"they’ve left their teeny 6 week old baby in nursery to pay the mortgage etc…" As someone living in Denmark, this really blows my mind. In no way should a 6 week old baby be in a nursery. Here the norm would be 6 months to a year before they see any kind of nursery/daycare.
When my wife and I took a birth class in Boston, the ice breaker was to go around and say who you were and how much time you had off once the baby came (ostensibly so the instructor could tailor her advice).
After a long string of answers like "two weeks.. three weeks.. six weeks.. four weeks", the international parents in the group felt compelled to begin their introductions with an apology for numbers like six months, one year, two years...
I've never been able to understand how a parent could advocate against European-style healthcare goals (implementation details left as an exercise for technocrats).
> I've never been able to understand how a parent could advocate against European-style healthcare goals
I'm pretty sure parental leave is not mentioned in the US Constitution nor in the founding documents of most countries.
If we don't have it today, it's not because people advocated against it and removed it, it's because we simply haven't had enough push to advocate for it and add it.
Large countries have a ton of inertia. Diverse, thinly populated countries even more so. When people are far apart, they care much more about local politics and their neighbors than they do centralized government. Making change happen at that scale is very very hard.
People living in European countries enjoy criticizing the US on stuff like this, but they fail to realize how much bigger and more spread out we are than they are. The US is more than twice as large as the entire EU. Our density is less than a third of the EU's.
Another comment here mentions Denmark. If Denmark was a US state, it would be 36th in size, smaller than more than half of all US states. In population, it has fewer than 20 other states. The metropolitan area of the city I live in (Seattle) alone has almost half the population of the entire country of Denmark. LA and surrounding environments contain more than two Denmarks worth of people.
Consider if every US state were to independently enter the EU. In that case, of the top 40 largest members by area, only 9 would still be in Europe.
The US is behind in many ways, but this is not because we are backwater full of regressive idiots. We are a very large country without the density and homogeneity to benefit from good economies of scale. It's a lot easier to reach consensus and move a government forward when you have fewer people and they can more easily relate to each other.
If you are unable to understand why we might not have attained the same healthcare goals as your country, consider that your inability to understand people whose situation is different from yours is the exact psychological problem that slows us down.
I'm not sure I gather the defense you're making for the US's position. You're arguing that since the US populous is so spread out they have a hard time getting on the same page to advocate for positive change in health policies?
What part of population density or land mass size makes for this excuse where there's examples worldwide of both ends of either measure who've implemented paid leave by law:
Countries larger and smaller than the USA have better policy. Countries with greater and lesser population densities. Diversity of people might matter but I fail to see a demographic within the US that is outright against increased parental benefits of new parents that doesn't exist within every country that has overcome the problem.
The parent comment by munificent is just making the lazy go-to excuse for US policies that it's so big / special / whatever that everything has to be different there.
Notice how these lazy comparisons never make any specific comparisons to other countries that would trivially refute their claims, such as Russia having 4x less population density than the US, but still somehow managing to have a federally mandated parental leave.
If it were true that it's just so hard for people far removed from one another geographically to relate to each other wouldn't it follow that the situation in Russia would be 4x worse than the US?
Well, I would suspect that the US is much more culturally diverse than Russia. Something like a quarter of all US residents are foreign born or have a foreign born parent; that's reflected in cities like NYC. I am doubtful the numbers are similar for Russia, which is very large and does have some ethnic and cultural diversity, but has been dealing with the same groups for much longer and probably in more of an authoritarian way.
Not a defense of America; I do think the difference is more complicated than just the size.
[Insert default arguments of why America is special]
1.) big and sparse. oh wait..
2.) culturally diverse. oh wait.. [1][2][3][4]
I only have one explanation for social service scarcity in the US: It seems to be dominated by a culture where you'd rather have large parts of the population suffer rather than having anyone chip in for the bill of groups of people (s)he doesn't identify with. It's the idea of self responsibility pushed to an unhealthy extreme. At the same time when talking to people in the US personally (almost) everyone seems to be helpful and nice, much more so than in most European countries actually. That dichotomy is something I'm really struggling with, i.e. I fail to find a good explanation.
That's a very different story than the Russia link you provided, which, as I suspected, says that the country is mostly a) ethnically Russian and b) the rest are minorities the Russians have been dealing with for most of their history. I've even seen suggestions that the "White" category is perhaps too coarse, with observable cultural and political differences between whites of English descent and whites of German descent.
