no clear solutions
I live in a country where it's exactly what we do, and it's fine. I took a 7 months paid parental leave as a dad recently and my company congratulated me for the birth.
Again, saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. That's like saying why are incomes in Mexico so much lower than the US? Just do what the US does.
In fact, Mexico has 12 weeks. And Greece has 40. I'd rather be a parent in the US than Greece or Mexico. Policies don't exist in a vacuum.
And Sweden has 480 days. Poland 1 year. Switzerland 20 weeks. Ireland 26 weeks. UK 52 weeks. Canada 50 weeks. Norway 12 months. Denmark 52 weeks. France 16 weeks for mothers and 4 weeks for fathers. I can go on. There's 120 such countries in the world.
BTW that leave is on top of 20-30 days of paid vacations each year and unlimited paid health leave in most of these countries.
Notice that most of these also have free healthcare and free or cheap university education. Which is also "impossible" apparently :)
Also notice that some of these countries have higher or similar GDP per capita to USA. Also ALL of the countries I mentioned have lower gender salary gap than USA. And most of them have higher women workforce participation.
Somehow the argument used against paid parental leave turns out to work in favor of it :)
If you choose to ignore almost all developed countries other than USA (that have 20 weeks or more of paid paternity leave ) and cherry-pick Mexico as your counterexample - you should at least be aware what you're doing. You are searching for excuses to keep your ideological delusions going.
This isn't complicated, it works everywhere it's been tried, it's a simple change, the costs are marginal compared to benefits, even countries with GDP per capita one tenth of USA can afford it.
You sound exactly like this: "8-hour work week can't be done, the argument that other countries do it means nothing - in USA it won't work. I prefer to work 12 hours a day 6 days a week in USA than to work 8 hours in Wenezuela after all".
It's always amusing to hear Americans act like basic social programs are impossible to implement as if they're living in a vacuum. I usually have to show them these charts: https://mobile.twitter.com/michalwols/status/145489419148668... or a comparison of cost of education/healthcare and ask them to explain why America is the only country that can't do it.
> Also notice that some of these countries have higher or similar GDP per capita to USA.
In the US, households have 10% more money than the second closest competitor (Luxembourg), and 20% more money than next closest (Germany & Switzerland).
I think that's a much better comparison than GDP (which isn't necessarily connected with employment), and shows how these tradeoffs work.
In Germany a person with median income will have access to free healthcare and education, good public transportation system and maybe even to an apartment with controlled rent. After you subtract all those expenses you may find that people in Germany may have more money in the pocket than in the USA. Anecdotal evidence does not prove anything, but few Americans who moved to Berlin were actually telling me that despite lower income and higher taxes they have more money here.
I doubt many billionaires have income. Although you're partially right, I'm not sure which is a better metric. Probably depends on where in the distribution you are (above or below the median).
Realized capital gains, dividend income, income on rents. I'm not sure how the calculate disposable income. If I have 200M in stock that I could sell, is that considered disposable income? If I earn 2M in dividends that I reinvest, is that considered disposable?
According to [1] USA is 86th in the world according to unemployment. Most of the countries with lower unemployment than USA have paid paternity leave. Please stop cherry-picking, you're not fooling anyone. 120 counties in the world have paid maternity leave, often about a year or more of it. That includes countries with higher standards of living than USA.
All else being equal, providing a large benefit that's most likely to be exercised by one type of worker will discourage employers from hiring that type of worker.
This shouldn't be complicated or controversial. It's basic incentives.
Perhaps you are artificially limiting the scope of what incentives/disincentives exist with regard to parental leave such that your ideological model is maintained. There certainly seems to be a significant amount of evidence to suggest your fears are unfounded.
I don't understand the logic. Because Greece has some issues with its women employment rate, USA can't do anything about parental leaves? You even suggested in your initial post simple solutions for this problem, that work in other countries.
It's a damn clear logic to me. --Employers show reluctance to hire women of certain age--. It is same in India with govt's liberal policy of maternity leave, overall employment rate of Women has gone down.
Resources do not come out of thin air. Something has to happen for it to change:
1) Govt provide income to family engaged in child raising activity. -Need high level of tax base and political support to actually fund it.
2) Govt open free and quality child daycare. - Again need political support and competent administration to do it.
3) Force private employers to pay. - Only business survive are with high income and revenues. Not gonna work with conservative politics.
4) Go back to old joint family structures where grandparents stay in same home with couples and provide "free" child care. - Needless to say absolutely not gonna work. Its antithesis of progressive vision of society.
5) Keep giving examples of other countries. Useless until one look at whole societal structure and find why many other things work in USA but not in those countries.
> Its antithesis of progressive vision of society.
Could you expand a bit on this? My impression was that it just became a cultural norm in places that could afford this, driven by the basic need to cultivate own "spaces".
If you're going to cherry pick irrelevant metrics you can also say that higher gun deaths are related to lower unemployment. Just shoot your way into a job promotion.
You might not want to use Greece or Mexico as a good example. One is literally a 3rd world country and the other had to be bailed out by the EU. So, no they actually can't monetarily support those policies.
> Again, saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer.
It very much is part of the answer as it gives successful examples and as such proof how it's very much realistic to achieve, if effort was actually put into it.
Which is a much more constructive PoV than acting like even American problems are so exceptional that all of them need equally exceptional and unique solutions that no other country before could have figured out.
> Policies don't exist in a vacuum.
Indeed, that's why between Greece, Mexico and the US I would easily chose Greece, which has nearly half of the infant mortality rate of the US [0].
A rational answer to that would be yes for anyone who is making an above average salary, and no only if you are below average. That's how all tax funded benefits work.
You would be better off financing your own "benefits" if you're above average. And everyone would theoretically also be better off without the benefits, because of how much money you would save in all the bureaucracy needed. It's only the people who are not able to take responsibility for having their own money, that are the ones that are really better off.
Any tax financed benefits for everyone like this, pensions, maternal leave, unemployment, health care etc are really just an institution forcibly saving money for you, on your behalf. So that you don't have to be responsible for saving money yourself, and don't have to take the risk of over spending or mismanaging. And for that service you will pay the price of salaries for all the people working in these institutions.
But this doesn't seem to be happening. Very well off people in the US still have very very modest vacations and parental leave, very expensive day care etc.
What's even the upside if you're just trading universal tax to paying a for-profit corp monthly instead? Skipping the queue through wealth instead of need?
I suspect that "very well off" people in the US most likely have only one breadwinner and one stay at home parent more or less full time. And/or a nanny.
The upside like I said, is that you save all that unnecessary work in the bureaucracy around the parental leave systems. Just look at sweden for example, it's a huge mess around the parental leave, they have a centralized agency now to micro manage every single household in the country with exactly how many days here and there, they will stay home with their child. It's basically central planning for child care.
