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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

#251

Post by mturmon »

patrickmay wrote: post #208
dmm wrote: post #27

I 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…

I wouldn't kill my mother for that.

But fortunately I wouldn't have to, because she pays her taxes. And is proud to, last I checked.

As you can tell, I reject your whole line of thinking.

It makes a bunch of assumptions to carry the situation to extremes, and then innocently asks, "you wouldn't want that extreme outcome, would you?". The same argument can be made against any form of regulation whatsoever.

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

#252

Post by anon4 »

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

Sick leave here is unpaid (well not exactly, but something like a 3-day leave due to sickness can be unpaid). Which means that when I'm sick, I still go to work as usual and get everyone else sick. Because fuck them.

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

#253

Post by thecage411 »

jamoes wrote: post #229
bronbron wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most companies provide better benefits than what is legally required Cool, let's just bank on the generosity of companies. > Unlike something like cancer pregnancy is not an accident. If you can't afford to pay for children, don't have them. Did you even read the article? These people can obviously afford to have children. They can't afford to become unemployed because they had children. Short of being independentl…

> 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 bureaucrats in D.C. to solve societal problems.

I'm glad you qualified it with always. But a look at U.S. history shows a lot of societal problems were helped by those bureaucrats in DC and elsewhere (school segregation, voting rights, equal access to public transport, public accommodations [restaurants can't deny your service based on your race], equal opportunity employment, etc).

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

#254

Post by logfromblammo »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #236
NateDad wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people deserve to have kids, too.

Who's going to pay for their kids?

Most of the time, kids pay for themselves out of their future earnings and consumer behaviors. We have a stable enough civilization that we should be able to invest something now for a potential return in 18-25 years.

The children will be born whether you want them to exist or not, and regardless of whether the parents are fit to raise them. Once the kid exists, what do you intend to do with it? Ignore it and hope for the best? Or maybe coax it into some form of societal contract, wherein we all help it reach its maximum potential now, and in return, it constructively participates in the civilized economy later?

The question is really whether you believe that the inability to easily pay the costs of child-rearing, whatever they may be, dissuades people from having more children.

And if, for some reason, one generation decides to grant itself a heap of late-life benefits that will have to be paid for by future productive workers, like retirement funds, pensions, and medical care, it would really be shooting itself in the foot to slash its support for young parents and immigration. The existence of "money" notwithstanding, current consumption always has to be paid for with current production and past stockpiles. Unless there's a warehouse somewhere out there filled with stored-up services for older people, people looking to consume such services had better start thinking about who might be providing them in the future.

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

#255

Post by PhasmaFelis »

cdoxsey wrote: post #163
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…

> 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…

> (1) Most companies provide better benefits than what is legally required

Gosh, I'm sure that's comforting to the OP.

OP: "My car's samouflange broke at 60mph and now I'm quadriplegic." cdoxsey: "Well, most samouflange-failure incidents only result in minor bruising, so everything is fine!"

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

#256

Post by SCdF »

the_ancient wrote: post #239
SCdF wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd hope it was because you considered your country (and the world as a whole) a community where we all help each other out, and treat each other how we'd like to be treated. The implication of "user pays" is that the rich live life basically as they always have (because costs of life events don't scale with your wage), and the poor are utterly fucked. You may believe it's selfish for new parents to demand time off…

I believe both are selfish, I also do not believe it is any place for government to be involved. If an employer wants to have 1 day, or 365 days off that is up to them, that is part of your compensation package you should evaluate when you agree to take a job. Just like I believe it is a responsibility of those with money to help those with out. That does not translate in to supporting the use of government violence…

I imagine we will never agree on this, as it sounds like our opinions could not differ more.

To sum up with an example though: a few elections ago I voted for the political party who had stated that they would raise my taxes (in particular, the bracket I get paid in). I did so because I consider myself very fortunate to work in a clean ventilated office, and sit at a desk solving programming problems. I don't think it's because I'm hard working, or diligent, or anything like that. At least, no more so than the dude outside logging bags of concrete around

I think it's because I was lucky enough to be brought up in a culture where I "fell" into this situation (pressured to do well in high school, brought up around computers with a passionate father, taught to program when I was 10, going to uni was a no-brainer and couldn't be any other way, etc). Other people aren't so lucky, and it would be height of hubris for me to think any other way.

(edit: quick note: I live in NZ, not the US. My opinions aren't particular controversial here)

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

#257

Post by trhway »

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…

>It's completely shameful and it's a stone age policy compared to the rest of the Western world [1]

not that i agree with such policy. Yet logically i can see the other side of that - why encourage people to spend their time and effort during the most productive years of their life on basically their personal sideprojects - children - instead of contributing to the economy when US can "import" through immigration any kind of people they want - from toddlers to ready-made programmers to almost ready-made doctors - thus saving a lot of societal resources which otherwise would need to be spend to bring up and educate such a person (add the risk that not every child becomes a highly productive member of society and some even become a burden like go to prison). Basically the same logic why iPhone is built in and imported from China :)

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

#258

Post by mpyne »

patrickmay wrote: post #208
dmm wrote: post #27

I 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…

That contorted chain of logic is quite striking. And even then you miss the other questions you need to ask yourself.

"Would my kindly, gray-haired mother refuse to pay taxes for this?" "If she didn't, would my kindly, gray-haired mother really manage to escape from prison?" "Even if she did escape, am I certain that she would be shot instead of apprehended and re-arrested like the majority of other escapees?"

And this is, of course, all conditional on the idea that the government would simply throw you in jail right off instead of garnishing wages or seizing assets to cover the tab (you know, the things that would actually happen).

And the best part about all of this is that, all you've really come down to is the idea that maybe the parent commenter didn't realize that governments can't pay for things without taxes, as if that very basic feature of how governments work had momentarily escaped dmm just as he was typing to an HN .

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

#259

Post by mindslight »

gglitch wrote: post #118

Genuinely curious - where are the markets-should-be-completely-unregulated guys on this?

Take time off from working, pay bills from your savings, and be comfortable with that.

That most everyone lacks savings which can be used this way is the underlying problem. This is due to an economy where any extra steady-state income gets extracted via an ever-present housing bubble (plebs' only access to money printing press. people don't buy houses - they rent them from banks) and increasing taxation to grow the bureaucracy and the empire.

These basic structural problems are masked by a constant creation of new entitlements that pacify the majority of people by directly taking care of their specific popular problems (eg this), while making it even harder to retain autonomy or stray from the herd.

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

#260

Post by lutorm »

patrickmay wrote: post #208
dmm wrote: post #27

I 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…

"...remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head."

Wow! I never noticed, and I've been paying taxes for 25 years...

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