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Without parental leave I might be dead

nytimes.com

101–110 of 570 posts

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#101
post #7

I believe parental leave should be provided, but I don't see how anyone expects employers to shoulder the burden of providing paid parental (in reality maternity) leave without an implicit bias towards hiring men (or at least paying women less). You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time. I guess you can force people to…

> Even if the federal government picks up the bill, it's still a discontinuity in business, something an employer would want to avoid.

IMO this as well is something where the DevOps slogan "if it hurts, do it more often" should be applied.

The "discontinuity" of an employee leaving temporarily with months of warning in advance is the easy case. If that is a serious problem for your business, it's a failure of company culture and management. How would you deal with the "Hit by a bus" scenario?

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#102
Assume there is no border control among nations, people are free to choose whether they want to work where wage is lower and leave days are longer, or where wage is higher and leave days are shorter. No matter how people make their free choice, there will still be people complaining about leave days are not mandated to be longer.

I will always celebrate the fact that we still have a nation on this planet does not mandate leave days. And I give full wish to people choose to move to countries with longer leave days.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#103

Maybe you should not live somewhere so expensive and stop spending money on unnecessary things. You can switch to eating cheap food and minimize your expenses. If you are just making ends meet you are not financially responsible.

> Maybe you should not live somewhere so expensive

That is one of the problems of the "cycle of poverty". Moving requires a large upfront capital investment for a moving truck or gas for your own vehicle at the very least, as well as taking time off of work for house and job hunting (since getting to your old job may be unfeasible from wherever you manage to find a home). Not to mention you'll need to pay up for a deposit for the new location without having the old deposit back yet and in almost all cases either a fee for breaking your lease or paying two rents simultaneously for a month or more.

Summarized, that is easily hitting 5.000 $ if not more.

> If you are just making ends meet you are not financially responsible.

Are you really calling nearly 70% [1] (or, after COVID, likely more!) of Americans "irresponsible" for having less than 1000$ in savings?

Were the rate of people in that circumstances something like 5% or lower, I might be inclined to agree. But that large amount speaks rather for a systematic problem!

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/survey-69-americans-less-1-17...

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#104
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This graph shows the gender pay gap trending down in the UK since they implemented parental leave: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor... This graph shows women's employment rate trending up in the UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...

Policy changes don't exist in a vacuum. I'm not interested in studies that show something. I'm interested in a mental model that results in employers being indifferent to hiring men or women when statistically women are much more likely to take a considerable amount of paid time off with restrictions set on replacing them. The model could be that employers are altruistic. Or that employers are dumb and don't realize…

>I'm not interested in studies that show something.

An interesting way to think, to say the least.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#105
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took less than the allotted time. I was bored sitting at home. Much of the first 3 months is feeding the baby, something I am physically unequipped to do. I enjoy work and the comradery of my co-workers. I was working from home anyway, so there was no long commute. And it gave me something to do. I'm a programmer. I like my work. It gives me an outlet for my creativity and allows me to bond with co-workers. And I c…

I felt similar after the first child. But the reality for my SO is that it was harder on them because of all the other non-baby chores I couldn't do when working. So for the second child I had to get VP approval to take a whopping 3 weeks (unlimited* PTO, technically no paternity leave). That was essential because now there was childcare, chores, and baby care involved. It should've been more like 8w.

That's fair. I was working from home and tried to do a lot more of the non-baby chores, like cleaning and cooking. We're also fortunate enough to have paid cleaners. But it didn't require me to take any more time off work. I would log off relatively early. I think sitting around not doing anything or screwing around on my computer not at work would just annoy my partner more. But I know some people have a lot more chores

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in your mind Charles Ponzi innovated the principle of factoring in the likelihood of growth into economic planning? And any investment that is premised on that growth is thus a Ponzi scheme? I guess we can use words however we want, sure. Also, again, lol that roads pass this criteria. No expectation of growth and expanding tax bases there...

Requiring growth is not a Ponzi scheme, requiring additional investors for the initial ones to be paid is. Do you have an actual rebuttal?

