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Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

nytimes.com

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Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#351

Post by ukj »

krschultz wrote: post #113
ukj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Everybody likes grand gestures. Nobody likes paying for them. As a social responsibility it's not on private businesses to cover the cost. Pay for it through taxation. Until then - my choice is a competitive advantage.

I'm going to guess you will get more growth in your career by learning how to be empathetic than negotiating with such an asinine argument.

And I am going to guess that knowing when to be strategically empathetic in a negotiation is going to get me even further.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#352

Post by mmt »

eanzenberg wrote: post #290
existencebox wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement of "recruit" is exactly the sort of misconstruction I was hoping to avoid. threatofrain got it right. This is a problem we need to address, but the solutions I've seen thus far don't take unfortunate pathologies of human psychology into account, and when we don't do that, we get very surprised at the lack of results down the line. You're more than willing to try to live in a world where you say "Becaus…

I'm super confused at what you recommend needs changing. The law against pregnancy discrimination exists, but because it's easy to circumvent you want something stricter? Or you want the gov't to subsidize it?

If I understand correctly, although the GP may have been suggesting government subsidy as a possible solution, the point wasn't that this is somehow "best" from broad or moral reasons.

Rather, it addresses the specific issue of there being an economic incentive to discriminate, intrinsic to all businesses.

Addressing that issue is compatible with concurrent solutions that outlaw the discrimination on moral grounds, or do so more strictly, or provide more aggressive enforcement.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#353

Post by fulafel »

Heya4 wrote: post #342
fulafel wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From general interest POV, FB stock price is peanuts compared to problems arising from to many people and overconsumption.

Maybe that's a problem in developing countries, but population increase is very slow in the US. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/us/usa-population-grow...

It does not make sense to quantize this based on national borders. We're all in the same atmosphere and biosphere.

And of course, any growth is bad in the current situation since the current level is so unsustainable - population should decrease, not increase.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#354

Post by chii »

paxys wrote: post #302
eanzenberg wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me for being flippant but, I don't care if you're a 10- or 10,000- person company, but I'm going to take >4 weeks of vacation per year and if you can't handle that then you don't deserve to exist in the market.

There is a huge difference between a few weeks of vacation a year (probably taken in 1-2 week chunks) and multiple continuous months of parental leave. The latter can absolutely kill a startup, especially when the person leaving is a subject matter expert in a critical area.

> probably taken in 1-2 week chunks

if that wasn't mentioned in the employment agreement, then you (the boss) just lied about the conditions of employment.

I think a startup deserves the right to not hire somebody who plans to take multiple months off (without telling the boss), but a startup also needs to be upfront about it. I think a bit of transparency goes a long way towards making the market more efficient.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#355

Post by chii »

ukj wrote: post #351
krschultz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess you will get more growth in your career by learning how to be empathetic than negotiating with such an asinine argument.

And I am going to guess that knowing when to be strategically empathetic in a negotiation is going to get me even further.

> strategically empathetic

aka, the sociopathic mentality.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#356

Post by stealthmodeclan »

victor106 wrote: post #334
existencebox wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something that has always nagged at me in these discussions, and I've always been somewhat afraid to bring it up lest I misconstrue, but I want to try and figure this out. What's a state of affairs we can reach such that people don't become preemptively discriminatory for lack of being able to examine factors that would impact workplace performance? We agree, societally, that we shouldn't discriminate against…

The corporate tax rate has been reduced to something like 20%. Most companies in the US pay much less than that. The state is already subsidizing a lot for big corporations. Companies are nothing but made up of people. The irony is at one time or another these same people would have wanted the exact same benefits for themselves but they don’t like extending those same benefits to others. If they can’t act in the larg…

If they can’t act in the larger national interest on a few of these occasions then they won’t have a population to sell to.

Apple sells globally, should Apple also pay for the welfare of the countries where it sells its product?

The corporate tax rate has been reduced to something like 20%. Most companies in the US pay much less than that. The state is already subsidizing a lot for big corporations.

Some part of which flows to investors who purchase securities. Capital gains and dividends are taxed.