And there are tons of edge cases and contradictions and bugs in this, of course. It's even become somewhat of a virtual currency now these "days" that parents are given as a gift from the state. Every single family in the whole country is now basically a welfare case that has to be processed through this machinery, with all the applications, paperwork etc, regardless of how well they actually manage on their own. It's incredibly costly, inflexible and inefficient, compared to just giving people higher salaries and letting them manage their family time themselves.
Edit: and, surprise surprise, it's also abused and people game the system. Many parents for example use their parental leave at the same time, to make extended vacations abroad of several months.
Lucky for me I happen to be Swedish and can call you out on that absolute garbage FUD post that doesn't in the slightest reflect the general Swedish opinion of the parental leave system.
the US also has significantly (in a statistical meaning of the word) lower average life expectancy than peer countries despite having by far the largest health care related expenses per capita.
Which country? What do you mean by fine? It might not affect you directly but there's going to be some negative to treating it that way. A lot of countries that provide services like this tend to have massive burdens on their health systems as well.
It's a tradeoff. It might be a better tradeoff for society as a whole but this idea that there aren't some cons to doing it that way is just false.
Personally, I think if your company was able to do without you for 7 months then they don't need you as an employee. My guess is that your salaries are much lower than someone would receive in the US.
> most men take only a fraction of the allowed time
I truly don't understand this, and each time I see the stats on it sit in even greater disbelief. Why would anyone turn down the opportunity to spend, for an awful lot of companies, fully paid time off work to spend time with their new family?
Guessing I'm much less "career-minded" than of lot of these guys, but it makes zero sense to me that you wouldn't stretch this benefit as far as you can do.
Edit: appreciate all the comments! Main themes are to reiterate it's not an easy task by any stretch, and fears (both real and assumed) over retaliation for time out. I'm not yet lucky enough to be father, but I still can't square either of those between work and family time.
I took less than the allotted time. I was bored sitting at home. Much of the first 3 months is feeding the baby, something I am physically unequipped to do.
I enjoy work and the comradery of my co-workers. I was working from home anyway, so there was no long commute. And it gave me something to do. I'm a programmer. I like my work. It gives me an outlet for my creativity and allows me to bond with co-workers. And I care about the product and deliverables I'm working on. I don't like letting my coworkers down as they cover for me.
I took another 2 weeks after my wife went back to work.
I felt similar after the first child. But the reality for my SO is that it was harder on them because of all the other non-baby chores I couldn't do when working.
So for the second child I had to get VP approval to take a whopping 3 weeks (unlimited* PTO, technically no paternity leave). That was essential because now there was childcare, chores, and baby care involved. It should've been more like 8w.
That's fair. I was working from home and tried to do a lot more of the non-baby chores, like cleaning and cooking. We're also fortunate enough to have paid cleaners. But it didn't require me to take any more time off work. I would log off relatively early. I think sitting around not doing anything or screwing around on my computer not at work would just annoy my partner more. But I know some people have a lot more chores
Good points. We had a house to maintain, family was further away, and no paid help. Another big factor is C-section recovery can be a lot longer than natural birth. It is major surgery.
I think you might be touching on a taboo that nobody will ever admit publicly: having a baby is no walk in the park, and in comparison sitting in a cubicle and answering a few emails can seem like a massive upgrade.
Or children are no longer a byproduct of sex due to ease and availability of birth control options, and women gaining financial freedom, so the cost of children is finally allowed to become explicit.
As opposed to environments without prophylaxis options and where women do not have financial independence, where it was implicitly borne by women.
If you thought your boss would resent you for taking the full benefit and would rank your performance poorly, would you take that risk knowing that you've now got a very small person who is relying on you? You could potentially be limiting bonuses, raises, and promotions for an extra few days off. I'm not saying this is right, but I can imagine a reasonable new father feeling this pressure.
I doubt many people shorten their paid time off simply because they love work so much.
In most countries it’s not fully paid but a fractional pay setup for paternity leave. Some good companies top the benefit up to 75% of base pay. But bonus and stock are challenges. For many people being on paternity leave they earn 40% of total compensation which may be part of the reason many dads go back early.
I took all twelve weeks at my company spread out of the course of a year. 90% great, 10% work hassle. I manage 3 teams and it was hard to get some larger initiatives moving with me being out so much. But we aren’t good at leave like this is the US. Corp policies aside we as employees just aren’t good at it. But it’s the right way to go. And I wanted to encourage people on team to take the leave that was available.
I can think of a few reasons. Foremost is they feel threatened by the prospect of their employer realizing that they're not irreplaceable. Also they may love their project and want to be there for the next phase. Or maybe they just figure that their employer would be hurt by their absence and they'd feel guilty about.
When I took mine, I was told it was at a particularly convenient time because I had just started at the company (Deloitte, so huge corp) so wasn't deeply embedded in any projects yet, plus my billable time ratio "doesn't count in your first year".
I still got a lot of pressure from my bosses to cut it short and work part time while I was out. One of them even questioned my "loyalty to the team" at a holiday party that I attended in the middle of it (I went specifically because I wanted to get face time with people and not be distant).
The way a lot of corporations work, you have the "policy", and then you have management interpreting that policy. Things like leave of any kind might be technically "guaranteed", but they come at a cost of fewer individual contributions to projects and lower billable rates. And, at the end of the day, you report to someone who only cares about his budget, who has control over your project assignments.
So after that, suddenly my first year was only 6 months long (something something fiscal year), and it did count (blah blah blah pattern extrapolation) and I wasn't getting good assignments (constantly set up to fail, and even though I always pulled it off, I'd get terrible reviews for the smallest of issues). Eventually, I got "laid off". Really, I was fired because my billable rates was too low (and my billable rate was low due to retaliation for having slightly more going on in my life than living at work), but the company schedules regular layoffs to axe the lowest x% of employees. I guess that is one silver lining of that awful, Metropolis-esque machine: they gave me a (very small) severance on the way out.
So yeah. You can have a company "guarantee" leave, but still will structure a reason to get rid of you.
Same thing happens frequently with ADA. You're not going anywhere other than out as soon as they can find a good excuse, if you're even hired in the first place. Doesn't matter if you can do the work or not.
For people who don't know... Deloitte is a literal partnership so every hour you aren't working and billing is directly impacting the income of your boss (the partner).
Most consultancies operate this way, not just ones organized as a partnership. My boss and his boss weren't partners. I think it had to go up two more levels to finally hit a partner, though there were always other partners involved in the projects (that's part of the grift of partnerships, load up as many high-hourly rate partners as possible).
