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How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

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

#281

Post by at-fates-hands »

gknoy wrote: post #110
at-fates-hands wrote: post #92

Is this the difference between working in academia and working at a large corporation? Most of the large companies I worked for had 12 weeks paid vacation and then you could do an additional 12 weeks which wasn't paid for the primary care giver. Otherwise, as a non-primary, you still got 2 weeks paid. Also, I remember several female sales people abusing the system pretty well. They'd get within a month or so of their…

As a father, I spent an astounding amount of time in the first month of my kids' lives caring for them, and then also caring for my wife. If the father is going to spend 12 weeks with the newborn and the new mother, you can bet your ass that they're likely not sitting around playing CoD or watching TV. I basically did everything except for breastfeeding, and it was freaking exhausting. Non-parents have no idea how lu…

>>> If the father is going to spend 12 weeks with the newborn and the new mother, you can bet your ass that they're likely not sitting around playing CoD or watching TV. I basically did everything except for breastfeeding, and it was freaking exhausting.

Agreed. The guys I knew who said they were the primary did it so they could help their wives and were happy they did. Some of the guys who opted just for the two weeks said it wasn't enough, they wanted more time to spend with their newborns.

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

#282

Post by the_ancient »

aperrien wrote: post #249
cdoxsey wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> (3) Unlike something like cancer pregnancy is not an accident. If you can't afford to pay for children, don't have them. It's not an accident, it's merely one of the foundations of any healthy society. I'm willing to part with a bit of our collective wealth to help raise them.

ahh good old communism...

Everything is owned by the collective and we have no personal wealth....

North Korea Welcomes you

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

#283

Post by the_ancient »

thecage411 wrote: post #253
jamoes wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cool, let's just bank on the generosity of companies. Or, how about you think about this when finding a job, and weigh the pros and cons of various employers' benefits and policies. We don't always need top-down guidance from bureaucrats in D.C. to solve societal problems.

> Or, how about you think about this when finding a job, and weigh the pros and cons of various employers' benefits and policies Sure, if you are in high demand you can probably do this. If you work an entry level job you won't have much leverage and since you probably can't afford to take extended time off, you may find taking care of children somewhere near impossible. > We don't always need top-down guidance from…

YOu do understand that all of the problems you say "bureaucrats in DC" solved, were infact created by bureaucrats in DC and bureaucrats in local government.

Almost the entire Civil Rights act was about ending GOVERNMENT entrenched racism and repealing laws that forced business owners to discriminate.

But hey do not let facts get in the way of irrational worship of government like it was a deity

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

#284

Post by the_ancient »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #150
learc83 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think that a minimum number of sick days should be mandatory as a public health measure. The amount of lost productivity caused by sick people infecting their coworkers per year has to be immense.

For large companies the minimum number of sick days should be the number of days for which a doctor verifies you are unfit to work through illness. Such companies who also have morals will make allowances for a certain number of uncertified days of illness (you don't get a doctor's note for flu, going in to work when you're too weak to stand up and can barely concentrate long enough to take meds; or going to work and…

USA was never a democracy. It is a Constitutional Representative Republic. Further democracies are the very very worst form of governance. Mob Rule is not something you should desire to live under.

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

#285

Post by the_ancient »

learc83 wrote: post #139
sarah2079 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing that makes it even worse is having health insurance that is tied to your employment. So if you get cancer and can't manage to keep your time off to less than 12 weeks plus your accrued sick days then you can be fired and lose not only your income, but your health insurance as well. It is an unbelievably awful system.

Doesn't the ACA largely fix that? Isn't losing your job a qualifying life event that allows you to sign up outside of the normal open enrollment period?

No, not by a long shot.

Insurance is still tied to employment, and even if you can sign up under the exchange after losing a job, the insurance offered under the exchange is less than desirable.

