In Canada Maternity/Paternity leave is basically equivalent to un/employment insurance. Both parents of a newborn are entitled to 6 months paid leave, paid for by the government insurance programs, which are inevitably paid for by anyone that legally works in Canada and pays deductions.
So you admit you were pretty much completely wrong about people negotiating for more time off and maternity leave, right? Because I’d bet that less than 10% of US working adults actually negotiate anything other than salary, and simply accept the paid leave offered them up front.
There’s so much more I want to say, but this subforum doesn’t allow such. I would really like to use stronger and more insulting language toward your posts in this thread, and probably your offerings in general.
So moved.
You have to be careful how you phrase that though because it generally isn’t true. It is true that there is no federal government mandate for things like vacation days even today but that doesn’t mean that most people don’t get them or didn’t get them in the past. Of course people got maternity leave in most jobs as a benefit before the 1990’s (it is true that most people didn’t get a bonus for having sex but their job was still there when they came back). Being a pregnant female employee wasn’t a crime even back then and almost all employers had policies to accommodate it.
The U.S. is just a little more libertarian and capitalistic than the rest of the world when it comes to such matters. You can work as much or as little as you like as long as you can make enough money to live. The labor market is not one-sided although the advantages to one side or the other flip depending on economic conditions. There is no mandated government policy on vacation either but I get 5 weeks a year plus holidays to use as I see fit as do all of my direct coworkers and lots of other people. It is one of the things that keeps us from taking another job and that is why my employer offers it along with lots of other things.
You can find plenty of people (generally those with less marketable skills) that don’t have good benefits for a time or even their whole life but that doesn’t mean that everyone has it that way just because there aren’t many federal or state protections dictating baseline benefits for a nation of over 300 million people.
Just because you see it presented on a chart in the worst way possible doesn’t mean that it represents the actual experience of many if not most working Americans. Many of us have benefits surpass Western Europeans just because our employers really want to keep us around. We don’t generally have employment contracts and can leave for a better offer at any time and they know it.
Would you care to actually look at the actual paid leave Americans actually RECEIVE, or do you want to go ahead and give up now?
I’m not going to hold my breath, don’t worry. LOL
No. I said that “many Americans negotiate for and receive paid time off”, and some exceed their counterparts in other developed countries. Norther Piper said that many people in first world countries get more than a year off, and I disagreed with him. Workers who don’t explicitly negotiate benefits are still implicitly negotiating them by choosing whether or not to take the job, so the percentage doesn’t really matter, and is unknowable anyways.
If you’ve got a problem, take it to The Pit. I’d be curious what I could’ve possibly said to make you so angry.
One thing to be aware of is that paid maternity leave in the U.S. is often part of short term disability insurance. So when I took my leave, short term disability insurance paid 2/3s my salary for six weeks. I had another two weeks of vacation saved up at 100%. So I took eight weeks off, two of it at 100%, then six at 66.7% of my salary.
In the U.S. women who intend to get pregnant often horde vacation time, if they company permits it (vacation time is often use it by year end or loose it - if you only get fifteen days a year, you can only extend paid maternity leave by three weeks).
Some companies may offer more generous maternity leave packages, although I’ve never worked for one, nor known anyone who has gotten more than the standard “six weeks for a vaginal birth, eight for a c-section - paid for at 2/3 through short term disability - and you can use all your vacation.” I’ve known people who have taken six months - but haven’t gotten paid for it. And I know teachers who have timed their pregnancies to give birth so that they are gone for the last two months of school, then are off for the Summer.
I’ve switched jobs twice in five years, and have been offered several jobs. I’ve tried to negotiate more vacation - “we don’t do that - vacation policy is a policy, and we cannot override it - you may be able to work out an under the table deal with your manager.”
I’m almost fifty, so I think at this point I should get more than fifteen days when I start. They don’t agree. I take them unpaid if I want. Or, I can work an under the table deal with the manager.
So, in my experience, you can ask, but with my admittedly small sample size - its not nearly as common as recruiters let you think it is for it to actually be something that can be negotiated.
Have you been Pitted before? I haven’t, I was just wondering.
And while it might be difficult to find numbers on people who try to negotiate paid leave, I think, maybe, the actual leave that people are really getting would correlate fairly well with this number you called “unknowable”.
There lot of posts here that appears people are getting disability pay for maternity leave only. In non US countries is that full pay? or only a percentage.
3 years I went out on FMLA for knee surgery. I was out 90 days. The 1st week I was paid 40 hours sick time. Then after the 1st week I received 55% of my normal wage is disability pay from the state, plus 20 hours sick pay each week.