My career is basically non-existent. I realize that I have a job, not a career. I took my full amount. I think it indirectly hurt my rating that year. I took family medical leave this year. It appears that indirectly hurt my rating this year.
By indirectly, I mean that when they compare me to the other people they don't seem to be prorating my "stats" for that extra time off.
Might be different in other countries, but where I live only one parent can take the full 18 months leave. For the other parent, its only a few weeks. In practice, the one that's paid less takes the leave, and that's usually the mother.
> Even if the federal government picks up the bill, it's still a discontinuity in business, something an employer would want to avoid.
IMO this as well is something where the DevOps slogan "if it hurts, do it more often" should be applied.
The "discontinuity" of an employee leaving temporarily with months of warning in advance is the easy case. If that is a serious problem for your business, it's a failure of company culture and management. How would you deal with the "Hit by a bus" scenario?
I don't think your analogy is a good one. Women go on maternity leave, not men. So if one group of people are the only ones who get hit by busses, and are in-fact expected to be hit by busses, who in their right mind would hire them?
Men are not invincible robots. They get sick, they quit. They may even gasp like to take paternity leave.
If your organziation isn't shitty, so you can handle a woman taking maternity leave, you also won't get fucked by people getting sick, and can offer paternity leave and sabbatical options to help you attract employees which, newsflash, has recently become rather difficult.
> Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer.
It is an answer. For example, my cousin in England was able to spend a year breastfeeding her daughters without having to go through the arduous process of pumping. Their family is alive and well, and so is the UK.
Also, I have never once heard anybody here complain that maternity/paternity leave is in some way damaging the company/employee/economy - just stuff that happens in the office.
Not disagreeing with the point of this comment, but just as an aside, pumping is something that even mothers who are on leave do. Speaking from personal experience as the dad, I was able to feed the baby pumped milk for some of the many daily feedings instead of my wife doing the breastfeeding, which let her get a few extra minutes/hours of sleep when the baby needed to be fed. Both of us were on parental leave during this period. That tradeoff (getting some extra sleep vs. pumping) is not one that all parents would make, but it did help us get through the first few weeks of a newborn.
For sure. Certainly once she did start going back to work and pumping at the office, it was less "fun" - the pumping room wasn't the most comfortable, she had to do it a lot more and cart it back and forth in a cooler, etc.
I think they mean it's not a good premise for implementing it somewhere else. Your mention of not needing to pump and being able to spend time with the kids are stronger premises.
>Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer
I mean it definitely is, since 186 other countries in the world do offer paid parental leave. The United States is a huge outlier, especially given its wealth.
> I believe parental leave should be provided, but I don't see how anyone expects employers to shoulder the burden of providing paid parental (in reality maternity) leave without an implicit bias towards hiring men (or at least paying women less). You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time.
That's why many European countries are progressing towards giving fathers the same leave as mothers, and making it mandatory for both (e.g. in Spain mothers used to have much more leave than fathers, but they progressively increased the leave for fathers while also making things more inflexible - fathers used to be able to "give" their days to mothers, but that no longer works, and both must take at least six weeks mandatorily).
I don't think there is a clear-cut optimal solution for the problem and every solution has pros and cons. For example, mandatory equal leave for both means losing flexibility (and there are biological arguments that mothers need more leave). But I think it's a reasonable compromise to mitigate discrimination and bias.
Where it works best in other countries it very much tends to be covered via taxation, combined with increasing pressure for providing benefits to fathers as well which are lost if not taken, coupled with strong legal protections against firing.
But even then you're right that it's a struggle to get men to take the full available parental leave, often because "just" getting paid 100% of salary isn't enough. Losing X months of career progression is often seen as a bigger deal (and a not unsubstantial part of remaining pay discrepancies between men and women in some countries).
That doesn't mean you can't get significant improvements, though.
I live in the UK, and waking up to the harsh realities of how shitty parental leave provisions and nursery provisions are here compared to Norway where I grew up was not fun...
(And yes, some people will try to discriminate, and some will succeed. )
The goal of "the (political-)economy" is not to increase some number relentlessly.
There is a trade off in all things. Something that is being studied now, Abused children cost society a fortune in missed productivity, court, criminal, medical and social care. What is the cost for those not abused but just where the family is stressed for decades, what missed potential, what of those that fell into crime at the margin.
We forsake the growing of our adults at a cost later on. And 90% of that growing comes from the family unit. So we forsake the family unit at our own cost.
I am not saying we should all be the Waltons, but we should aspire in that direction. Schools, urban environments. Even seemingly crazy ideas like early start support, or therapy for couples every 5 years, all start to look like "stitches in time"
There may be no clear solutions at the level of "who pays for missed working days" but then we are privileging private businesses beyond the level their role in society is I suspect.
> You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time.
Make it mandatory ?
In my country it's mandatory for my employer to let me take my vacation days. They are risking fines if they don't make sure I do and I can't give up on these vacation days either.
The long term interests of society, the employee and ultimately of the business is something that many business struggle to realize or care about.
So we have the government, whose power reigns supreme, who can compel the business to act. Sometimes this is necessary, because business managers aren’t always good at what they do.
My favorite example was something my local conservative radio media went insane over about 15 years ago. The state passed a law that requires employers to, in writing: (a) tell the employee what their job title is, (b) tell the employee what their rate of pay is, (c) tell them what their available benefits are, and what they cost, and (d) tell them what expenses the employee will have and what they cost. (ie, uniforms, tools) Dire predictions of doom were made, small businesses were going to be destroyed, yadda yadda.
> But obviously it doesn't make sense for many businesses, otherwise they would all be doing it.
Or, despite the fact that they believe so deeply that time off to produce the next generation of workers and consumers is a net loss to their bottom line, they're actually wrong and are yet to discover this.
Parental leave should be a universal benefit for workers, period. Employers should foot the bill.
I think society should foot the bill for society-wide benefits. I do not see any reason to expect small businesses (or even large businesses) to have to worry about the costs of funding parental leave benefits, outside of having the requisite staffing.
Ok, sure. I’m on board with that. Except businesses will probably have to pay higher taxes to support such a scheme.
Businesses are the wealth drivers of our economy (as we’re so often told).
Money either comes from taxes on them, or on taxes on the people that they pay. It doesn’t really matter. It’s all the same money.
Exactly, which is why tasking every business with calculating risks of pregnancies and funding for them is dumb. Just do it on a nation level, or at least state level.
Sure. Which is the most pallatable to the US legislature to actually make this happen?
It works in the UK and Europe because there is _some_ understanding that a prospering society at all levels can't be achieved by blind liberalism and some collective risk sharing is actually a good thing.
That line of thinking applies to everything, though: age, race, religion, disability. There is no developed-world country where employers don't have to be considerate of their employees needs, including the US, it's just that the US currently draws the line differently to everywhere else... just move the line a little, this isn't a radical change.
