Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19

Post by will4274 » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 6:24 AM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #213

ng12 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've seen is the complaints are largely coming from couples that want to raise kids while both parents work full time jobs. Asking for fewer hours so you can continue that lifestyle is asking your employer and fellow employees to subsidize your second income, not your ability to have and raise children. My coworkers with SAH spouses aren't feeling the burn anywhere near as badly -- it's just an extended summer f…

In modern society it's basically required that both parents work full-time jobs. It's not the 50s anymore; you can't support an entire household with children on one income. So you can't have the expectation that one of the parents give up a large chunk of their salary just to have kids. If you do structure society in this way then you get rapidly declining birth rates and very bad long-term population demographic pr…

Post by patd » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 6:25 AM UTC

ornornor wrote: post #794

wmsiler wrote: post #595

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>they chose to have children, and I chose not to Up until the pandemic, my work schedule had almost never been affected by me being parent in any way. I chose to have kids knowing that my wife and I would be able to continue working without this significantly impacting our jobs (after the first several weeks after they were born, of course), and that has always been true until this. You are acting as though parents f…

> This argument is like saying that a storm knocked down your neighbor's house, but not yours. It’s not the same though. Having a so called “act of god” result in property damage is just chance. Having children (in most cases) isn’t chance. It’s a conscious decision. Even though no one could guess the pandemic would happen, I’d hope people getting children are conscious that they’re getting into a 18–20 years commitm…

Post by throw554324 » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 6:29 AM UTC

Cd00d wrote: post #707

nicbou wrote: post #160

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I don't fully agree with you. Back when I worked in retail or fast food, smokers could step out for a 5 minute smoke break every once in a while. As a non-smoker, I wasn't allowed to just sit there for 5 minutes. At the end of the day, we got paid the same, but smokers got 30 minutes off, courtesy of the non-smokers who picked up the slack. Likewise, parents are excused from work because they have children. I fully a…

Honestly curious, what are these "personal obligations" that are similar to educating and entertaining children during their waking hours in dual-career homes after childcare and in-person school went poof? What I'm seeing overall is a shocking lack of empathy for that situation and seeing home-parenting obligations during a pandemic as not being too dissimilar from taking time to binge Tiger King or take a road trip…

Post by jlg23 » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 6:31 AM UTC

rauhl wrote: post #747

rhizome wrote: post #459

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A BIG chunk of all that drama is due to the US social safety net not including childcare. That's the thing disturbing thing about these stories: employees are turned against each other when it's a) the company; and b) your tax dollars, not providing any kind of built-in childcare for society. In France, kids can go to preschool and have pre- and post- school childcare, which has to be paid, but it's only like $500/mo…

The problem with that is two-fold: first, the median childcare worker is less concerned with the child’s long-term success than is the median parent (that’s not a slight against childcare workers!); second, that the presence of state childcare makes it less competitive for parents to spend time taking care of their children themselves rather than to work and earn money, which means more and more folks are likely to u…

Post by collyw » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 6:35 AM UTC

jdm2212 wrote: post #274

nicbou wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't fully agree with you. Back when I worked in retail or fast food, smokers could step out for a 5 minute smoke break every once in a while. As a non-smoker, I wasn't allowed to just sit there for 5 minutes. At the end of the day, we got paid the same, but smokers got 30 minutes off, courtesy of the non-smokers who picked up the slack. Likewise, parents are excused from work because they have children. I fully a…

Someone has to provide the goods and services you'll consume when you're old. Those people are today's kids, whose parents are doing you a big favor at considerable expense to themselves. Raising children isn't like smoking, a hobby, a side hustle, or other miscellaneous personal obligations. It's more like military service and jury duty -- an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we kn…