Last year my wife had knee surgery. 1st week 40 hours sick time. After the 1str week 55% of her pay each week from the state, plus 45% from her employer.
The best part. Out of the disability pay there was no deductions. None for Social Security, Fed or State taxes. So the take home pay was much more.
I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. Some Americans have great benefits, others have none LOL. What is your point? I know what paid leave I receive and that is the only thing that concerns me at the moment. I have received both less and more at different times but it was never zero except when I worked hourly part-time jobs in high school and college.
Do the analysis yourself and post the results if it is a personal cause.
You missed my point, The Joker and the Thief. You said that many people in the US workforce negotiate better leave packages, “…even exceeding their counterparts in other first world countries”.
Given that many first world countries have parental leave of around a year, i’m asking you to confirm that you have cites to show that many parents in the US are able to negotiate better parental leave packages than about a year. Exact number of weeks off isn’t the point here; it’s your claim that many American workers negotiate better paid parental leave packages than their counterparts in other countries. I’m curious to see numbers that demonstrate your assertion.
I haven’t, but if you have something to say you should say it. It’s like someone blustering about a fight but not actually going through with it.
I was trying to say that many Americans negotiate benefits and that some surpass packages that surpass Europeans. I guess that wasn’t clear, and that’s my fault.
Regardless, [WARNING: Link goes to .zip file — see Post #38] 1/4 women who take maternity leave in the US take more than 9 paid weeks. This is in fact greater than or close to paid parental leave in Malta, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and Ireland, among others.
Because she is presumably a non-UK citizen, and the rules have been changed/tightened.
Thank you so much!
Hang on, 25% of US women take greater leave than 100% of women in “Malta, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and Ireland, among others” - is that what you’re saying is a good thing?
btw, the headline to the article you quote in support is Among 38 nations, U.S. is the outlier when it comes to paid parental leave
This link is to a download file. I think it’s very bad form to link to something that will download something on another person’s computer without giving any warning that’s what it does!
Please provide a link that does not download something onto my computer.
I have reported it.
[QUOTE=BOOM!]
Hang on, 25% of US women take greater leave than 100% of women in “Malta, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and Ireland, among others” - is that what you’re saying is a good thing?
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No, he’s saying that 25% of women “who take maternity leave in the US” have that amount of paid maternity leave.
It’s not clear what percentage of women in the workforce that applies to; how many women in the US workforce are not able to take any maternity leave at all? That cite is apparently only referring to those who are able to take maternity leave.
But yes, of that limited sub-set, he’s seems to be saying that 1/4 coverage is better than 100% coverage.
And, it doesn’t address the case of fathers who take paternity leave.
Sorry about that, but the page it’s from doesn’t provide the same information.
Here’s the relevant data copy/pasted:
Weeks of Paid Maternity Leave Received Among Women Aged 18–44 Who Took Maternity Leave,* 2006–2008
Weeks Percent of Women:
9 Weeks or More 24.9
5-8 Weeks 26
1-4 Weeks 16
None 33.1
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. National Survey of Family Growth 2005-2008. Analysis conducted by the Maternal and Child Health Information Resource Center.
*Respondents were asked to report based on their last pregnancy
70% of women take some leave. And only 5% of women did not take maternity leave because it was not offered.
I think it was the pluralization by apostrophe 
A lot of European countries are experiencing population stasis or even population drop. Slovakia was experiencing drop (and Czechoslovakia before that), so that not only do (or I should probably say did, because I haven’t really heard any details since the last time one of my relatives had a baby, which was a while ago) women get pretty good maternity leave, they also get a stipend for having a baby.
Parents in the US get a tax deduction, and lower income parents (not just people in poverty, because depending on your number of children, you can be earning upwards of $50,000 a year) get something called “Earned Income Tax Credit,” that’s remarkably generous, but the bottom line is that aside from the general tenor of “What’s good for GM is good for the country,” the US isn’t trying to encourage births right now. In spite of the difficulty of caring for an infant while recovering from the birth and trying to earn a living, people are having plenty of babies, and we are having lots of people entering the country as adults, who bring experience and education that we didn’t have to pay for. It may seem Draconian, but the point isn’t really why doesn’t the US have this benefit, but why do so many other countries?
Believe me, I would love it if we had six months of paid maternity leave, and some paternity leave as well, not to mention people that stopped by the house to see how new parents were doing, and provided free help if they needed it (the first days with a newborn can be awful); but it’s not going to happen. There wouldn’t be an overall benefit to society if the result were a higher birthrate.