> I believe parental leave should be provided, but I don't see how anyone expects employers to shoulder the burden of providing paid parental (in reality maternity)
It is always citizens that shoulder the burden one way or another.
Self: Pay with your own savings
Firm: Pay with higher prices and lower wages
State: Pay with higher taxes paid to the state
If you ask me, option 3) seems to distribute the pain to the most people, which does mean that singles who never get pregnant will be paying you to take leave, and most likely the benefits will be capped so that high earners don't get 100% of their wages, and those who don't work much the year before may get some average of salary earned, nevertheless I'm OK subsidizing fertility like this.
That’s the deal here in Germany (taxes pay for parental leave), and I was ok with it, in a high-minded “it’s good for the children” way despite looking like I was just going to be on the paying-for-it side.
Fast forward to a rather late “happy accident”, and I thank whatever compelled me to move here soon after college.
Would I have saved more than the 18k EUR in parental leave pay had I been on even a non-SV US tech salary with US-only taxes? Yes.
Would I have had a whole work and regulatory culture around me that guaranteed that I could take that year, and come back to my choice of part-time schedule for the same type of work? No.
> You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time.
I bet over time that fraction would grow larger as paternal leave got more normalized, especially if the parental leave could be spread out over a few years (like it can in many European countries) instead of over the first few months.
Here's how the percentage of parental leave days taken by mothers and fathers in Sweden has changed over the years [1]. Note that between 2002-2015 each parent had exclusive right to 60 of the total 480 days of parental leave (12.5%), that has since then been increased to 90 (18.75%).
I think the pandemic has handily proven that C-suite executives are really good at generating whatever reality distortion fields are necessary to ignore any evidence contrary to their own personal comfort and how they "always did things".
I'm trying to figure out what "further encourages discrimination against people of child bearing age" means...
Anyway, businesses have had to be forced to not do things that turn out to be bad for their business, up to and including not killing their customers and employees. "Obviously it can't be better in all dimensions otherwise everyone would be doing it" is the ultimate conservative arguments, since it means nothing could ever change---obviously we have reached the optimum, right?
> Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. There's no clear solutions
Ah, the dark side of American exceptionalism. "Other countries do it" is absolutely an answer. We could, if we wanted to, peruse our way through the policies used in other countries and pick the one that best fits Americas needs and demographic situation. But that isn't possible if we put blinders on and pretend that the experience of other countries doesn’t matter.
The so-called "progressives" in Congress couldn't even get paid leave in the transportation bill because they have no spine. It just shows how badly this country is fucked by corporations
Because if a caucus isn't willing to stand their ground to get what they want, then what is the fucking point? Not to mention it was one of Pete Buttigieg's things he was pushing for. Yet when asked about why it didn't get included, he just kind of shrugged his shoulders like he didn't really give a shit.
It's why the Tea Party had limited success in the early part of the decade: they were willing not to participate. And it's why Democrats lost ground in elections (VA governor's race being the key one), and will be hit harder in the midterms.
Dems are screwed no matter what. If the progressive stick it to the center then nothing gets passed and 2022 roles around and republicans trounce them with empty promises. And then 2024 will look even worse for Dems because nothing will get done and the Republicans will say vote for our guy and we will pass infrastructure. The Dems need something to pass now so that there is 3 years of progress.
> Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. There's no clear solutions
It is an answer, because it’s been working well for decades in other countries. Right now I have a man in my team taking his parental leave and I as a manager have no problem with it at all. When hiring I just accept this risk and keep in mind possible mitigations (temporary reduction in capacity and expences or hiring substitution or redistribution of workload etc).
I think there should be more leave but it needs very strong federal subsidies.
I worked with someone from a European company working in the USA. She started her full time job here while she was on an 8 month maternity leave from her old European company (which she didn't plan on returning to afterwards). It would be fucked if her old company had to eat 8 months expenses and then not even have an employee returning back after.
Does that not encourage people to then become baby factories? If you know you get 8 months paid leave every time you had a baby, why would any man or woman go to work again? They would just sit at home and breed.
Unlikely. 8 months of paid parental leave would not encourage multiple births considering the true cost of raising kids. You've got to clothe, feed, and house them.
But we are also in population decline and that is worse than having decent parental leave.
Even accepting the tradeoff you posit, the basis of this argument seems to be that given the choice between guaranteed maternity leave and marginally higher expected pay, women should prefer the latter, or at least not be forced to chose the former.
Yeah I agree, we need socialist child care and socialist health care (and pretty much everything else should be free market). The sooner we decouple basic health and child care from employers, watch how many people quit their jobs to stat businesses.
While I agree that family leave is a good thing and needs some discussion about how to implement/fund it, I really dislike the title. It's a real stretch to claim that if she didn't have paid leave that she might be dead. The real root of the issue is that she should have been paying attention to her symptoms. One could even make the arguement that if she needed to go back to work sooner, that the symptoms would have been more disruptive and could have lead to addressing them even sooner. There are good arguments for family leave, but her story and the way she tells is not one of them.
Given my working class background, she's spot on. If you don't have paid leave, you don't have time to see the doctor. Thousands of people die every year just because they don't have time to see a doctor since they're too busy making Subway sandwiches or whatever.
She supported her point rather well, post pregnancy complications are extremely common and it shouldn't be a shocker to say you should have time to handle those.
"Thousands of people die every year just because they don't have time to see a doctor since they're too busy making Subway sandwiches or whatever."
I don't think this story shows that. This story involves a call to the doctor. The doctor says it's life threatening. Any person would choose to take off rather than die.
In fact, in my experience the people who die because they didn't see a doctor didn't know how serious their condition was, or didn't know they even had a condition. If anything, this story is a good argument for better patient education. After all, she had time off and still didn't pay attention to her symptoms - symptoms which were almost certainly required to be covered with the discharge instructions. So this is really an example of what paid leave looks like and how patient education needs to be improved.
"post pregnancy complications are extremely common and it shouldn't be a shocker to say you should have time to handle those."
This shouldn't be specific to pregnancy. This same logic can be applied to other medical issues. Is there really any reason to differentiate on causation when talking about medical recovery? There may be childcare issues that could support maternity leave, but those were not really covered here. So I would say this was an article mostly focused on appeal to emotion and theatrics (just look at that intro), not a well reasoned argument.
"America's the only county that doesn't offer parental leave, it's not radical to say this leads to poor outcomes."
You mean paid parental leave? You should be able to take unpaid parental leave under FMLA for medical reasons.
America is not the only country. It depends on if you mean developed country or some other missing adjective. Also, you said parental leave. Many countries only offer maturity leave, and not parental leave (maturnity + paternity). These also have other impacts/reasons than the medical point the original article makes.