There's another pertinent datapoint, which is that Russia has a very low TFR and is experiencing a population decline and is pursuing policies to reverse that, as it is seen as a major problem. The US, on the other hand, continues to grow, largely because of immigration; policies to increase the number of children are superfluous.
That said, as I mentioned earlier, I think that's just a factor. Every country is special and has to be considered on its own terms. Is geographic size a factor? Probably. Is population size a factor? Probably. Is population diversity a factor? Probably. Is some remnant of the mythological self-reliance of American frontierism a factor? Probably. Is the rivalry with the USSR a factor? Probably.
Moreover, while I personally would like at a minimum a year of paid parental leave, the idea that parental leave represents Forward Progress and any country that doesn't have it is backward and deserves to be shamed is rather disturbing. Instead of trying to shame America to conform to somebody elses' norms, we should probably work instead on convincing them that it's a worthwhile and workable idea, and that the potential tradeoffs are worth making.
The demographic you are failing to take into account is private corporations, who have a constitutionally protected right to freedom of speech, and whose board members believe they have an overriding ethical obligation to protect and increase shareholder value.
The government, led by the people, has an ethical obligation to extend rights to parents...to include longer maternity and paternity leave for all gendered categories of parents.
>People living in European countries enjoy criticizing the US on stuff like this, but they fail to realize how much bigger and more spread out we are than they are. The US is more than twice as large as the entire EU. Our density is less than a third of the EU's.
The population density may be an excuse for the poor passenger rail network, but it doesn't make sense regarding parental leave.
>The US is behind in many ways, but this is not because we are backwater full of regressive idiots. We are a very large country without the density and homogeneity to benefit from good economies of scale. It's a lot easier to reach consensus and move a government forward when you have fewer people and they can more easily relate to each other.
The EU has more people and still managed to legislate maternity, paternity, and parental leaves. They managed to do this while speaking 24 languages in Parliament.
European countries and Canada have these programs because we have had active left wing and socialist movements that got into the streets to demand it, formed political parties, and even sometimes won elections.
The fact that the Democrats have had as much political power as they have in the United States and _not_ yielded these results should tell you just how useful they are to 'progressives' as a force for 'progressive' change.
Lots of people agreeing to something is hard I guess. I don't which country has the closest to US population and better health benefit. But in terms of economies of scale at least the parental leave things doesn't require as much economies of scale.
But another thing the sparse argument fail to account the reverse side. US essentially has a big chunk of the resource of a continent for a very little amount of benefit. That has to count for something. It also benefits from some of the worlds most people moving there so I don't think having resource to provide better health care is the issue. From the comments that I read I think two ideas are prevalent that stops this.
- I'm healthy so why should I pay for another's healthcare
- I can better afford it so I should receive higher quality care
Now some definitely have ideological issue but I think at the grassroot level this is a big part of the cause.
That's actually the intention. The federal government was originally intended only to provide basic functions like national defense and border control. Domestic policy would've been practically irrelevant.
The United States is a collection of fifty sovereign states that pool resources to pay for things that are beneficial to the geographic neighborhood, like a giant HOA. It's not fair to compare the universal policies in a conglomeration of sovereign states to the policies in independent jurisdictions; that is, the comparison should be California<->Sweden, not U.S.<->Sweden.
Under that framework, all labor law should be state-level. This promotes competition among jurisdictions for population, which means people have the option to move somewhere nearby if a jurisdiction passes a really undesirable law. More local jurisdictions also makes representative government a lot more feasible. A rep with 25k constituents is going to be much more available to the average citizen in their district than a rep with 25m constituents.
Some areas in the U.S. do have mandatory sick and parental leave, and some don't, and that's how the respective peoples like it. Time will tell which approach is superior. We think that kind of competition is good.
I want to see the folks that don't want sick leave or that like being forced back to work weeks after delivery. Or are you saying there are areas of the US favored by those entertaining BDSM in all facets of their life? Or maybe where slavery and indentured servitude hasn't quite been phased out?
Uh, yeah, most people do go back to work "weeks after delivery" here if they intend to remain employed. My wife had a son in June and I got 5 days of paternity leave, after which I was back to work. Most women take more time off than that, but after a few weeks many of them are back in the workforce. Gotta get paid, don't get paid if you don't work. So, mission accomplished?
>Or maybe where slavery and indentured servitude hasn't quite been phased out?
