What fucking company is this? They are just asking for free publicity.
How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA
201–210 of 332 posts
Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is the trade off we pay for lower taxes. Why would mandating that companies provide meaningful maternity or paternity leave require higher taxes? This topic doesn't have much to do with fiscal policy.
If a company is required to provide paid leave, then that means they are required to pay a person money and aren't getting anything in return for that money. In other words, you're paying a person not to work. It essentially acts the same way as a tax.
This already happens all the time for salaried employees, they often receive vacation time that doesn't reduce their yearly salary and this works perfectly fine for those roles. This isn't a tax scenario, this is more of a compensation adjustment for workers.
Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA
#203At this point, the male students would nod and go on about their days, and the female grad students would stick around in an increasingly panicked state to ask about that whole saving annual and sick leave thing, since their contracts don’t include leave. I was 100% like the male students until fairly recently when my girlfriend and I started having serious conversations about having children. The conversation was so…
> In the US the only legal guarantee you get is that you can leave for 12 weeks unpaid and you'll probably still have a job when you get back. (1) Most companies provide better benefits than what is legally required (2) The US has a robust and very expensive welfare system (3) Unlike something like cancer pregnancy is not an accident. If you can't afford to pay for children, don't have them. FWIW most tech companies…
Poor people deserve to have kids, too.
Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And I don't want to even get in to how fucked up it is to have to save up years of vacation days to take some time off when you have a baby This is the trade off we pay for lower taxes. (Yes certain states like NY and CA have higher tax rates, but they make up for it with more state benefits.)
Maternity and paid sick leave policies have very little to do with tax rates. See the CA state budget here: http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2014-15/Enacted/agencies.html The big-ticket items are the things affecting tax rates, like 11B on corrections, or almost 50B on K-12 education, and another 50B on health care services.
I believe what the OP was saying here was that in countries like the UK or Canada with subsidized/government-provided health care, the costs for that health care is covered by higher taxes/VAT.
Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA
#205I am a graduate student, my wife is a post-doc, and we are expecting our first child in the next few weeks. I actually just found out that my school recently (this summer) made a policy allowing graduate students to take up to 60 days of paid leave, so I am fortunate here at BU. I didn't realize how bad the US policies are until we started talking with our (mostly foreign) coworkers who were all surprised that my wif…
I am also at BU (staff) and my wife and I had our first child this past spring. Our benefits are good compared to my past employers, and I took a few weeks of paid vacation time so I could stay home with my wife and help after her c-section. I'm glad to hear that there is leave available for graduate students as well. Are the 60 days of paid leave for sick time or paternity leave? I had not heard that anything change…
The 60 days are specified as paid paternity or maternity leave[1]. I don't actually know what the sick leave policy is. As a graduate student your schedule is flexible. I am not taking classes, but I can work as much as I want, and as long as the vacations are reasonable they aren't really tracked. I think that goes along with officially being paid for 39 hours a week with the expectation that you are there much more.
[1] http://www.bu.edu/academics/policies/childbirth-and-adoption...
Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a counterpoint from civilized Germany, after the birth of a child both parents are granted 14 months paid leave (at 2/3 salary up to ~$3k/mo) to split between them. Usually the mother takes 12 and the father 2 concurrently. The state pays for this, not the employer. You also have the right to 3 years unpaid leave (extended with further children) and the employer must find you a similar position when you return to…
The real "benefit" of the American system is that it keeps everyone eager. It keeps us grateful to have a crappy job at all. It keeps us ready to trade salary for benefits, or vice versa. It keeps us at jobs we don't like for the medical benefits we think they give us and our families. It reduces the bargaining power of labor. Is this good in the long term? Maybe not, but it is the American aesthetic. It goes hand in…
That can't be the case. Pretty much every country with a better handle on these things, also has a young, eagar often educated workforce.
Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The USA looks less and less like a democracy _for_ the people the more I learn about it. It's what people get when they come up with their own fancy interpretation of the meaning of the word "freedom". Enjoy a lot of individualism? Well, better be prepared to live with the consequences. N.B.: I grew up under communist dictatorship, so I know the other extreme too. Both are pernicious.
Like Bill Hicks used to say, "You think you're free? OK. Try doing anything without money, then you'll see how free you are." Also, the vast majority of americans don't actually enjoy any individuality; what they actually love is running their mouths right up to the second they need major medical treatment. Then the whining starts. A couple years ago I read an amazing interview that I wish I'd kept. During the great…
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTwpBLzxe4U
"I've been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No."
Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA
#208I think we should have paid maternity leave and I think the federal govt should pay for it. If you force employers to pay for it you discourage the hiring of young women.
"I think the federal govt should pay for it."
Please have the decency to be explicit about what you are saying. No government, federal or otherwise, has any means to pay for anything. All money comes from taxes. All taxes come from individuals. What you are really saying is "I think all of the taxpaying individuals in the United States should pay for women's maternity leave."
Once you recognize that, I can do no better than quote P.J. O'Rourke: "...remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head.
Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don't pay taxes, you'll be fined. If you don't pay the fine, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot.
Thus I -- in my role as citizen and voter -- am going to shoot you -- in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck -- if you don't pay your fair share of the national tab.
Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, "Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?"
So, would you kill your mother to pay for someone else's maternity leave?
Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA
#209I think we should have paid maternity leave and I think the federal govt should pay for it. If you force employers to pay for it you discourage the hiring of young women.
"I think the federal govt should pay for it." Please have the decency to be explicit about what you are saying. No government, federal or otherwise, has any means to pay for anything. All money comes from taxes. All taxes come from individuals. What you are really saying is "I think all of the taxpaying individuals in the United States should pay for women's maternity leave." Once you recognize that, I can do no bett…
Every decent behavior anybody has in public can be explained by 'holding a gun to their head' by the same chain of logic. You spit on the sidewalk, you get fined. And so on.
This holds the average citizen in contempt, and I reject the whole sophomoric chain of 'causation'. People behave because they're civilized and orderly and want their community to thrive.
So lets get the conversation back to, how do we want to maintain a standard of living that benefits us all. Through taxes and rules and institutions, like we have always done.
Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Important to note that these are government leave programs. A big problem in the USA is that it is expected that your employer handle this stuff. Here in Canada, the employment insurance system - a payroll-tax-funded program that handles short-term unemployment benefits - also handles parental leave. They offer 4 months for birth mothers and a an additional 8 months for any parent. The money is tiny - something like…
You just listed how the Canadian policy lets the husband take time also (more time, if they want, such as in your case). That suggests that companies would be equally "punished" by hiring men who want families. Why would that policy only harm women's employment options?
Because realistically I'm unusual for using it, and I used it for only one of my three kids.
In my progressive, bleeding-heart-liberal family? The man still represented only 7 months of leave time, while the woman represented 29. The "leave cost" whatever it may be was 4X higher for my wife.
From a policy perspective, it's roughly egalitarian... but you can't ignore the cultural difference that means 100% maternal leave is the default assumption.