141–150 of 229 posts
Wow, just wow. Whoever made that decision is somebody who is truly worthy of the title "douchebag". How can any human being have so little regard for another? That's just disgusting. There's a right way to handle a situation like this, and it goes something like: ----------- Dear $EMPLOYEE: We are very sorry to hear about your loss. All of us are wishing you the best in this time of need, and we are here to support y…
And you might think, hey but 99% of people are decent and would not take advantage of the company. That's probably true! But there's always the 1% that ruins it for everybody else (just like the outlier sociopath HR person in this article).
If you say stuff like, "take as much time as you need," 99% of employees would not abuse this situation. But there's always the 1%...and if it's a big company, that 1% could be 1,000 people.
The rate of stillbirth is 1 in 100 births. So it's not exactly uncommon.
So you can see how a company might end up paying a salary to 3 people who haven't showed up to work in over 2 years because you were just trying to be a decent human.
You might think that's an insane scenario that would never happen. You'd be surprised. Crazy things like that are the reason HR policies exist in the first place.
Her maternity leave was cut from 8 to 6 WEEKS I had to do a double take there, I read it as months first time. How can a woman give birth and be back at work in eight weeks? Six weeks seems impossible baby or not, the recovery time for pregnancy and birth can be many months. If I were a woman living in a society like that I think I’d either not have children or not work at all.
What is the answer? I don't know. As I recently read "Most people can more easily imagine the end of the world than a change in capitalism."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't understand how this is going to result in anything positive for the company. the whole point of an HR department is to stop anything developing that could cause productivity issues for a company. Cutting the leave short for because someone's child dies shows a stunning lack of empathy or understanding of wider consequences for staff and company. If I had found out that my company had pulled shit like th…
I have nothing (to my knowledge) but my opinion on this, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that a majority of people just lack empathy.
I've noticed in myself and others that when you're stressed/inexperienced/otherwise not-at-ease at work, people start behaving defensively. That often turns into this sort of cold-hearted behaviour that people believe is considered professional, even though no competent manager would actually behave that way.
It's similar to middle management wearing nicer clothes in the typical signalling theory example.
The article says she was given 6 weeks instead of 8 weeks. It also says that it’s unclear if the maternity policy was even 8 weeks to begin with, and HR didn’t seem to know. Apparently there are multiple policies, depending on role?
I don’t know the “right” amount of time, but it seems like the difference is a lot smaller than the headline and discussion are implying. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong or evil for a company to give 6 weeks off for a baby that died on the first day. It absolutely does not fit the subtitle which says “experience extreme forms of pregnancy discrimination”. Reasonable people could debate whether it’s the most fair, but nobody can say getting only 6 weeks out of a possible 8 is “extreme forms of pregnancy discrimination”.
The article also says that an outside hire was made to fill a more senior role that this woman hoped would go to her. She suspects that she did not get it because she was pregnant, and the company insists that those are unrelated.
Should we just assume that every pregnant person who doesn’t get promoted is a victim of discrimination? Non-pregnant people also don’t get promotions quite often. While I’m sure that does happen for improper reasons from time to time, and it must be frustrating, there isn’t anything to prove that is what happened here. I’m sure it’s also frustrating that when it does happen due to pregnancy, it’s impossible to prove.
There are some legitimately difficult problems when it comes to pregnancies and employment. It’s illegal to not hire someone because they are pregnant, so what do you do instead? If you’re a small company or a startup, you have nobody performing that function, and you’re still paying a salary and benefits. If it’s an unskilled role, sure you can contract a temp hire, but that isn’t an option for senior roles or roles with specialized skills, even if you could afford the contractor premium on top of the existing salary. I honestly don’t know how I would handle that situation in a fair way.
The other issue she has is compensation. As a sales person, part of her compensation was based on commission. Well, if she’s not at work, she isn’t making sales, and therefore not getting commission on sales that don’t exist. Ok, that sucks, but what’s the solution for people who take commission roles? Someone else has to pay out of their commission? What if she were a realtor? If she stops selling houses for a couple months, she isn’t going to make anything either. But since they are self-employed, there’s nobody else to point at and accuse of discrimination. She can’t demand that other realtors in town chip in and cover the shortfall. Why should this be any different? She feels she should not be “penalized”, but that isn’t a penalty, so this is disingenuous.