Companies can't earn record profits without government running deficit (by healthcare/infra expenditure) and without people running out of savings (by spending on the goods and services being produced)

Part of the value produced will be taxed in the US while the individuals and governments all over the world run out of saving and run into deficits respectively. All that flows to the US. Stopping this is much worse for the US.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#357

Post by chii »

ryanobjc wrote: post #298
fixermark wrote: post #292

Fundamentally, this is one of those places where if we want to change policy, the government needs to step in. If we want companies to honor paternity and maternity leave, then when a parent takes such leave, the government needs to soak the employee's salary and benefits. 100%, no questions asked, full stop. Any less is incentive for every company in the marketplace to find every excuse to cut parents out of the loo…

So what do you do when you have high risk scenarios that are semi-rare but semi-predictable, combined with a high loss when they happen? It's called insurance. That's the private/"market" based solution to privatizing and sharing risk across a pool. Given it's kind of an impossible thing to fake, there isn't much risk of false claims.

insurance doesn't work when the event is controllable (like pregnancy) and happens regularly to everyone.

Imagine an insurance company offering to sell to a business a plan for each employee, which covers their salary while they take leave.

The premium of this plan must be lower than their total cost in salary while they are on leave, since if it was higher, the business can just pay the salary!

Therefore, the insurance company must cover the cost by taking on the risk that some employee don't take parental leave (and thus, profit off those premiums).

But in aggregate, "everybody" reproduces. Therefore, there'd be nobody to "earn" the premium from. So the only remaining possibility to profit is from making interest from the premiums not yet paid out (which, while significant, can't really be as profitable as any existing insurance product).

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#358

Post by not_kurt_godel »

lhorie wrote: post #244
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm suggesting that your blanket statement about the triviality of hiring or not hiring a 10th employee is patently absurd on multiple levels. Even the dichotomy you posed in your reply is nonsensical - why is your assumption that the 2 options for revenue are 1M vs 2M? What if it's 1.3M, and your 9 employees are barely able to handle the workload?

> What if it's 1.3M Then you do your risk analysis and determine if the risk of the person not working out is something you can stomach. At 1M/yr, the risk is you hire a salesperson who gets you no new accounts after a year, existing revenue drops for other reasons and then you are forced to fire someone productive to make ends meet because you're 100k in the hole. At 1.3M/yr, maybe it'll be extremely stressful, but…

> Then you do your risk analysis and determine if the risk of the person not working out is something you can stomach

Yeah, duh. Apparently you do realize this tautologically obvious point despite your churlish and contrarian argumentation against it. The need to do risk analysis as it relates to potential pregnancy was the main thrust of the post that you dismissively replied to by saying that any business can do equally well with 9 employees as with 10 as if it were some kind of fundamental truth - despite that assertion being trivially easily disproven even by your own logic.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#359

Post by jobigoud »

Spooky23 wrote: post #241
kurthr wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there's... "hey Joe's got young kids and needs to be 9-5 now, you're single so can't you pick up the slack?" Or "you're not married, can't you be on the pager during Xmas/Turkey-day/weekend". They are two abusive sides of the same coin.

The abuse is the compulsory, unpaid pager, and the expectation that you’re working 7a-9p. “Joe” with the young kids pushes back because he has to. You’re the sucker saying yes. The fix for this is easy. You pay for on-call, and have a understood system for assigning it. My brother in law is a fireman... he misses many holidays, but can plan around it because there is such a system.

> “Joe” with the young kids pushes back because he has to.

Having children is just a choice of a hobby that takes a lot of time, but in our current culture it's reprehensible for me to say I can't fill in his hours because I have my own hobbies that I want to do instead.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#360

Post by coldtea »

ukj wrote: post #23
coldtea wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, you know, businesses and societies could leave that as a courtesy to just those that did chose to have children -- a group of people that every society that cares about sustaining itself forward should encourage and respect.

Sure. Everybody likes grand gestures. Nobody likes paying for them. As a social responsibility it's not on private businesses to cover the cost. Pay for it through taxation. Until then - my choice is a competitive advantage.

>Sure. Everybody likes grand gestures. Nobody likes paying for them. As a social responsibility it's not on private businesses to cover the cost.

That's just a law away. Some countries do have private businesses to cover the cost.

Private businesses are not holy cows.

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