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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

#351

Post by [deleted] »

ptyyy wrote: post #339
pi-rat wrote: post #156

28 days? That's barely enough to get your head off from work tbh. I just finished 133 days (at 80% pay) of paternity leave here in Norway, and the last part was def more rewarding than the start as you hit your new stride and regular work life grew ever more distant. All the organised toddler activities shut down because of covid19. Bought one of those child carrier backpacks, and we've been exploring forests and mou…

Around the start of August I finished up my 6 weeks here in the US and it was definitely not enough. 133+ days would have been nice, but here in Freedom-Land™ I was lucky to get the 6 weeks I was given. I know a few new dads who got no paternity leave from work, or 1-3 days. Absolutely ridiculous in this day and age.

[deleted]

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

#352

Post by TMWNN »

bwb wrote: post #327
marcusverus wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks love to talk about these marginal 'perks' in Social Democracies, and the benefits experienced by the least fortunate, but you never hear about the costs of these programs or their impact on the finances of the average household. All these great benefits are, of course, funded via massive taxation of the middle and upper classes. You can see the (relative) impact in the data, which reveal household incomes to be…

Taxes in the usa are not accurate above, you need to add in healthcare and social security type payments too. Our tax rate is as high with those things included.

>Taxes in the usa are not accurate above, you need to add in healthcare and social security type payments too.

The OECD definition of disposable income is after healthcare and social security costs (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46).

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

#353

Post by dnate »

straw11 wrote: post #6
mensetmanusman wrote: post #2

Spain found that parental leave resulted in fewer children. Ha. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

This a good Thing, the Planet cant afford more people.

you may want to watch this video and check your fear of overpopulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI

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

#354

Post by throwaway62948 »

I work at one of the large U.S. tech companies and am currently on parental leave. Fathers get four months of leave at 100% pay, and my health insurance covered every penny of the $500k birth (there were a lot of complications). My wife and I feel extremely lucky to have this perk at this company, and I don’t take it for granted at all. It’s mind-blowing to me that U.S. companies are not required to offer any leave to the fathers. My previous company did not offer leave, so a lot of my male coworkers just used a few vacation days and then were back at work.

My wife and I are very busy taking care of the baby essentially all day, so I have no clue how this work is so often done by one parent, much less having both parents working full time.

The U.S. needs to get its act together in the 21st century. A lack of mandated PTO and a lack of leave cannot be good for the long term mental health of the country. I would gladly pay more taxes to ensure everyone had this perk.

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

#355

Post by jasonlotito »

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...

80% salary, with a cap of 1006 SEK (110 USD) a day. While paid leave is great, it's not just 80% of your salary. There are a lot of maximums. This isn't to say this is bad or "I gotcha!" but rather to share a bit more information.

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

#356

Post by tialaramex »

echelon wrote: post #284
black_knight wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. In Norway fathers and mothers must each take 15 weeks. And then in total there are either 49 weeks (with 100% pay) or 59 weeks (with 80% pay), so you can divide the remaining weeks between the two. But there are some inequalities in the system still. For instance, the father can only take the shared weeks if the mother is in "activity" (working or studying). While in Sweden there is no such requirements. And…

A company has to pay workers for 49 - 59 weeks without getting any work? I'm all for parental leave, but that's a full year. Does the government subsidize this? That expense could sink a small company. What happens if the workers leave the company after getting the benefit? I'm really curious how European firms compete with American ones when workers can take so much time off and saddle their companies with so much r…

Yes, the government will subsidise this, although exact details vary, for example government might choose to arrange that they pay the employee over this period instead.

It's not magic, obviously overall the economy is still paying for this to happen, but then the US system isn't magic either, babies don't magically receive any benefits from parents who are actually working all the time and barely see them for a handful of hours per week. So the question is only: Is it a good idea? Because if it's a good idea then paying for it is just a question of mechanics. Same for universal healthcare, the provision of safe drinking water, literacy programmes, you name it.

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

#357

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

amyjess wrote: post #341
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is smaller employers, which simply can't afford to shoulder the burden of paid maternity leave for 1 of their 10 employees. You can set up a graduated system like the UK has, where all employers have to pay and can reclaim a variable amount. But one way or another, any benefit the government won't foot the bill for is a benefit many parents won't get.

