French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by ChuckNorris89 » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

acituan wrote: post #417

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> have very welcoming immigration laws But also huge language barriers, especially for small shops, not speaking the local language is seen a disadvantage. > we have no massive local companies that can utilize all that talent and no big VC funding That is not because Europe has less money, but because they have different risk profiles and competencies regarding investing. In some European countries governments are th…

>In some European countries governments are the biggest venture capitalists

Yeah, this x1000. In my area, most startups survive by government and EU grants so the thinking pattern of most startups here is "what do we do to get more grant money?". You can't create successful SW companies like that. Not to mention, the elephant in the room, the fact that those government grants are often accorded by favoritism instead of merit(connections, nepotism, etc.)

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

#422

Post by jariel » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #164

brnt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those policies are discussed in the open, don't generalize your countries dysfunctional political culture to the rest of the world. Also, don't assume then that your legislators considered the externalities such as poverty and working poor of such a disparate society. Europe is fine, don't confuse the absence of tophits for an absence of a strong middle class. I'm tempted to say Europe is in fact one of the most resi…

"Europe" in the sense you speak of just isn't. EU as an economic space has huge internal periphery with all the typical problems thereof (high unemployment, flight of young qualified workforce elsewhere). It is quite easy to visualize, actually. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... My wife is a huge fan of Spanish culture. We travel there often (pre-Covid, but hopefully also post-Covid). An…

Who'd have thought that warm weather causes unemployment?

Or perhaps being a post-Roman nation causes unemployment?

Even though I'm partly kidding, I'm partly not.

Some of these things are so consistent, I wonder if we gloss over them and should contemplate they are underlying issues whereas 'employment policy' may be less relevant than we think. Maybe in some cultures people like to work more than others.

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

#423

Post by oblio » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #11

lotsofpulp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s zero in all but ~10 US states if your employer has fewer than 50 employees. And even then, the leave is unpaid.

> the leave is unpaid All employer-paid employee benefits ultimately come with a reduction in salary. The reason is simple - companies do not look at your salary when deciding if it is worth hiring you. They look at total compensation (salary + benefits). The larger the benefits, the lower the salary. Me, I prefer minimal benefits and maximal salary.

This is wrong because many benefits are like insurance.

It costs the company $100 per employee to offer rarely used $10000 benefits to everyone.

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

#424

Post by buzzerbetrayed » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

car wrote: post #43

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before people think that this policy is all roses, a close friend of mine is the CEO of a multi billion dollar international business. They don’t hire anyone from France because the French government makes it so difficult to fire a bad hire. Maybe you could argue that the French are better off without them, but people love working for them and they have great pay and benefits. I’m sure there are a number of companies…

CEO of a multi billion dollar international business Companies simply can’t always pay people to not work for 6 months to a year, so they’ll go somewhere where they don’t have to. Why ‘simply can’t’ a ‘multi billion dollar international business’ offer paid parental leave, if so required by law? This does not make any sense, large international corporations will do business wherever they can profitably.

I wasn't saying that this particular multi-billion dollar can't afford it. Just that there are many smaller companies that can't.

This particular multi-billion dollar company certainly doesn't want to pay it. And so they get their employees from other places. They still do business in France and have customers there. They are a SAAS company. They just don't hire from there.

Also, they do offer paid parental leave. Just not an entire year of it.

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

#425

Post by pizza234 » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

pravda wrote: post #399

pizza234 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still only 2% of men take the leave, while 42% of women do [1]. > I can only speculate as to why. This is actually pretty simple: Germany's culture is still deeply rooted into old gender roles - father provider and mother educator. To give a context of the culture and legal system, as of today, unmarried fathers don't get legal custody automatically, and if they apply and the mother refuses, they need to go to cour…

>unmarried fathers don't get legal custody automatically, Interesting. Do unmarried fathers have any financial responsibility for the child?

Yes. The German old perspective is detailed in the Zaunegger vs. Germany case in the European Court of Human Rights, because the German judge voted against recognizing legal custody (only one in six to do) as human right, and gave a justification with historical grounds.

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

#426

Post by ptyyy » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #404

ptyyy wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm very curious about how a company could determine or enforce which spouse is primary and which is secondary. My company leaves that decision to the couple. The couple chooses who is primary and secondary. My wife got 12 weeks as the primary caregiver. Our situation is a bit weird because we work for the same company.

Yeah, in that case it makes sense, but if your wife worked for a different company, what's stopping you from claiming to be the primary caregiver even if your wife does the majority of the child care work? Or vice versa? This policy seems unenforceable in this circumstance which is surely more common than both spouses working for the same company.

You make a good point.

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

#427

Post by Ericson2314 » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

rags2riches wrote: post #419

Ericson2314 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, more myopic individualism. How about this: after we mandate even split and the culture changes, we give parents back the right to allocate it as they see fit. Hell, if we want to converge faster and get back to parental choice quicker, we might mandate 3:2 men's vs women's paid leave. Annecodes like your female PhD candidate story are no basis for determining policy.

Sure, call it individualism to view people like my friends as the ends of your policy. What shall we call it when the policy treats them as a means to some other greater end?

> What shall we call it when the policy treats them as a means to some other greater end?

Sacrifices for the greater good.

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

#428

Post by fastball » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

jahaja wrote: post #197

fastball wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with payment. People work jobs in society. Even if you don't live in a society where you get paid a wage for working that job, time still needs to be taken off work to have a baby. It's more economically efficient (it takes time and effort to replace the work that was being done by someone, regardless of how employers are remunerating employees) to extend that person's leave than to arrange for…

Why do you think this is about economical efficiency?

Because that's reality?

It's emergent behavior based off efficiency and the harsh realities of childbirth (i.e. men and women have very different parts to play in childbirth). It's not sexism.

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

#429

Post by fastball » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

madarcho wrote: post #173

fastball wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "structurally sexism", it's biology. Practically no women ever will make it through the entirety of a pregnancy without needing (not choosing) to take some time off work if she works a full-time job. Even if this is just a single day of delivery. Generally though, it's much more than a single day that needs to be taken off. In contrast, at no point in a woman's pregnancy does the father need to take time off…

Do you think the work stops once the baby is born? This is exactly the effort that these parental leave laws tries to cover.

Did you read my comment at all?

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

#430

Post by confidantlake » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #414

Swenrekcah wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having more than 2 kids as a couple is actually pretty rare. Kids/woman ratio is way under 2 everywhere in Europe [0]. So this is just nonsense. 0: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

His coworker certainly did have 5 kids, regardless of what the average birth rate is.

I interpreted the "this", in "this is nonsense", to refer to the claim that excess leave from having 5 kids is causing economic decline in Europe. I don't think he was claiming that someone in Europe having 5 kids was nonsense.