I'm not sure why you linked that article. Maturnity leave refers to post delivery. Pre delivery would be prenatal leave, which isn't discussed here. They do discuss some medical leave here, which brings me back to the point about not making this solely about maturnity leave, and that the original article is more about medical side and not the other aspects of parental leave.
>You mean paid parental leave? You should be able to take unpaid parental leave under FMLA for medical reasons.
No working class person can just take 6 months off and still make rent.
In many countries you can take leave before having a kid or after. America lacks any such framework, or general worker protection. A family member of mine missed significant time from work due to a difficult pregnancy. Lucky the kid was fine, but her employer just fired her.
*Yes this was illegal, but their wasn't any real recourse she could take*
Most of us here are very privileged. But no normal person can sell some RSUs and take off half a year
Perhaps people should look into disability insurance for longer issues. It would still cover other medical issues too. I'm guessing the person in your example needed more than 3 months off, otherwise they would have been protected. If they were protected, there are lawyers who will take a strong case on a contingency basis.
Where do we draw the line for when a person can be fired - 3 months, 6 months, 12 months? If one is out for 6+ months, their replacement would likely be up to speed and would have to be laid off (assuming same capacity). At some point it makes more sense for the person who is out to seek a new job and allow the current worker to continue.
I don't have RSUs, and I make a lot less than most on this site. I am lucky that my employer provides 10 days of paid family leave in a rolling 12 months. I also have disability insurance. The insurance is attainable for most people (depends on income level but could be as low as $10-15 per month). I think many people don't even think about it. It would be great if our schools taught useful stuff like this.
I agree, the only way the author's premise makes sense is if she was given bad information, and she did not bother to research anywhere else. With both of my wife's pregnancies on both coasts of the US, we were told to immediately call the doctor if bleeding persisted after a couple weeks. You are even told exactly what the bleeding should look like and how its characteristics should change over time, and if it deviates, to call the doctor.
Apart from the very obvious argument that parental leave should be a human right and is essential to women's rights, the HN crowd might appreciate that there are significant individual and societal long-term benefits to mothers being able to care for their newborns.
Such as an estimated 2.6 point boost in IQ from breastfeeding [1] (95% CI: 1.25; 3.98)
I, a man, did not get parental leave at the company I was with when my daughter was born. On top of that, I had asked to travel less and was still being sent on travel, so missed out even more. This was one of the factors in me eventually deciding to leave that company.
It was a factor in deciding where I wanted to live in the US. I was not going to raise my daughter or expect my wife to have kids in a place that did not have parental leave laws.
really, how is student debt crippling? if you go to a state school and get a high earning stem degree you'll pay it off in no time, besides which the interest rates are really low. Sure if you go to Brown for a history degree with no scholarships and don't bother to take a part time job then you may find yourself up shit creek, but that's hardly behavior I want my tax dollars subsidizing.
But don't get me wrong, I'm all for you not having children. Fewer people is one way to solve our climate issues.
Generations of kids have grown up this way without issue. Sleeping 7/8 hours at a daycare is barely different than sleeping 7/8 hours at home. And the other hour bing broken up while being held with a bottle and a diaper change.
I can only assume you have no experience of what breast pumping entails, and the biological and chemical effects of a mother breastfeeding her baby. It is not true that it is "without issue". Not being able to directly breastfeed your baby leads to many downsides, even just mechanical ones.
Such as decreased or erratic milk production, clogged nipple ducts, engorged breasts, all which are greatly reduced when an infant feeds from the breast.
Not to mention the effects of oxytocin on the mother's healing body from having skin to skin contact with the baby.
The effects are extremely complex, I do not even see how you can measure them to claim dropping an infant off at daycare is "without issue".
If you also cared for an infant, you would also know they don't sleep 7 hours, and feed 1 hour. They feed every 2 hours, and they can take anywhere from 10 min to 45 min to feed every time. And every time, the infant will need to be burped, or maybe they will need to poop and the mom has to wait that process out, and then go back to feeding.
And to keep up this production while the infant is at daycare, the mom has to pump every 2 hours. Which means going to the pumping room, taking out the pump equipment, cleaning the pump equipment, storing (refrigerated or frozen) and transporting the breast milk, heating it up.
Yes, I've raised kids. Mine were only up maybe 30 minutes every 2-3 hours when born. And there are 16 hours when a mom isn't working to have all those benefits you discussed. And if you can find a study that says there's a discernible difference in childhood outcomes based on those additional 8 hours of contact between a child and mother, I'd love to see it because I can't imagine in all the factors that involve childhood, those 8 hours difference (for a few months) are detectible.
Subtract commuting time, pumping time, getting ready time, etc out of those 16 hours.
And no, there is not going to be a study that shows a discernible difference in childhood outcomes. That’s an immeasurable metric.
But it is known that babies extract milk and regulate milk production much preferably compared to pumps, from the woman and the baby’s perspective. And that benefit alone is worth the 0.1% a nation shaves off its GDP.
Sounds like you had some awesome babies. My kids took at least 1 hour to feed each time between latching, burping, puking, pooping, being fussy, and falling asleep while feeding. Seeing what my wife went through even with 6 months of leave, I would want my daughter to have better.
Obviously we can toss the kids in daycare and put the moms back to work and put the pumping burden on them. And then watch the data show the length of time kids drink breastmilk go down. Or we can step back and evaluate why the most “advanced” and “prosperous” society cannot give its women a year to raise their infant and protect their job.
Why wouldn't we just give the moms a choice? They have unique duties for child rearing so it makes sense to accommodate that as a society. But not all moms might want to partake since there are consequences to their careers (you don't gain experience in your job when you're not doing your job), plus some people hate being stuck home all day.
We did and do give the moms a choice. Look at where it has gotten us. Kids don’t breastfeed as long as they should, labor markets are such that women feel they need to go back to work and pump.
On one end of the spectrum you have certain European countries where women receive ample maternity leave. The right to have a family is protected by law.
On the other end of the spectrum you have certain countries where married women are not expected to work. The right to have a family is protected by traditional beliefs and customs.
But there is this nasty area in the middle where married women are expected to work but there's few workers rights - having a family becomes a privilege rather than a right.
I would imagine the demographics of HN make it so that not only are there few women, the gender who is most commonly tasked with taking care of the newborn, there's also few who even have had kids.
If you can be disgusted by what someone says, then of course you can be disgusted by different opinions. Opinions can express the best of humanity, or it's absolute worst.
I live in Europe and we became parents recently. The mother gets about four months of paid parental leave by default: two before and two after the day of birth (paid by the health insurer plus taxes). In addition, parents can take over a year of paid parental leave (paid by everyone, i.e. taxes).