The question of whether the Feds had authority to universally outlaw slavery presented a constitutional crisis that culminated in the Civil War, and there are still people who believe that such prohibitions are out of the scope of the federal government's powers (not that they believe slavery should still be legal, but they believe that per the 10th Amendment, the right to make that decision was reserved to the states). It's certainly not a simple matter.
> I want to see the folks that don't want sick leave or that like being forced back to work weeks after delivery.
These folk are also know as the "job creators". Why should they pay you for not working? Your newborn doesn't do anything for their bottom line. After all, it is their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value by screwing over employees, customers, suppliers or anyone else who is not a shareholder. They are already not fans of raising the minimum wage, why should they be pro-labor in any other area?
That's why in every other country that has paid parental leave, the leave is covered by society and not your employer. Again a public good like raising the next generation should be paid for by the public.
>That's why in every other country that has paid parental leave, the leave is covered by society and not your employer.
That's not totally true. Many countries require the employer to pay at least some of the leave.
>Again a public good like raising the next generation should be paid for by the public.
This is absolutely not the American perspective. Americans don't think of their children as "public goods", and the expectation is that everyone will support themselves and their offspring, and that individual charity will be accommodated by voluntary private activity as necessary. This isn't based on selfishness, but a belief that if you don't want your children to be wards of the state, they shouldn't be dependent on it for their sustenance.
The European system is looked upon with suspicion out here, to say the least. America is not a big government place.
Yeah, that's fundamentally the difference between European/Canadian and American mindsets - one trusts the government while the other holds it in suspicion. Of course, that also reflects in the vast income disparities between the two groups of societies. I'd much rather be in the bottom 80% in Canada or Europe than in America.
why is this preferred? make everyone pay for it? make everyone who doesnt have kids poorer? pass the money through the government that takes a cut of it to administer the program leaving less money on the other side. i dont see the good in any of it
Nevermind that the argument you seem to be making is that the US is so diverse that the population at large would not agree to having a choice of a paid leave for a year or so. You really think men and women wouldn't want that choice of potentially staying at home for a longer period while retaining pay and their position? Wouldn't want the government to have their back that way? O rly?
> Because you'd have to advocate paying even more taxes, something Americans just do not want
That's not how parental leave works. The employer is obligated (by law) to continue paying salaries for the stipulated period while the parent is on leave. The government doesn't shoulder the cost.
That's not true. There is no state or federal government that mandates paid family leave that has to be covered by the employer. The family leave act only mandates up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave.
I was addressing incorrect assumption that longer parental leave would require the raising of taxes. I should have also been clearer that I wasn't talking about the US government(s) but for Europe and the rest of the world: Nowhere (that I know of) is the parental salary/income paid directly via taxes or by the government. Instead, the laws state that your employer should continue paying you a certain percentage of your salary while you are on maternal/paternal leave. This percentage is usually 100% , some countries have a time-based fall-off (amount decreases to X% after N weeks)
I never understood why maternity + paternity leave isn't longer. Current corporate policy in America is insane for working parents. Especially when the US DoD gives 12 weeks maternity leave (http://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/645958/carter-an...). As a dad who had to take care of his little one for the first 60 days of his life, I can say that paternity leave should be there as well for awhile. I found myself (as a DoD employee) in the precarious situation of working when my son was asleep, and early morning/late at night. Thankfully I was the boss so I could do that (and you know, anybody that worked for me got the same privilege). It's not easy. Moms are in no shape to go back after 1/2/3 weeks, heck not even 1 month. Moms need time to heal + time with the baby. Dads can help out with that process a lot! Unfortunately, most in the US view dads as not really essential to the parenting process. This is reflected in the DoD paternity leave policy which only grants 14 days. I think valuing the fathers input would likely enhance the stability of families (see Nordic countries quest for equal gender rights (https://www.nav.no/en/Home/Benefits+and+services/Relatert+in...). I wonder how Nvidia handles parents who don't fall into the "mother"/"father" categories. That's always a huge hole in some of these plans.
Compulsion is not the modus operandi in the US. The belief is that if the employment marketplace values parental leave, it will be offered without being compelled by government force. If parental leave is critical, find an employer willing to provide it (or better yet, make money independently; America makes this easy relative to Europe).
"It's a free country" and all that. One's employer has no more obligation to continue to employ him/her than the employee has obligation to continue to work for the employer.
How do companies in countries with six months or a year or two year of parental leave handle it?