ACA was never designed to solve any problems with health insurance, in fact it was designed to exacerbate them to pave the way for Single Payer Health Care which based on the comments in this thread will be hailed as wonderful by most of the commenters here because people seem to worship government like it was their Saviour

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

#286

Post by michaelochurch »

drostie wrote: post #122
michaelochurch wrote: post #25

The takeaway from all of this: employers in the U.S. do not care about mothers of young children at all, unless we’re consumers of their products. It might be more accurate to say that they view us as horrible useless burdens who need to be ushered back to full-time work as swiftly as possible. They will do anything in their power to keep employees from exercising their federally guaranteed rights to twelve weeks of…

I normally really like you and upvote your comments as thoughtful, but in this case I really have to disagree. Eugenics arguments are deeply flawed. They are based on an assumption that the nature-vs-nurture debate is decided firmly in the nature direction, and that assumption is wrong. "[A] point-of-view is worth 80 IQ points. If we're born in 10,000 BC with the IQ of Leonardo [da Vinci]... not a lot is gonna happen…

Upvoted because you don't deserve to be downvoted for this post. It shouldn't be light gray.

I'm taking an agnostic viewpoint on whether the qualities we want are genetic or cultural and educational, an whether IQ is a valid measure of intelligence.

I generally agree with most of what you're saying. However, even if we assume that desired traits are cultural, it's still bad for the world to penalize thoughtful people.

Evolution happens over much longer time-scales and represents a slight force in an extremely noisy environment

I disagree. Evolutionary progress took billions of years because nothing in nature favors complex organisms so strongly that amoebas would turn into cats with a straight-arrow certainty. Natural selection is very slow and noisy, as you acknowledged, which is why it happened at an evolutionary (e.g. slow) pace.

Throw in artificial selection (e.g. our impact, intentional and otherwise) and the genetic mix can change rapidly. Elephants in Africa are becoming tuskless due to poaching, dogs are a human-made subspecies of the wolf, and fruit flies, with their rapid generations, can be brought to "evolve" well within a human lifetime.

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

#287

Post by jen729w »

the_ancient wrote: post #228
minimax wrote: post #39

At 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…

Why? It was your choice to have a child why should your employer pay for it, and why should all your fellow employees that did not have children have to work harder to cover for you while you are on paid leave? I think it is selfish for new parents to demand all this time off, you were hired to do a job, do it, if you can not or unwilling to because you have made a choice to make a major change in your life then i am…

The word is "society". I, for one, like living in one.

Also as a single 38 year old man with no desire to have kids, I'm glad other people do. I'm happy for my (Australian) tax dollars to support them.

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

#288

Post by astrange »

kclay wrote: post #222

I went through this last year with the birth of our second son. My wife was making sure that everything would be taking care for talking to HR multiple times and they all saying she would be fine. Come time for her to take time off we were presented with a whole other story. First she would't get all the weeks off because she went into labor a week early then expected and to top that she wouldn't be getting paid over…

> Luckily I gotten into a bad habit of placing all the money I will need for my taxes at years end into my account and just not touching it.

If you need to pay taxes in the US are you not supposed to be paying the estimated tax quarterly, not at the end of the year?

That way you'd get more stable expenses.

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

#289

Post by AndrewKemendo »

lutorm wrote: post #277
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #267

I took a full month off of work after my last two children were born (couldn't do it for my first born, but that is a different story). Luckily my wife is a stay at home mom and we could pull it off with one income. I think most people underestimate the value to the family of having this time off. As an employer though, I am conflicted about mandatory policies. Actually, let me rephrase that, I am conflicted about si…

I know for a fact that if our CTO took a month off of work we would probably go out of business Well, reality is that your CTO could get hit by a car, get sick, or not be able to work for a month for all kinds of reasons unrelated to childbirth, so that seems like a problem in general. At least when it comes to children, you have many months of warning. Or, have you considered what would happen if your CTO said "actu…

Your point is exactly why I stated for pregnancy situations - emergencies and "acts of god" can't really be planned for outside of having some kind of contingency fund/plan.

If the company fails without them, they are in a pretty strong negotiating position.

As are all the founders in a startup, that's not really saying much.

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