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French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

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Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#231

Post by heyoo »

vortico wrote: post #180

I'm dumb and don't know anything about maternity/paternity leave. What prevents someone from being hired by a company, taking leave due to a child in X days, taking the salary the government forces the company to give you, and quitting Y days after you return? What if X and Y are a month or even one day? Could companies could be scammed for a year of salary while getting only a few days of value out of their employee…

In Denmark you are not entitled to a full salary during your leave. You are entitled to around 2k€ per month from the government (if you qualify).

However, it is a quite common employee benefit, that the employer pays full salary for part of or for the entire parental leave. The employer is then reimbursed from the government for the first 2k€ every month.

Nothing prevents you from quitting when you get back from parental leave. Except that you probably already have a lot on your mind with a little child - why add the extra pressure of switching jobs?

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#232

Post by alkonaut »

woodpanel wrote: post #105
cluoma wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany also has quite generous parental leave. 14 months to split between parents as they see fit. But no single parent can take more than 12 and it's only 65%. 12 of the 14 months can be doubled as well, up to 24 months, at half the regular salary replacement. A good option if a parent wants to work part-time.

I can echo that. Still only 2% of men take the leave, while 42% of women do [1]. I can only speculate as to why. 1) Our cultural wiring runs deeper than just "sex is a social construct" 2) The German system is still quite complicated. As countless online calculators and private consultancies helping you filling out the forms prove. As well as the above statistic itself, since financially it would make more sense if t…

This is clearly cultural. If I hadn't taken my several months of leave when my kids were pre-daycare age, that would have been effectively me being an "absent father" in the eyes of people around me. It simply isn't a very acceptable thing to do.

You get paid (80%). You can't get fired. Choosing not to do it means you don't want to do it, or you chose something else over your parental leave. Not only would skipping parental leave not be seen as normal by my social circle, it wouldn't be seen as normal by my manager or colleagues. I'd be getting questions like "you took zero weeks of leave when your son was born? why?".

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#233

Post by speedgoose »

msh wrote: post #151
tjs8rj wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I don't want 12 kids, but my mindset changes if enough kids means early retirement ;)

I think having 12 kids is a lot harder than going to work...

I think having one kid is a lot harder than going to work, when you work in IT.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#234

Post by Sharlin »

andrepd wrote: post #227
fsloth wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's more of a matter of culture and priorities than excessive expenses.

It's a matter of money more than it's a matter of "culture".

Yes, in the sense that rich Western countries can afford things like that. And many do, whether they’re ”petrostates” or not. But what about the richest country of them all? Tell me that the US couldn’t afford it if they really wanted!

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#235

Post by mcv »

andrepd wrote: post #227
fsloth wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's more of a matter of culture and priorities than excessive expenses.

It's a matter of money more than it's a matter of "culture".

No, it's more a matter of culture. Any wealthy industrialised country can easily afford this. The difference is in how much value they attach to family, child care and parenthood.

For all its talk about "family values", the US doesn't seem to care much about families; it's one of the few countries in the world without paid maternity leave (the others are Papua New Guinea, Lesotho and Swaziland), and it has the highest maternity death rate in the developed world.

And the US is not a poor country by any means; this is really a matter of culture and values.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#236

Post by crispyporkbites »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #13
dleslie wrote: post #4

It really irked me that here in Canada the options were generally skewed towards mothers remaining home. You can split 40 weeks of parental leave, but many employers won't provide parental benefits and those that do often only provide parental benefits to mothers. For instance, my employer at the time provided wage top-up for women on leave but nothing for men. Just one of _many_ structually sexist policies in societ…

Biology tends to be structurally sexist as well. The only solution is to essentially force fathers to stop working as well during this time. This is equality of outcome.

There's nothing biological about working a job. Why are women forced to stop working when they have a baby? Stop pretending our social problems are science based.

And yes, there are options for them to carry on but society pretty much forces most women to stop working, due to aforementioned social pressures, structural sexist policies and expectations we put on women.

If all men and women were forced to take 6 months off, we would see far more women succeeding in the workplace over the long term, as they would not be disadvantaged by choosing to have a baby.

This means we as a society get more people working overall in more jobs, being more productive, solving more problems and building a better future for us all. Capitalism is not zero sum- men do not lose when women succeed, quite the opposite. Limiting our workforce to 50% of our population is bad policy, even if you're sexist and in favour of men over women, you must understand the economic benefits of increased paternity leave.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#237

Post by alkonaut »

setr wrote: post #169
car wrote: post #22

Compare this to 480 days of shared and paid parental leave in Sweden at 80% salary. The fathers are looked at negatively if the don’t take some of this time. https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-maternity-leave-pater...

