Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

the-toast.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 332 posts

Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

#211

Post by jchung »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #24

I find the whole notion of "sick days" and accruing them bizarre. What happens if you're sick but don't have enough sick days saved? Are you fired? Stop getting payed? For comparison, this is how sick leave works in the uk: https://www.gov.uk/taking-sick-leave 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

At my startup I've decided to have a "take what you want when you want it" vacation and sick day policy. I care about results against goals, not how many hours you work or when they are. Abusing the policy in a way that affects morale (e.g., deciding only to never show up in the office and spend a year working from your batcave) would be grounds for a warning/replacement. So far it has worked well, but with only a handful on the team. Not sure how it will scale to a team of 100 or 1,000 or more.

Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

#212

Post by chrisBob »

rdtsc wrote: post #3

Aside from police brutality, all the spying and erosion of privacy, corruption at high level (like regulatory capture), the medical and insurance situation points more to the fact that this country -- US, is not a civilized country. It is a country with a high GDP, strong military, good natural resources, strong manufacturing. All those nice things. But it is still not a civilized country.

I strongly agree. Its interesting how the US chooses policies some times. The culture here is very different from most other civilized countries.

Countries with no national paid maternity leave policy: US, Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and Liberia [1]

Countries who have executed people in the past 25 years who were under 18 at the time of their crimes: The People's Republic of China (PRC), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United States and Yemen. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave (also noted elsewhere in the comments)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Juvenile_off... Admittedly this fact is cherry picked. The US has since changed the policy

Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

#213

Post by michaelochurch »

viewer5 wrote: post #194
michaelochurch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of the Valley and New York, where there's less competition for talent, there are many companies that deduct sick days from vacation. This allows them to say that they offer 15 days (which, by US standards, is about average) of "PTO" in recruiting when it's actually less. When companies pull that shit, you see people getting a lot sicker, because people come into the office when they should be staying home. Th…

I'm at my first job out of college and it's like that here (taking off if you're sick = PTO) Is that not the norm?

Not at decent companies.

Stick it out for a year or two (to avoid the "job hopper" stigma) if you don't hate it, and bounce. Why be loyal to a company that isn't loyal to you?

Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

#214

Post by greedo »

zrail wrote: post #89
greedo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Discovered I had cancer in the fall of 2005. My firm told me they would be so generous to keep me employed throughout my treatment. Got fired the week before Christmas (while still going through chemo) because the company was being sold and they wanted to minimize headcount. And companies wonder why there's no loyalty anymore.

That's brutal! Chemo is one of the crappiest things that I've ever experienced, I can't even imagine having to think about looking for work at the same time. I hope you're doing well now.

Yep, completely healthy and I often forget that I ever had cancer. Of course the names of the company officers are etched in my memory, but hopefully over time I won't harbor such a grudge.

Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

#215

Post by djur »

kefka wrote: post #189
Pxtl wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when you extend the rights to the man, there's still the traditional cultural expectations will end up with the leave on the mother. I mean, I'm a liberal stereotype and we didn't split the parental leave until our third kid - we went the traditional way for the first 2. So even in the optimal "extend rights to both" we still have the problem that the female employee took leave and the male one didn't. We can re…

But, shouldn't that choice be within the family, rather than government applying uneven pressure for the female to "mother"? It may be the case with my wife and I as well. We've discussed it, and whoever makes more per 2 weeks will be the one to continue work. But we'd both want that choice to be our own. And also to be more specific, my dad was Wilbur Crawley. Worked at Faurecia, and was over 50+ engineers in an aut…

How were they out on the FMLA for a year? The federal FMLA caps out at 12 weeks, and I'm not aware of any state that has a FMLA that would extend to a year's leave.

Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

#216

Post by mikestew »

"You will be shocked to hear that the updated policy was developed in part by a man who does not have children."

You will be shocked to hear that even men without children can recognize the need to retain employees that they value, because you can be sure that your competitors in the employment market will offer less misogynistic polices.

Sadly, I had to argue this very point years ago with my Microsoft coworkers. "Wah, I don't have kids, it's unfair!" Hey, I don't have kids and never will, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize the value of offering company benefits that I will never use.

Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

#217

Post by ssharp »

king_jester wrote: post #202
ssharp wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vacation is still an option for employers, not a requirement. If the government required vacation time and a company did not previously offer vacation time, it's net-effect would still be an additional tax.

I'm not making a moral argument here -- actually find it rather immoral for a company not to offer adequate time off. I'm just saying the net-effect of a government forcing a company to pay more money than it normally would is a tax.

Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

#218

Post by coryfklein »

gglitch wrote: post #191
coryfklein wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the FMLA IS government regulation, and it isn't working so well. Besides, plenty of other governments regulate this, and they do things differently. Government regulation vs no regulation doesn't really weigh in here.

I guess I was thinking of the abstract question of how someone would convincingly argue that the plight of new parents would be better off in general with no government regulation at all. I agree that the FMLA is grossly inadequate, but not one of the businesses I've worked for in my entire career, so far as I know, has voluntarily offered anything better.

I am a free market proponent. It is difficult to predict what the free market would make of this situation since we are currently so far from the free-market model. Here are a few stabs at looking in my crystal ball.

* Minimum wage laws pressure companies to cut benefits such as this.

* Many laws and regulations make it more difficult to start your own business. In a free market, having more small business owners would even the playing field and make benefits like this more common.

* When businesses no longer have terrible laws like the FMLA to serve as a reference for their time off policies, more would craft their policy based on attracting and retaining talent. Businesses that do so naturally are more likely to succeed and will crowd others out of the market.

* Since people can't rely on a government for their own welfare in a free market, they would be more proactively aware of time off policies when taking a new job, thus creating a natural pressure for better policies.

* Since businesses wouldn't have the "We're completely compliant with federal regulations" cop-out, more outcry may result from stories like the OP because these policies are actually counter-productive to business.

But in the end none of that really matters in the free-market debate. Either you do have the right to use force against people who are honoring a mutually agreed contract, or you don't. If I want to work for a company with a no-time-off policy, what right do you have to steal that company's money (fines) or property (confiscation)? What did we ever do to you?

If it's okay to use morality as an argument to make such laws, then why is it not okay to use morality as an argument to leave people be?

Re: How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

#220

Post by nostrademons »

viewer5 wrote: post #194
michaelochurch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of the Valley and New York, where there's less competition for talent, there are many companies that deduct sick days from vacation. This allows them to say that they offer 15 days (which, by US standards, is about average) of "PTO" in recruiting when it's actually less. When companies pull that shit, you see people getting a lot sicker, because people come into the office when they should be staying home. Th…

I'm at my first job out of college and it's like that here (taking off if you're sick = PTO) Is that not the norm?

Yeah, most good office jobs give you sick days "as needed" - take them on the honor system, don't abuse it or your manager will get suspicious, but they don't check up on it. The reason is that they don't want to incentivize employees to come to work when sick, because then they get everyone else sick and the whole office's productivity is reduced.
Post reply on HN