That's the baseline and no company needs to bother with any company-specific policy, pseudo-benefit. No company incurs any explicit costs for that.
This is not even the most family friendly country in Europe, btw.
I have a 5 week old son. I'm lucky enough to be able to quit my job to help mum look after him because we don't have any family nearby to help. It's still a struggle with both of us doing it full-time! I have no idea how single mothers cope. I've no idea how people can work in the early months of parenting a child. I'm in the UK and had 2 weeks parternity leave - it's really not enough!
"If you live in Canada or, say, France, you are probably amused by this little thought experiment. And possibly drinking a beer from a small and dainty glass."
Not really. Yes we have one year parental leave here in Canada, but the $$ value of that is not very high all things considered. It's not enough to live on on its own. Maximum in Ontario right now is $595 CAD a week for the highest income earners and lower than that (2/3rds of pre-leave earnings) for others, and rents and housing have climbed very high, so in reality you still need a working spouse to make ends meet on that.
So, no, we're not laughing, but we do have sympathy.
Completely my experience as well (x3 kids)...can you enlighten me on what the author meant by, "drinking beer from a small and dainty glass"? If there's a social reference or analogy, I'm missing it.
Assume there is no border control among nations, people are free to choose whether they want to work where wage is lower and leave days are longer, or where wage is higher and leave days are shorter. No matter how people make their free choice, there will still be people complaining about leave days are not mandated to be longer.
I will always celebrate the fact that we still have a nation on this planet does not mandate leave days. And I give full wish to people choose to move to countries with longer leave days.
In Canada, the most money you can get paid from public maternity leave benefits if you take the standard 12 months off is about $30k CAD (~$24k USD).
It's a major pay cut if you have a high-paying job, so if you are a developer making $100k, you are going to have a large reduction in your standard of living. The monetary incentive is still very much to work as much as possible.
I agree with the author's point, but her jokes are cringy at best and trying to use funding for space programs as a way to blame lawmakers for ignoring people's basic needs is something that's been dead since Kennedy shut it down in the 60's.
It's not like there's one pool of money, and some wizard distributes it.
I work for a FAANG and 11 years ago, there was no such thing as paternity leave. I ended up taking 2 weeks PTO vacation to help my wife and bought enough time to get her from my mom in law. Recently, the company gets more generous with paternity leave thanks to competition from other companies.
One thing most libertarians never understood about Keynes, is that Keynes was probably as much, if not more, anti-communist than they.
But keynes also knew that people that are hungry today, don't have too much patience to wait for the markets to reach an equilibrium, and because of that they tend to make revolutions.
This American Market fundamentalism is probably the biggest threat that the liberal capitalism ever met, because this is what is going to radicalize the american worker, and soo, the disappearing middle class.
Business people don't have the training to think about that sort of thing and politicians should, but they do whatever their corporate donors tell them to do. I believe FDR said he did what he did to save capitalism.
Anyway, it's all short term thinking. We've had two revolutionary type events in the last year, the BLM movement and the Jan 6 movement. We currently have a general employment strike going on. People are pissed. Once they realize that the party divisions are mostly intentional and mostly cultural rather than economic, and everybody wants the same thing, who knows what will happen.
And yet again I have no idea why people don't leave to EU or Canada where there are actual human rights. I understand it is your homeland, but your homeland is treating you like it's still the middle ages.
To be against parents being with their children during their earliest months and years is to be against humanity. The other word for that is "capitalism".
Flamewar comments will get you banned here. Personal attacks also will, and your comment crossed into that. Not cool. If you'd please review the site guidelines and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: you've posted a bunch of other flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments in this thread as well. Please stop doing that. It's not what HN is for, and it destroys what it is for.
I did not intend to personally attack anyone with my comment. I will try and avoid using words like you in the future which can be confused as meaning the parent as opposed to an arbitrary person.
Yes, that would be really helpful. Personal language (even just 'you', as you correctly point out) combined with pejorative language tends to land as personal attack, even if it wasn't intended. Since intent doesn't communicate itself over the internet, the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Avoiding personal language, except when you're sure you need it, is one excellent way to do that.
Thanks for replying so nicely - I know it's not pleasant to get a moderation scolding.
If only bring frugal were as simple as you make it sound. The food industry has optimized how cheap food can get both in price and nutritional content. If you eat the cheap stuff, you WILL develop health issues, which will compromise your ability to work and your child's development.
Given that education requires spare income, and spare time, how are you supposed to gain qualifications/training to allow you to up your income?
Assuming that everyone was able to become qualified, given the saturation in the market place of cheap, new people, how will that glut of supply increase media wage?
If you cannot earn, how are you supposed to save for "financial responsibility"?
You have a workplace accident, not your fault. Now you have huge hospital debt. This is coupled by inflation on fuel and housing. Minimum wage doesn't rise. how are you supposed to earn more?
Not exactly on topic but the recent Netflix series Maid does an excellent job of making the viewer feel how difficult it can be to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. I almost hesitate to recommend it because everyone I know is so stressed right now and the series is so anxiety inducing, but if you’re someone like me who thinks rising tension is the heart of good storytelling, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Everything about it is excellent.
I really can not follow the logic of this thread here, especially the last sentence.
When the choice is between "living a life you can't afford" and "not living at all as they do not have any money to pay rent", I think it is clear that people should try to live.
The thing that isn’t talked about is that a significant portion of the population simply isn’t intelligent enough for a decent paying job. Men of that type can usually go in to a field where they trade their long term health for more pay, but women that’s harder. Either way there’s a good chance you’ll be on disability by the time you’re 50.
I agree that a lot of people make really poor financial decisions, but don’t think everyone has the same earning potential as you.
You are very special. Do you meet a lot of different people? Like, different countries, adults with parents from other socioeconomic backgrounds, people with chronic diseases, all of that stuff? Because, to me, it really seems like you don't.
Yes, I'm in a lot of discord servers. I have talked to people from many countries. I have even talked to others using their native language. I'm sure that I've encountered people from different socioeconomic backgrounds and people with chronic diseases.
And you think discord users are a good sample of the population? It's absolutely not true that not everyone could just pick a skill like programming and work on it until they're employable, especially as many people need to start working as soon as possible to be able to survive.
If you had to work 50h/week plus 3-4h commute every day, how would you study programming exactly? If you didn't have access to a computer, how would you do it? If everyone around you made it seem like it's an activity out of your reach, how would you figure out it's not?
> Maybe you should not live somewhere so expensive
That is one of the problems of the "cycle of poverty". Moving requires a large upfront capital investment for a moving truck or gas for your own vehicle at the very least, as well as taking time off of work for house and job hunting (since getting to your old job may be unfeasible from wherever you manage to find a home). Not to mention you'll need to pay up for a deposit for the new location without having the old deposit back yet and in almost all cases either a fee for breaking your lease or paying two rents simultaneously for a month or more.
