Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

"With this in mind, today we’re introducing an unlimited leave policy for new moms and dads that allows them to take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child’s birth or adoption"

Ah, unlimited for a year. So no taking 30 years off after your child is born then.

Congratulations Netflix. I'm personally a big believer that equal maternity and paternity leave is crucial for future equality in the workforce, and Netflix have just set a great example to the rest of the industry. And a full year is excellent too. Hopefully other employers will take notice, or even better it becomes a legal requirement. Why it isn't already in some countries[1] continues to mystify–to my mind, a business should not be considered successful unless it can afford to, and does, treat its employees like human beings.

[1] I say "some countries" but really it's only the United States and Papua New Guinea that haven't made it a legal requirement to have some form of paid maternity leave, among countries where data is available (e.g. North Korea isn't listed). Oman used to be in that list, but they left in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave and http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcom...

The way this is going to pan out, is that the House Slaves and Tools who love to crab bucket and compete with others will not take any maternity/paternity leave, and politically push out those who would take a reasonable amount of leave.

To be fair, of course the others would still be paid during this, but they will have to move to another company and take a hit in reputation.

So in the end, this is either great news for people with crab bucket mentalities, or for everyone else, a great way to get a year-long severance while finding a better place to work.

There's always a catch.

Unlimited leave policies encourage employees to self-police and conform to peer pressure. At a place like Netflix I can imagine the result being that people end up taking less than the industry average.

A better gimmick would be if Netflix picked one of the Nordics and announced that they were going to adopt all of the social policies provided by that country's government.