At most places I've worked, they would not have been able to let my work go undone for six months or a year or more, so would need to find some other way to get the work done. At the large companies, there might be enough redundancy to be able to spread my work among those already working there. At many, though, it seems they would have to hire somebody.
For senior technical positions, especially if the company has proprietary systems or technology that is not publicly documented, it can take quite a while to get someone new up to speed.
How do parents in countries with less than six month to one year parental leave handle it?
Most kids I've brought up have been about a million times more intense than any tech career I've ever pursued.
And for the companies they work at, how do they manage retaining any half decent people while actively ignorning one of the most basic human processes? Ask any parent what the most transformative event in their life was. How do these companies survive with a staff that's essentialy kids or dysfunctional/depressed parents??
Because a large enough portion of our society finds the technical details very unsavory and the system by which we run our society makes it difficult to do things without an overwhelming consensus (among people who care about the issue).
> I've never been able to understand how a parent could advocate against European-style healthcare goals
With respect to absurdly long paid parental leave in particular, I would oppose it on the grounds that it's immoral to force people to subsidize other people's children. Having children is a life choice that other people shouldn't be on the hook for.
That's an asinine argument, as a tax payer I'm "forced" to subsidise many things I don't personally benefit from. Ensuring that the next generation of society is well adjusted and participative seems as sensible an idea as public education and public healthcare.
More positively:
- Population growth is slowing.
- We need the subsequent generations to be well educated participants in a high tech knowledge economy.
- If they are not there will be no one to pay for your retirement (current incomes pay for pensions, health subsidies, pay interest on investment debt, pay tolls on roads etc to keep the wheels going round).
- Early childcare quality is very important in ensuring subsequent health and education performance.
> > That's an asinine argument, as a tax payer I'm "forced" to subsidise many things I don't personally benefit from.
> "There are other bad things, so you can't object to this new bad thing!"
The OP never said the things they did not benefit from were bad. Merely that as a tax payer, you pay for things that you personally do not always benefit from directly. You might think these are bad, but this is not the same as them being bad.
I do not personally benefit from having, say, wheelchair accessible housing requirements. This does not mean it is bad to have those requirements -- I simply do not use a wheelchair. This is only the simplest case imaginable. So your reply comes off as a bit of a farce, I think.
Your argument seems to hinge on premises like the fact there is a definitive moral/societal calculus by which we can determine if something is "good for us", so we should/should not do it (it's "immoral" to subsidize having children, but many would argue the same about providing birth control), that we should even treat it as a 'subsidy' vs 'investment' or 'just a good idea' (if we're "subsidizing" children, why even do it for 3 weeks? why not only give 3 days of parental leave?) or that there is a definitive, negative result to be the whole outcome, regardless of context (e.g. that extended parental leave is a definitive societal drain vs the value to be reaped in the same period). If it does not rely on these premises, I apologize, but that's what I read of it.
Skipping the bits about morals (you will not do well to convince people on that one) - is there any evidence to suggest that extended parental leave, as offered by EU countries (your quoted bit from the OP) for example, results in sustained economic or societal "subsidization" that has observable, long-lasting negative effects?
Well obviously, there is no such thing as "being bad" as an intrinsic quality. All "badness" or "goodness" is extrinsic, so it should have been fairly clear what I meant. ("This is bad" = "I think this is bad".)
> This is only the simplest case imaginable.
And in this case I disagree with you. I question whether or not legal accessibility requirements have been a good thing for society. As an example, I used to live in an old university building that was legally required to have a sort of wheelchair lift on some stairs to a commons room. The university had to pay close to $300,000 for that machine. In the two years I lived there, I do not believe the machine was used once. Was it really worth a good 35 years worth of in-state tuition scholarships to pay for a wheelchair lift that no one ever used?
> sustained economic or societal "subsidization" that has observable, long-lasting negative effects?
While it's impossible to isolate this policy as a causative factor, almost all European countries have drastically inferior GDPPC (adjusted for exchange rates and purchasing power) to the USA.
It's also not very hard to see how encouraging people to leave the workforce for months at a time would hurt productivity.
Having children is a life choice in a social context by definition. Along your lines of argumentation, someone could make absurd arguments like that when you retire you should not be allowed benefits paid for from the tax base you made the choice to not enhance. Or should you be allowed to employ or even work with people who were raised and educated at the expense of people who made the choice to do so? Paternity and Maternity leave is a drop in the ocean in subsidizing the expenses parents make or the benefits of their choice to society.
> when you retire you should not be allowed benefits paid for from the tax base you made the choice to not enhance.