Summarized, that is easily hitting 5.000 $ if not more.
> If you are just making ends meet you are not financially responsible.
Are you really calling nearly 70% [1] (or, after COVID, likely more!) of Americans "irresponsible" for having less than 1000$ in savings?
Were the rate of people in that circumstances something like 5% or lower, I might be inclined to agree. But that large amount speaks rather for a systematic problem!
>investment for a moving truck or gas for your own vehicle at the very least, as well as taking time off of work for house and job hunting
There are financial instruments like loans where you can for a fee get money which you can use now and pay back later.
>Are you really calling nearly 70% [1] (or, after COVID, likely more!) of Americans "irresponsible" for having less than 1000$ in savings?
Yes. I don't even have a job that pays well and I could quit my job and live for years if I wanted to off my savings. Now I'm perhaps an outlier, but you should have a buffer in case you can't work for whatever reason or something unexpected happens.
If irresponsibility becomes the norm, then it ceases to be an individual personal failing to be scolded for, and is instead a systemic societal issue that should be addressed.
Agreeing with parent here is in conflict with your original point. Your original point is that poor people are in that position because they're bad with money and make bad financial choices. Parent is asserting that it's a systemic issue that is unrelated to individual financial responsibility. These positions are incompatible.
Yes, but in that case "irresponsibility" becomes less of individual character failings and more of a society-wide issue that requires society-wide solutions. People do not receive sufficient financial education. [0] There are is too much cheap credit and major institutions desire it. [1] They are too enticed to consume. [2] Basic costs of living have risen sharply [3] while wages have not. [4] When all of this is considered, it is clear that the aggregate problem is less irresponsibility, and more that Americans are simply being pushed to their limits from every direction, by structures and systems that are stacked against them.
> Maybe you should not live somewhere so expensive ..
What should e.g. waiters / waitresses do then? Drive to work for hours every day so they can serve coffee to those who can afford to live where they need to work?
I mean, that’s an example where they could easily move. You can wait tables anywhere.
Eventually there wouldn’t be enough in cities and they’d have to raise wages to equalize, but a lot of people can’t even envision not living in a mega-city.
"Easily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that first sentence. Moving is very expensive, and requires a lot of spare capital and time off. Renting trucks, breaking leases, paying deposits, and not working all burn through money pretty quickly. It's also logistically tricky, as often you have to land a job before moving because landlords want to see a job and income before letting you move, and low skill jobs don't want to hire someone in the indeterminate future.
And you also need to consider social networks. Poor people depend heavily on their existing social network for financial safety. Having a social safety network when things go poorly is the difference between having a bad time and going homeless. Moving to a new area involves potentially shedding that safety network, which is a high risk high reward maneuver. Often for those on the edge of financial ruin the potential downsides emotionally dominate the potential upsides, which is unsurprising if you've ever experienced poverty.
Can it be done? sure. People do do it, after all. But it's difficult, risky, and expensive. If you ever find yourself wondering why most people don't do something that's "easily" done, then chances are it's less about people being lazy or dumb and more about there being factors you've missed.
> but a lot of people can’t even envision not living in a mega-city.
I think the snide tone here is completely unwarranted. It's not that people "can't even envision not living in a mega-city", they live there for a variety of perfectly rational reasons. If you've ever talked with the working class in those "mega-cities", a lot of them would absolutely love to move to at least a smaller city, but feel like they can't because of everything I said above.
And even outside those mega cities it's not like everything is perfect either; there's not some magical utopia in Kansas or wherever with high wages and low COL that the workers are too stupid or too myopic to move to. Most of the areas with jobs are also expensive, and getting more expensive still. Places that are actually cheap are cheap because there isn't a lot of work to do, because they're unpleasant places to actually live, or because they involve a hellacious commute into the areas where the jobs are.
The commute thing might sound petty if you have a new car, but it's a big problem if you're poor. Long commutes cost more in gasoline and maintenance, and an unexpected breakage can put savings (if any exist) and jobs at risk. Nevermind that adding a long commute might not be possible on top of the hours required to float the household financially.
Attacking another user like this will get you banned here, regardless of how bad their comments are or you feel they are. You may not feel you owe them better, but you owe this community better if you're participating here.
'America' can theoretically mean either the US or the two continents of the Americas depending on the context, but a US newspaper will invariably use 'America' to mean 'The United States of America'.
In fact most people proficient in English (second language learners included) will expect that 'America' means the USA. Surely you're not hearing this for the first time? Anyone who wishes to reference the continents tends to use the plural form.
Honest question, is there anywhere in the English speaking world that actually uses "America" rather than "The Americas" or "The American continent" to collectively refer to the continents of North and South America?
The first one in dictionaries I just checked (Oxford and Cambridge) references the country, The United States.
I’m well aware of what the Americas are, but I’ve never once heard a speaker of American English use the singular form of the noun to refer to the collection of continents.
edit: Since your reply has been rightfully flagged, read the first line of the definition you pasted. You really didn’t need to share a link to show me exactly what I told you.
Thank God I live in a civilized country. Live and let live. Could be so easy for so many. But well... earning the next dollar is more important than supporting others in times of need. Separating parents from their children is miserable.
The problem with parental leave is the same problem with universal health care or any entitlement that isn’t utilized by the entire population at the same rate constantly.
Things like roads (and even then there are many locales with crappy roads) are easy to justify. Things like parental leave and universal health care are hard because the percentage of those utilizing will be low and the disproportionate benefit will inherently fall with a small percentage.
It’s inherently a Ponzi scheme. Not to say that we shouldn’t participate, but it is what it is.
Add in the mindset of maximizing wealth and it makes even less sense because those who need is will be increasingly less fortunate and those who don’t can fund it themselves anyway.
Not every societal benefit has to be quantified and accounted for to justify its existence. Pretty much everyone has experience with misguided middle managers trying to run organizations entirely from the context-free numbers their spreadsheets, why is this any different.
The majority of the population over time will use parental leave if it is available. Most people do have at least one child in their lifetime so this is a terrible example of an entitlement which is unequally distributed. Health care is even worse, especially if you are guaranteeing access prospectively. Even people who are not currently using healthcare resources (hopefully most people) know that there is a very good change that they will have to and realistically as you age the chance that you need substantial medical care approaches 100% pretty rapidly.
It is not a Ponzi scheme for a number of reasons.