The article then says “Discrimination is particularly flagrant in Silicon Valley, where women hold just 5 percent of leadership positions.” But they haven’t established discrimination as the reason for that, so it sounds like the article, like many from Vice (although this author is new, it’s usually that Lorenzo guy trying to spin facts and invent controversies) is more interested in pushing a narrative. To borrow a term from tptacek, collecting rageviews.
They then quote a lawyer who represents plaintiffs in discrimination lawsuits against their employers. Clearly a real source of unbiased facts on the issue at hand.
And a former Google employee filed a lawsuit against Google, who said: “The memo described disparaging comments made by a manager at Google about pregnant women being “overly emotional and hard to work with.”
This is not a wise comment for a male manager to make. But if the worst thing they did was make a flippant comment like this (there is no allegation that they acted on it, the basis of the complaint was simply that they heard the comment), I would call it a fairly extreme reaction to get HR involved and attack them on internal mailing lists.
The comment isn’t exactly unfounded either, it’s just un-PC, and one of those things that we aren’t allowed to say, even though everybody knows that pregnancy has a non-zero impact on emotions (for good reason!). Show me someone who has either been pregnant or spent a lot of time around a pregnant person who hasn’t thought they had some moments of overly emotional challenges here and there, and I’ll show you a liar. This guy’s crime sounds like a lapse of judgment in vocalizing it during a moment of frustration. Wait, was it a guy? Or did they leave that out and let us assume that? It turns out, it was a woman, who is also a mother, who made the comment. So to reiterate, a woman heard her woman manager make a comment about another woman being difficult to work with when she is pregnant, and decided to report her to HR and rant about this injustice on internal mailing lists. Unsurprisingly, her manager turned cold on her. Since the woman who complained apparently also happened to be pregnant, it’s a little ironic that she went nuclear over another woman’s comment that someone was difficult to work with. You know what other unwise, flippant comments I’ve heard at work? “They can’t touch me, I’m pregnant.”
She likely didn’t do much to improve anyone’s perception by going that route. And considering the players involved, I don’t think this supports the “gender inequality” claim. But hey, at least she is a martyr on twitter now, and she is currently shaking down Google for a large settlement.
I think there is a lot of room for improvement on these issues. I don’t think we get there by using underhanded scorched earth tactics. A paid pregnancy-related leave might be something that the government has to provide for it to work. Something like unemployment insurance.
Her maternity leave was cut from 8 to 6 WEEKS I had to do a double take there, I read it as months first time. How can a woman give birth and be back at work in eight weeks? Six weeks seems impossible baby or not, the recovery time for pregnancy and birth can be many months. If I were a woman living in a society like that I think I’d either not have children or not work at all.
Women everywhere agree with you. Capitalism relies on women to create, raise and see to the education of new consumers and workers with little to no help. They are opting out. People everywhere see that the childless have a higher standard of living than parents. In many places there are more people 65+ than those under 18, and that will soon enough be common in most places. The example cited in the article is just a…
Countries who have done this, while still being market-based economies (capitalist), have been successful in increasing their birth rate to sustainable levels! Maybe we should try it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't understand how this is going to result in anything positive for the company. the whole point of an HR department is to stop anything developing that could cause productivity issues for a company. Cutting the leave short for because someone's child dies shows a stunning lack of empathy or understanding of wider consequences for staff and company. If I had found out that my company had pulled shit like th…
My thought exactly. Honestly, I think Informatica should consider firing their entire HR department. As you say, the entire point of HR is risk management. I hear loads of time on HN about how you can never trust HR because they are only there to protect the company, and while that's true, a lot of the time good HR people realize that the employees' needs and the long-term needs of company are aligned, so they should…
Why? They changed the policy over a year ago to 16 weeks of paid leave, and included pregnancy recovery in that. Is that not good enough?
The United States is infamous among world nations for lack of mandatory paid maternity leave. Even the unpaid leave is incredibly short: Only 12 weeks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternity_leave_in_the_United_... This, while the total _paid_ leave available to mothers among OECD nations is ~54 weeks, including 18 weeks average paid maternity leave plus another long period of paid parental leave following it: http:…
That 12 weeks of unpaid leave is only for companies who employ more than 50 people, too. I expect most Americans work for companies smaller than that (and so don't get the leave) but I haven't checked.
https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-profes...
"Since 2014...34.3 percent worked at small companies."
And this is for "small" defined as It's also important to note that it's wrong to say that employees of small businesses "don't get the leave." Many small businesses will ofter leave to their employees without a federal mandate.