While I'm having trouble parsing this sentence, I believe you're saying that we shouldn't give money to retirees because they're economically unproductive. I agree, except that most retirement programs (nominally) required retirees to put in money before they retired, so it's at least plausible to claim that they're owed that money, having already paid for it.
> Or should you be allowed to employ or even work with people who were raised and educated at the expense of people who made the choice to do so?
Not sure what you're saying here. As far as I'm concerned, employment should be a mutual agreement to trade labor for resources. Not sure how the way they were raised comes into it.
> Paternity and Maternity leave is a drop in the ocean in subsidizing the expenses parents make or the benefits of their choice to society.
While I disagree that people having children in general is good for society, let's leave that aside; we don't feel the need to have the government subsidize (or force companies to subsidize) every "good" behavior, like being nice or having a job. There is no need to subsidize people having children, because they will do it anyway. It's a lifestyle choice, not a public service.
Ummm... there are some things which are just good for society. Having children is one of them. "Everyone else paying for it" is a reasonable thing, especially in this day and age when people don't want the hassle of having kids.
You're presenting an extremely selfish point of view.
I'm lucky enough to be Canadian and we've had universal parental leave for some time now, though not at full pay. Of my group of 5 close families, all of them ended up taking some form of parental leave. One parent was initially told no by her company before she pointed out that the government enforced this and the company couldn't say no.
Most did things like rent a house somewhere else and stay for 2-3 weeks. All of them still rave bout this as being some of the best times of lives. If you do ever get the chance to do this, I recommend doing it with another couple in the same situation so you have a built in baby sitter so you can go out to diner without having to worry about who is watching your new born.
Just to show the other side, one of my friends sent out this article below to highlight the downside of parental leave. As this becomes more common, I think companies will learn but it can still be a sticky topic.
I hope to one day have children and experience these things, but this runs counter to the narrative that parents put forward rationalizing why these kinds of benefits should not be afforded to people who choose not to have children. Often I've seen the argument that having and raising children is, itself, a form of work not a vacation or that having children is a form of public good and that's the reason why we can't all just have a standard paid "leave of absence".
It's a shame we see it this way. Fewer people would resent paying tax which goes towards roads and healthcare even if they never travelled much and were healthy - they appreciate this as a basic right for people (sure, some will even disagree about this) but we now live in times where raising a family is no longer seen as a cause we should happily support as a part of our society.
That narrative is a bit strange in the US, as the only federal/state mandated leave afforded to new parents (if they even qualify) is one that covers major medical/caretaker leave too.
There's a problem in language here too. Obviously a child isn't a form of paid work in service of a company, but if not work and if not vacation what is this? If this is a medical leave, then how do we extend this opportunity for medical leave to those who choose to not or cannot have children?
Or do we just say that having children is just that, having children, and that parenting is a privileged class?
No they are saying that the societies best investment in the future is ensuring that the children of that society are nurtured and provided for. I agree with this and I think it's on us all to pitch in.
I also think that those who don't have children should have the opportunity to have the same time away from work that parents who get time to "have the best times of their lives" are allowed.
> If you do ever get the chance to do this, I recommend doing it with another couple in the same situation so you have a built in baby sitter so you can go out to diner without having to worry about who is watching your new born.
Am I reading this correct ? 12 weeks of paid paternity leave. My jaw is still hanging :) (Maternity leave is awesome too but its already more than 22 weeks in the country I live).
As a grateful recipient of 12 weeks of parental leave, I hope this is a sign of a wider competitive benefits escalation. It seems likely that increased benefits will be confined to highly in-demand industries though.
But who knows, maybe American workers outside of tech will one day get a paid vacation!
I got 6 weeks paternity leave. I wasn't allowed to take it all at once but hey, it's something. We also extend benefits to adopting families like nvidia is doing.
Weeeellllll, 2 days is still better than what a lot of folks in the US get. Which is to say, they don't even qualify for 12 weeks unpaid leave from FMLA as their employer is not big enough or they have not worked enough hours for their employer (part time and scheduling shenanigans), so they get no time off - not even unpaid - and no job security to speak of.
There's a pitiful 3-4 states (including California) that offer partial paid leave. That's it. CA's is only ~50% taxable income for six weeks and no job protection if you are not covered by CFRA/FMLA. If you're a mother recovering from a C-section or if you're taking care of a seriously ill spouse, good luck!