First, Ponzi schemes use money from new members to pay for older members. This might be a model for retirement spending (it isn't, see my next point) but it has the timeline reversed for parental leave. Parental leave is effectively funded by the fraction of the population not currently using it for the benefit of the fraction that currently is. It effectively serves a few different distributional roles:
a) It moves resources from your own pre-child and post-parental leave career to the period when the child is born. Many people who can easily fund a year of not working from their total career earnings cannot do so in their peak child-bearing years and there aren't any efficient ways of using saving or borrowing to shift that money either. For these people, parental leave uses the risk pooling and payment guarantee capabilities of the state to effectively borrow cheaply against their lifetime earnings.
b) It distributes resources from higher to lower earners, depending on how the obligation is structured there is usually a progressive taxation element which ensures a certain minimum is available.
Second point, retirement schemes are also not Ponzi schemes.
A Ponzi scheme requires an ever-increasing number of new entrants to maintain payouts. Pay-as-you-go retirement schemes require maintaining a balance between payers and payees which can be disrupted by changes to demographics but that does not mean that they are inherently fraudulent, just that in the presence of demographic trends which lead to a change in that ratio, they either need to reduce payouts, or increase payments in, or borrow to bridge temporary gaps. The difference is that in a Ponzi scheme, the changes required to maintain this are exponential and rapidly become impossible. There is no stable state to a Ponzi scheme.
> The majority of the population over time will use parental leave if it is available.
I agree with this. However:
> b) It distributes resources from higher to lower earners, depending on how the obligation is structured there is usually a progressive taxation element which ensures a certain minimum is available.
This is irrelevant to whether or not parental leave is a ponzi scheme.
> a) It moves resources from your own pre-child and post-parental leave career to the period when the child is born. Many people who can easily fund a year of not working from their total career earnings cannot do so in their peak child-bearing years and there aren't any efficient ways of using saving or borrowing to shift that money either. For these people, parental leave uses the risk pooling and payment guarantee capabilities of the state to effectively borrow cheaply against their lifetime earnings.
Parental leave’s true cost is more than just the income lost. It’s the labor required to raise the new children.
If we say parents cannot just stay at home (in which case parental leave is unnecessary) then the people required to sustain the new children will be exponential in growth.
Parental leave temporarily moves labour output from the measurable "economy" to the non-measured domestic economy (and displaces a small amount of what would otherwise be wage-labour childcare by non-parents).
Children raised in this way will require childcare of their own but I don't see how the labour required to raise children goes up over time unless the fraction of the population which is children goes up.
That's...not what a Ponzi scheme is. Also, lol at entire population using roads at exactly the same rate, I've been subsidizing rural and exurban lifestyles my whole urban lifetime.
Is there any indication it actually requires continued growth to break even?
Given average salary where I am and roughly average tax rate, a typical household with two working adults is going to pay somewhere in the neighbourhood of $2m in tax over their working life. Paying 3% of that back to them is not going to break the bank.
There are other programs vying for their tax dollars, but I can't see any inherent reason why it requires population growth to fund the benefits unless as you look at a timeline longer than a single tax year.
As well, kind of an odd program to make that argument on. Parental leave is one of the few programs where you can pretty definitely guarantee the population growth since it's paying out for population growth that has already happened.
I see what you're saying, but parental leave is a direct cost, but there are subsidiary costs, such as the lost productivity as well as the lifetime resources to raise the newly born child that require more people to subsidize.
If a child were something that required no ongoing resources to provide for, then yeah I'd agree with you.
That being said I didn't really properly articulate that, so the way I described it I'd have to concede that perhaps it's not a Ponzi scheme.
The benefit side of that equation is the perpetuation of human society, so it’s worth some investment. Humans and economies aren’t cost minimizers, they’re utility maximizers.
So in your mind Charles Ponzi innovated the principle of factoring in the likelihood of growth into economic planning? And any investment that is premised on that growth is thus a Ponzi scheme? I guess we can use words however we want, sure.
Also, again, lol that roads pass this criteria. No expectation of growth and expanding tax bases there...
It's hard to rebut your arguments when you don't really explain them, instead relying on scarewords that don't fit at all.
Who are the "additional investors"? The children? In what way would parental leave had been a horrible misstep if they do not show up? Seems like a wash.
Or are the additional investors individuals and families who won't ever need paid leave, don't care about their neighbors, and don't care about the next generation of residents? If so, Ponzi schemes are when market participants indirectly spend money on things that they don't 100% agree to? So, like, every interaction in life outside of the household that one individual might fully dominate?
The additional investors are all individuals necessary in taking care of the new children directly or indirectly.
You introduce paid leave, which is fine, this creates more demand for children which is also fine.
So now you have more children. Who’s going to take care of these people? Presumably child care workers who are disproportionately women. And if those women have children as well? Who replaces them? And who replaces the women who originally were on leave?
If you think every industry can absorb 12 weeks (original proposal) of paid leave you’re in for a ride awakening. That’s if everyone only has a single child, by the way. Multiple children only compound the problem.
If you believe this problem will sort itself out you should consider that in San Francisco day care can be as high as 3000 a child per month. Keep in mind about 3 years of day care is necessary. So that’s almost 100k after tax. Even someone making 400k a year before tax would notice that. And that’s only daycare.
That being said this kind of Ponzi scheme isn’t really a big deal because that’s basically just having kids in a nutshell. However if you’re trying to convince your fellow citizens to pay for it you’re need some luck.
I think the parent post is a troll, willingly or not. Leave it, he or she has made up their mind that infrastructure and services are a Ponzi schm. Sigh.
Roads aren’t as easy to justify as you think. Different people use them at different rates and in order to account for this there is a concept called a “toll road” which is a road that has usage fees. I’d argue if you can support public roads despite them being used at different rates by the population then these benefits shouldn’t be shot down by the same objection.
Have you looked up what Ponzi scheme means? I agree parental leave is a forceful redistribution of wealth, but it's not a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost parents are not investors in the tax system, also how are recent "investors" paying previous investors if parental leave is a Ponzi scheme?
I get you now. You mean the bigger system of mandating benefits to be paid for by future taxes, not specifically paid parental leave.
I still don't agree it's a Ponzi scheme because it's not soliciting investments with promises of big payoffs unless you count paying taxes as investing. I would agree that is shares an important property with a Ponzi scheme. It will fail when it can no longer increase the amount that gets paid in.
I call it a Ponzi scheme because there’s a discrete payoff - having a child and receiving paid time off.
Taxes in general aren’t a Ponzi scheme because many of the things paid for by taxes are continuous - less people, less tax collection needed. Tax collection for roads being an example.
Parental leave and the amount of taxes necessary is more contingent on the future population than the present.
Not sure why it works (parental leave and universal health care) in the rest of the world but ~cannot not work in the US. Maybe the US is so focused on being "pure capitalist" that you forgot the peoples who are part of the system?