Honestly, so many of the problems in our work culture is caused by small businesses who don't want to play by the rules that I'm okay with just letting them hang. This is the same argument that's used to justify lack of paid sick leave, lack of protections against discrimination (Title VII only applies to companies with 15 or more people), working people who don't have employer-provided health insurance, etc. Every s…

It's not a matter of willingness to play by the rules. A company with 5 employees is always going to struggle to handle a sudden 20% increase in labor costs, no matter how much its owner has good intentions.

It's certainly consistent to say that everyone should just work for big businesses who can absorb these kinds of costs. But I think we have to acknowledge that this process, where regulations end up building a wall only big businesses can easily climb over, would be called "regulatory capture" in a different context. Government funding really seems to me like the better alternative.

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

#358

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

sokoloff wrote: post #305
echelon wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company has to pay workers for 49 - 59 weeks without getting any work? I'm all for parental leave, but that's a full year. Does the government subsidize this? That expense could sink a small company. What happens if the workers leave the company after getting the benefit? I'm really curious how European firms compete with American ones when workers can take so much time off and saddle their companies with so much r…

The salaries for devs in Europe are quite a bit lower than the SF/NYC/Seattle/Boston/Austin markets. You can look at it as they’re “buying” these (and other) benefits via lower salaries across the entire market.

Tech salaries aren't lower in Europe because of free healthcare and education funded by our higher taxes, they're lower because we don't have a huge government funded defense tech sector, we don't have mammoth sized, trillion dollar SW companies with a global monopoly like FAANGs that create hundreds of thousands of highly paid jobs, we don't have massive VC funds throwing money at every founder that promises to create the next Instagram and we don't have the US treasury free-debt money printer. Combine all that with a shortage of skilled workers due to the high cost of higher education in the US and the very restrictive immigration policies, even for skilled labor (H1Bs are still way tougher to get than a work visa for Europe). So basically the US has huge demand for talent with low supply which results in high wages.

Instead we have the opposite. We have very welcoming immigration laws(which waters down salaries) we have plenty of skilled grads as education is basically free(which waters down salaries again), so in my college town I can't pretty much throw a rock without hitting someone who's doing a PhD in DS/ML/AI but we have no massive local companies that can utilize all that talent and no big VC funding so all those bright minds end up working in lame webshops/consultancies or in some research institute that gets bought up by FAANGs the minute it comes up with a good idea. So basically, we have a huge supply of talent(local and imported) but a low demand(compared to the US) wich results in lower salaries.

To summarize, this is why we can't compete with the US on the tech front, not because of our taxes but because the US can outspend us.

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

#359

Post by yxhuvud »

rezic wrote: post #212
ido wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do you assume that? With my second child I took 4 months of parental leave (2 of which simultaneously with my wife) & divided between ages 0-2 & 10-12 months old.

I can't speak for other countries, but both parents cannot take parental leave at the same time in Norway. Some choose to use vacation days while the other parent has parental leave, but it's a fair assumption to make that one of the parents were working while the other was on parental leave.

In Sweden, most of the paternity leave is one at a time, but both are taking care of the child during the first two weeks.

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

#360

Post by sokoloff »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #358
sokoloff wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The salaries for devs in Europe are quite a bit lower than the SF/NYC/Seattle/Boston/Austin markets. You can look at it as they’re “buying” these (and other) benefits via lower salaries across the entire market.

Tech salaries aren't lower in Europe because of free healthcare and education funded by our higher taxes, they're lower because we don't have a huge government funded defense tech sector, we don't have mammoth sized, trillion dollar SW companies with a global monopoly like FAANGs that create hundreds of thousands of highly paid jobs, we don't have massive VC funds throwing money at every founder that promises to crea…

When I'm considering where to hire my next team or open my next office (both things which I've actually done, including a European dev office [in Prague]), I assure you that I look at as much of the entire picture as I can. That includes the cost of benefits, cost of taxes, labor policies, education and size of workforce, etc.

The more labor costs an employer in category X, the less the employer has left to offer labor in categories Y and Z.

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