FWIW, this is the government mandated standard paternity leave for everyone in Norway. The mother also has to take the same in maternity leave, and then there's 26 weeks that can be shared between both parents, but in 99% of the cases the mother gets this.
(To be perfectly correct, the parental leave length has been fluctuating between 10, 12 and 14 weeks during the last decade, in what amounts to a major bikeshedding competition by the political parties).
While some gap in paid maternity vs paternity leave is permissible as women uniquely have to recover from a childbirth (considered short-term disability), courts have found 6-weeks as the typical recovery time and thus the typical allowed difference in maternity/paternity leave duration [1]. Nvidia's clearly understands this issue - adoptive and foster parents parents receive the same leave as paternity (no disability for these groups of course).
How are they've overcoming the legal issues around offering a 10-week difference in maternity/paternity leave?
It's a legal issue because courts have previously interpreted large differences (i.e. beyond recovery time) in _paid_ maternity vs paternity leave as a gender discrimination issue. See linked NYT article above
One example from the article: "Just last week, CNN and Turner Broadcasting quietly settled an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charge with a former CNN correspondent, Josh Levs, who claimed that the company’s paid parental leave policy discriminated against biological fathers.
At the time Mr. Levs’s daughter was born, in October 2013, CNN offered 10 weeks of paid leave to biological mothers and the same amount to parents of either gender who adopted children or relied on surrogates. By contrast, the company offered two weeks of paid leave to biological fathers."
This is really awesome! Good for you nvidia! As a dad it sucks typically getting such low amounts of time off simply because I wasn't the one who gave birth when I want to bond with the baby as well as help my wife with anything I can. The last two times we had a baby they were at companies where I had to take vacation time to cover my time off (I was only able to take a little over a week off the last time).
The American company I work for gives 24 weeks (6 months) of both maternity and paternity paid leave, more if you need it. As a single guy I'm a bit envious, but at least I get a 3 month paid sabbatical every 5 years plus unlimited time off.
What exactly are you envious of? That those 6 months off are akin to a 6 month vacation? It's a full-time job.
The smart business move would be to let people just take the time "off" and come back healthy and rested after a few months. Not sure why businesses don't see this obvious fact.
How is that relevant? Regardless of how hard parenting is, they decided to bring that responsibility upon themselves, and other employees bear the financial burden.
It's not a "job" in the normal sense because you're not generating profit for anyone, but the company is still paying you. All the people without children perform more labor but get rewarded less (because they get less time off, don't get whatever benefits patenthood may entail, etc.). People without children absolutely get screwed over by such arrangements.
Whether or not this is acceptable depends on your goals and what you consider acceptable incentivization schemes.
And the people without kids who don't like generous parental leave decided to bring that responsibility on themselves when they chose to work there. When they accepted that job, they saw what the benefits were. If they feel like they're getting screwed over, then they can choose to work somewhere else.
> That those 6 months off are akin to a 6 month vacation? It's a full-time job.
Except I'm sitting in a little room all day staring at a computer, you're spending all day with your family and seeing your new child walk and talk for the first time.
You think new parents sitting around laughing and taking pictures all day? hahahaha sorry, no.
New parenting (infants) is about 5% photo-filled rewarding, 95% just repetitive work, cleaning up shit (literally), waking up every couple of hours, trying to keep it together with your spouse in stressful situations with very little sleep, and feeding this organism that will eventually have a personality and start interacting back. And that ratio gradually changes as they grow older.
I remember after the first month, I used to consider going to the office my "break from parenting" because of its consistency and ability for my mind to just rest for a bit.
Just remember when you're asking a parent of an infant to have a full-time job on top of parenting, you've essentially now got an employee that is splitting their time/attention/energy between two jobs. If you're ok with the altered productivity, then that's fine.
I refuse to accept this ridiculous idea that you are making some great sacrifice by taking time off after your kid is born. If it's so horrible then don't take the time off.
According to NVIDIA's glassdoor, they have a thing where you can ask any time to take time off for any amount of time. It means you have to stress out about negotiation, according to reviews.
This seems to be a stark contrast between the normal policy!
This is obviously a nice gesture by Nvidia but I always wonder how can it be legal to have different amounts for father/mothers? Are there no laws on discrimination based on sex in the US?
> how can it be legal to have different amounts for father/mothers? Are there no laws on discrimination based on sex in the US?
Well, the law does recognize that the person who just delivered a baby went through a lot harder time than the one who simply contributed the other half of the genetic material 9 months before.