It's hard to rebut your arguments when you don't really explain them, instead relying on scarewords that don't fit at all.

Who are the "additional investors"? The children? In what way would parental leave had been a horrible misstep if they do not show up? Seems like a wash.

Or are the additional investors individuals and families who won't ever need paid leave, don't care about their neighbors, and don't care about the next generation of residents? If so, Ponzi schemes are when market participants indirectly spend money on things that they don't 100% agree to? So, like, every interaction in life outside of the household that one individual might fully dominate?

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#107
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. There's no clear solutions Your argument makes me think about this satiric article : https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na... I live in a country where it's exactly what we do, and it's fine. I took a 7 months paid parental leave as a dad recently and my company congratulated me for the birth.

Again, saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. That's like saying why are incomes in Mexico so much lower than the US? Just do what the US does. In fact, Mexico has 12 weeks. And Greece has 40. I'd rather be a parent in the US than Greece or Mexico. Policies don't exist in a vacuum.

> Mexico has 12 weeks. And Greece has 40.

And Sweden has 480 days. Poland 1 year. Switzerland 20 weeks. Ireland 26 weeks. UK 52 weeks. Canada 50 weeks. Norway 12 months. Denmark 52 weeks. France 16 weeks for mothers and 4 weeks for fathers. I can go on. There's 120 such countries in the world.

BTW that leave is on top of 20-30 days of paid vacations each year and unlimited paid health leave in most of these countries.

Notice that most of these also have free healthcare and free or cheap university education. Which is also "impossible" apparently :)

Also notice that some of these countries have higher or similar GDP per capita to USA. Also ALL of the countries I mentioned have lower gender salary gap than USA. And most of them have higher women workforce participation.

Somehow the argument used against paid parental leave turns out to work in favor of it :)

If you choose to ignore almost all developed countries other than USA (that have 20 weeks or more of paid paternity leave ) and cherry-pick Mexico as your counterexample - you should at least be aware what you're doing. You are searching for excuses to keep your ideological delusions going.

This isn't complicated, it works everywhere it's been tried, it's a simple change, the costs are marginal compared to benefits, even countries with GDP per capita one tenth of USA can afford it.

You sound exactly like this: "8-hour work week can't be done, the argument that other countries do it means nothing - in USA it won't work. I prefer to work 12 hours a day 6 days a week in USA than to work 8 hours in Wenezuela after all".

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t have to have children. And people can and do stay at home with their children at all income levels.

> People don’t have to have children. Ah, here we go. This is a veiled "only people who have enough money should have children" argument. > And people can and do stay at home with their children at all income levels. I am sure that disproportionately favors certain income levels.

It doesn't need to be veiled, that's already the official policy: people are responsible for providing for their children. You have to have money to have kids. It's just a little less.

On some level you have to encourage people to somehow try to support themselves and their children, and to adapt their footprint to match their contributions.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People don’t have to have children. Ah, here we go. This is a veiled "only people who have enough money should have children" argument. > And people can and do stay at home with their children at all income levels. I am sure that disproportionately favors certain income levels.

Poor people have more children than rich both per capita and in aggregate Also, I never said only rich people should be able to have children. However at the end of the day raising children requires money. Hence the newly introduced children tax credit.

Birthrates among poor people are way down:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov...

There may be some effect of the very poorest people having children for the purposes of benefits, but the vast majority of women will have fewer kids once they get access to birth control and financial independence.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#110
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that _every_ other "civilised" country has some sort of rudimentary care for new parents, which doesn't acutally cost that much, I can't see any reasonable objection to not having it. Giving a special benefit that will for the most part only be exercised by women discourages hiring women. You can still think its worth it, but don't pretend like you're baffled by anyone who would object or question how this im…

Agreed, this sounds like a very good reason to ensure parental leave is available for both men and women.

It's like that here in Germany. It's a little more complicated but in the end mom and dad can split up to 14 months of paid parental leave time where no one can take more than 12 months.

Now the pay does not replace a full salary of course. It is a percentage of your pay up to a maximum of 1800€.

I know many dads (myself included) that have used this program.

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