I dont understand how this could be a viable strategy -- unless your job is entirely useless, the business must replace your position during your absence in order to continue normal operation; even thirty days absence should disrupt things, if an alternative isn't found.. So then what exactly do you return to? It can't be your old position exactly -- you were replaced. So its more like a vague promise that the busine…

> So then what exactly do you return to

You can't know. It's supposed to be whatever I did before, or equivalent. Basically if they replace me I can make a fuss about wanting my position back or an equivalent position. In any case, you can't e.g. be at a worse pay grade even if you have a lower "position" than before. I have never seen it be a problem.

> even thirty days absence should disrupt things, if an alternative isn't found..

We do 5 or 6 weeks holiday every year without problem, not sure why that would be such a big issue. Actually since I had kids I distribute out my remaining parental leave days to a couple of weeks per summer, so from ages 0-8 my summer holidays have been 7 or 8 weeks every year. No manager would even ask a question about this.

> So its more like a vague promise

Well it's the law...

But most importantly so long as people want to take paternal leave, I think even the promise of being rehired is good enough. The key to the system working is that everyone does it. I wouldn't want to work for a manager that hadn't.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#238

Post by black_knight »

allan-a wrote: post #222
sdfqasdghj wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The two weeks at birth aren't legally full pay (most employers pay you anyway). 2. Yes if the mother doesn't qualify the father doesn't qualify. I think that there has been a court case that found that this is not legal. But the law has not yet been updated.

I can confirm this. I'm an American living in Norway and I have had two children. My wife is also American, and we moved to Norway while she was pregnant with our first child. Because my wife had not been working we were not entitled to the normal benefits. Time has passed, and my wife got a job in her career field. We are now expecting a third, and because of covid-19 my wife has been unable to work the required min…

You probably did this already, but make sure to double check that your wife really did not work enough under any possible requirements.

I know someone who had only substitute positions for shorter periods in the ten months before birth. But after several rounds of back and forth with NAV (even after birth), she got her benefits. She had to argue that staying at home would cause her to loose income (showed that she had to say no to some substitute work because of birth), and give them detailed lists of all hours she worked. Somehow it amounted to "enough".

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#239

Post by ben_w »

andrepd wrote: post #227
fsloth wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's more of a matter of culture and priorities than excessive expenses.

It's a matter of money more than it's a matter of "culture".

Any nation with a mandatory retirement age/state pension that normal people live long enough to revive for at least one year, necessarily has enough money to let typical parents look after their kids for at least six months per parent per child.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#240

Post by andrewjl »

tomp wrote: post #178
andrewjl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue isn't that someone may be forced to take the leave when they don't, rather there are hidden incentives for them to not do so when they do. There's a heck of a lot of room between the latter and the former. On another note we are seeing fertility levels fall in many countries to the point where it's becoming an economic hazard. Parental leave thus becomes a social good. A smart market friendly soluti…

Nudging parental/father's leave in order to increase fertility levels seems like a drop in the bucket... Why not tackle the real issues? Pay people more, tax them less (lower income taxes, increase capital taxes), make property cheaper. Yeah that includes a good parental leave pay (possibly more than 100%, in order to specifically encourage fertility in highly educated women/couples). That will have 100x greater effe…

All those things you listed involve difficult trade-offs.

Increased capital taxes would on the margin decrease capital expenditures, and thereby hurt income growth in long-term due to lack of productivity gains. That's the last thing we'd want if our goal was to increase income. IMHO both income and capital gains taxes should be cut substantially.

Cheaper property necessitates more property, and at least here in US not building in the suburbs has become presidential campaign fodder. The most economically productive cities like SF have some of the most complex zoning and planning regulations that make boosting supply challenging.

If I had to guess what the right answer would be, it'd be higher minimum wages + stronger unemployment benefits that are designed to get folks back to work. Germany's post-Hartz system is an example of the latter. Higher minimum wages would force people out of work, but they would also motivate higher cap-ex in automation. Higher labor costs would make certain overly expensive automation projects more tractable to corporate management. The unemployed would get an opportunity to retrain for better, higher paying jobs and do so while having basic needs met.

You can probably see though how this solution is basically impossible in the current political climate.

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