After my wife gave birth, she breastfed every 3 hours (typical for a newborn) so that means very little sleep. Recovery from having pushed another human being through the birth canal (or from having the abdomen cut wide open) is not trivial.
Then there's the baby's bonding, which is primarily with the mom in the first few months.
Paternity leave is a great thing; as a dad I got to support my wife in child with all the household stuff. And there is not replacement for witnessing the first few months of one's child's life. That goes by so fast.
But as a dad, I recognize that the largest burden was born by my wife. Many trivialize the effort women go through but I think they are the unsung heros of humanity.
I'm a guy who just had a baby. I'm a pretty hands-on father. However, I have no problem for birth-givers (i.e. biological mom) getting more leave than men. In fact, it is a shame how bad mat leave is in most places. Even in Canada, it isn't full income replacement for a year .. there are a bunch of caveats.
It's a political 3rd rail. There are laws about discrimination based on sex in the US, but you generally get a lot of flack for pointing out the unfairness if it benefits women, which is mostly considered ok since it's making up for the many years that the discrimination went the other way (and I'm actually ok with that).
And to be fair, it's a hell of a lot harder on a birth mother than anyone else. You'll notice adoptive mothers in this policy only get the 12 week benefit too, so this one is already fairer than most.
Your use of "unfairness" sticks out to me, considering you go on to say you're OK with it. Are you actually OK with the disparity or do you think it's unfairness? Can't really be both.
Unfair can simply mean not the same. Dunno about GP but this is a pretty popular sentiment. Look at e.g. GitHub saying they won't consider racial or sexist behaviour, depending on who is the offender. Look at recent popular protests in the US, where leaders organize people on skin colour.
My wife had to take unpaid FMLA. I got 6 weeks paid. They even noticed she took 3 days too long and made a big deal out of it requiring her to come back exactly then end of the allowed FMLA time. This is still a step in the right direction. Plus giving birth is a little bit more difficult than my job as a dad.
I haven't seen any men breastfeeding lately. Nor do fathers regularly go through post natal depression or suffer the other ailments of pregnancy. I suggest you talk to some mothers (or your own) before making such absurdly informed assertions.
Not trying to imply that it doesn't. It is a stressful situation for everyone. But the rates in women are significantly higher. (Ironically being a stay at home mum can be isolating and it might be better for her health to go back to work...) One analysis also found a small be definite correlation between a mother being depressed and also the father. The incidence varies strongly depending on risk factors (smoking, obesity, poverty, trauma), form 10-25% in women, and about 5-10% in men (though men tend to under self report..).
Hello, I am the person who submitted the link. I got to know the Nvidia story last night because a long-term friend who works there posted it on social media. He is newly wed, so he is understandably very excited about the new policy about paternal leave.
It is indeed an interesting coincidence that there is another story about parental leave at the front page.
Taking a substantive discussion in a snarky generic direction is exactly the wrong thing to do on HN. Please don't do it again.
Maybe the comment you were replying to hinted at that (if I squint I can read it that way), but if so, the thing to do is gently turn the discussion back in a neutral direction with a substantive reply, or simply not to reply at all.
Same here. I used to live in NYC, but planned for a significant lifestyle change (move, job, etc.) with kids because I didn't want (and couldn't afford) to pay someone else to watch them.
Likewise. This is very important. It takes the full-time efforts of both a mother and a father to raise a child. The father should be out winning the bread so the mother can provide the children the attention and care that they desperately need. The benefits of forgoing some luxuries so that a family can be raised by a single breadwinner are so self-evident that it's insanity to willingly choose to do it differently (recognizing that some have it thrust upon them due to accidents or the choices of others).
Well wouldn't that obviate one from working at NVidia? Sure, we could sidestep the CAP theorem by moving to Montana and living off the land. What does this have to do with TFA?
I don't know the backstory here but having 3 children in 3 years sounds quite normal to me. If you want 3 kids, and you want them while you're young, it makes sense to crank 'em out ASAP. I get that it must be pretty frustrating for the employers, but it also seems to be within natural human behavior (to me, at least).
No where did I say it was a 'vacation'. However getting paid to stay home, and raise your children sounds like a better alternative to sitting in a cubicle all day. If it doesn't, then you probably shouldn't have kids.
I think you're being a bit black-and-white in your thinking. Plenty of people have kids and love them, but also don't want to spend literally every minute with them. Or conversely, want to also do other things in their life.
Sounds like a good thing for Canadians. Otherwise you end up with no citizens and have to do bulk-level importing which is difficult.
A party in Germany recently proposed a E10K load, per child, up to 3. More kids meant you didn't have to pay off the loan. Sounds like a good way to help the birthrate. I think it was considered too racist to limit it to citizens.
To collect EI benefits, the individual must have worked 600 hours in the qualifying period (ie the 12 months before the leave starts). And I believe the max duration is 50 weeks, further payment requires another 600 hours of work.
Three consecutive years would involve a significant amount of unpaid time which (I'm going to presume you are American) you Americans are certainly able to take.
I doubt it's related, but today NVIDIA's stock price is down 2.4%. I don't remember it falling down that much in intraday for a while.
I don't know who took this decision to just give away money and free time to employees, and maybe it's good PR after all, but I do hope this is not announcing a trend.
Short term costs mean attracting and retaining top talent longer.
I've found it costs an employer an average of $3000 to hire someone for $8/hour and it costs an average of $26k to hire someone for $80/year. If you can pay someone a few weeks of salary and buy goodwill during a life event like this you keep your company competitive in the competitive tech space.
TL;DR
This will probably save them money in recruiter fees.
It's good PR because it's the right thing to do. I certainly hope it's a trend. It's fairly well-established that humans make babies and need time off work to properly care for them.
Well when compared to almost every other major nation on the planet, it becomes much less of a belief (or "political opinion" -what?) and more of an objective fact.
I applaud it very much. When a company has money to give to someone, they can give it to shareholders or employees (or just the bosses who set their own remuneration). It's nice to see it going to employees. It's not just good PR; it's good. I hope it is a trend, and I'm speaking as someone who currently makes more money as a shareholder than from my job.
Well, it is not really "money given to employees" unconditionally. First it is time-off given, the employee couldn't take only half of the time-off and cash the rest for example. Second it is only subsidizing some employees.
Not saying it is a bad thing, but in the end such decision are likely made to attract talents and/or limit turn-over more than anything else.
Employees are supposed to receive a salary in exchange for their work. The decision on how to distribute profits is, theoretically, made by shareholders. Maybe they decided to give some to employees in order to improve morale or something. If so, that's OK. If somehow the shareholders were left out of this decision, via some authoritative action from the executives or something, it's wrong.
"The decision on how to distribute profits is, theoretically, made by shareholders"
I disagree strongly. When shareholders purchase their shares, the rights they get with it are clear. Very, very commonly, they do not include the right to set renumeration. Not theoretically. Not practically. Not at all. Non-voting stock very deliberately gives shareholders no power.
"If somehow the shareholders were left out of this decision, via some authoritative action from the executives or something, it's wrong."
I disagree very strongly. It is the job of the executives to make these decisions. Their first duty is not to shareholders, despite the pernicious myth that there's some kind of legal obligation to do the best for shareholders. Shareholders do not need to be consulted.
They are not supposed to make decisions regarding personal management, but if those decisions consist in throwing money at employees, they may certainly be pissed off.
Shareholders literally own the company. They have influence on everything, at least indirectly. They vote the board of directors, so if they are not happy with the way employees are thrown money at, they will sack the directors and elect a board that will not do the same thing.
"They are not supposed to make decisions regarding personal management, but if those decisions consist in throwing money at employees, they will certainly be pissed off."
Not only are shareholders not supposed to make such decisions, they also actually don't make those decisions. Literally owning the company doesn't actually mean they can do what they like it, and that's how it should be. It's not as if they're liable for anything the company does wrong, so even calling it "ownership" is a leap.
Secondly, I am a shareholder and I applaud this. I'm not pissed off. I take a long term view and I find the attitude of shareholder value above all to be backwards and damaging.
I also know that the best shareholders could do is put up their own nominations for directorship positions. It would damage the company and should be done, frankly, only if the company was already a slow motion car crash. Sometimes you see activists doing this as a prelude to getting as much money as they can out of a healthy company.
Here's a company doing its job, looking after its employees and investing in its future.
> Secondly, I am a shareholder and I applaud this.
I'm a shareholder as well. I'm willing to believe this decision was made for good reasons so I give the executives the benefit of the doubt, but to me it is slightly worrying.
You applaud this, fine. We disagree, still fine. There is no right or wrong here, in the end it's only the votes that count. Because, if what the executives do pisses enough shareholders, they will be voted out and unlike you I believe this is all right.
