I don’t gripe about it at work. I gripe about it here.
Sometimes we do more than gripe. Sometimes we call our lawyers and let the evidence of a hostile work environment speak for itself. I have had supervisors that let parents waltz out the door for soccer games, but berated me for taking time off to see to the medical needs of an uncle who had a stroke. You better believe HR got an earful over that.
There is no way to make it fair and not have some child free folks throw tantrums about how they are still getting the short end of the stick. Because for everything they might get, the person with kids is getting it plus paid family leave.
The child free person has tons of advantages a parent does not; both in job types and shifts. Generally a parent is going to want weekends off and their holidays in sync with school holidays. The child free person is not as limited, thus they have more options to choose from.
parents also have many legal obligations toward their children which could either get them in trouble with the law or get their children taken away if they do not honor those obligation. I would consider paid parental leave in many situations to be more similar to how employers need to give you time off to serve on jury duty. If not being present has legal consequences, then there needs to be resource is in place to allow people to do what they need to do.
Maybe it’s because your classroom duties wouldn’t expand that much if a full-time teacher on your team is swapped out for a substitute?
But this isn’t the case for folks like me. The duties of my pregnant coworker are not going to be spread out evenly amongst the rest of us. A temp can’t just step in and pick up where she left off. No, her duties are going to fall on me and another worker–with me picking up the majority of the slack. For ten weeks, I will have to juggle my regular tasks with a bunch of other ones that I don’t like and aren’t in my wheelhouse. And do all of this seamlessly, so that the operation keeps running smoothly and I don’t get myself in trouble. All without extra compensation. And I probably won’t be able to go on leave for a more than a couple of days either.
Will I pout and fume about it? Of course not. Will I do my best to prepare for those two and a half months so that I don’t screw anything up? Of course I will.
But will I be happy about it? No, I will not be. I don’t think this makes me resentful or jelly. It makes me a person.
Wonderful! These are exactly the data I am looking for. Probably Deeg as well. Please share them with us so that we can quantify the costs and benefits and craft the ideal policy.
Fair enough.
So, what is a possible solution. Let’s suppose that the parents “waltz[ed] out the door” for something less trivial than a soccer game. Rather than take away the opportunity for a parent to care for a child, could we instead insure the opportunity for you (in the broad sense) to take care of the medical needs of a family member? It seems that some sort of accommodation could be made.
(Why did HR get an earful over that? Was there a company policy that allowed you to miss work due to your uncle’s issues? Was there a company policy that allowed time off for soccer games? Were company policies properly applied? What I am suggesting is that, perhaps, the conflict over this issue might have been averted if there were some overriding policy (let’s call it a law) that guaranteed your opportunity to care for your uncle.)
I think you are in a tough spot, monstro. But you seem to be handling it well. My job is hourly, so if my boss needs to me to cover a co worker’s work while she is out on maternity leave, I have the option of coming in on my day off or staying a couple hours late.
But if you think about it, you’d also be in the same spot if your co-worker was undergoing cancer treatment, or recovering from an injury, or similar types of situations. They’d be gone, you’d be stuck having to pick up the slack.
This is one of the silliest arguments I’ve ever read. Comparing parental leave to jury duty?
Forget it, Drum God, ZPG Zealot is Internet Mad. Where everything gets exaggerated out of proportion, the poster always looks completely vindicated in their own eyes, and everybody that disagrees with them is stupid. If you doubt me, check her post history to get an idea of who you are talking about 
.
Both carry legal ramifications if you don’t uphold your obligations. Leave an infant home alone for 10 hours, and you might get your kid taken away and/or charged with child endangerment. Miss Jury Duty, and you will also face punishment.
Should a parent feel compelled to break the law simply to make sure they have enough rent money? Doesn’t it benefit everybody for them not to be stuck in this kind of catch-22?
So now paid parental leave is to prevent child endangerment? That’s just silly. We don’t pay people to not break the law.
Actually, it is a huge incentive to have it.
Paid parental leave is a “huge incentive” that prevents parents from not criminally endangering their kids?
Cite?
I would be against any policy that encouraged people to have kids they couldn’t afford without forcing others to pay for or subsidize. That being said the pragmatic concerns I’d have over source of funds would be mitigated if this were paid out of the general fund rather than forced upon employers directly.
Employers don’t need more reason to eschew women in the workplace and forcing them to bear a higher cost for hiring women does exactly that.
Great, then as neither France, the UK or Germany can be in anyway classed as poor countries, and in the IHDI metric score substantially better for quality of life than the US (Germany: 5, UK: 16, France: 18, US: 28), and all have paid maternity/paternity leave, it’s pretty clear that the US can indeed afford maternity leave.
Wealth generation is a means to an end, to pay for other stuff, not the end itself.
Yes, let’s examine all the unmitigated success stories that are naturally exactly analogous to our circumstances. And don’t forget to factor our $18 trillion in national debt into the calculation. Show your math, please. I personally need no more explanation as to the value of such a program; the benefit seems clear. How we’ll be able to afford this requires more explanation than, “Those other guys do it.” Sorry if I missed it. Have been away from the thread.
I suggest we start with 940 weeks off for both parents. At 1.5x-pay, naturally, as kids are expensive. It’s the right thing to do. It gives me the good feels. And it will shoot our economy to the moon.
It always surprises me when subjects like this come up,. The way it gets debated.
“The other workers would resent it”, “Whats in it for me?” “Can we afford it?”
Other developed nations have done this for decades. Its not resented in the workplace, everyone benefits and it generally pays off economically. Yet most people would rather speculate on how they think it might work instead of just checking how it does work elsewhere.
Another thing I notice is that this seems to be part of a general way of understanding competitiveness. I’ve seen the competitiveness argument advanced in debates about minimum wage, holidays, maternity leave, sick leave, etc.
Yet the US fails to out compete nations with all these things. Some nations do worse, some do better, there seems to be no correlation.
So show us how it works. With numbers. Cost. Benefit.
Or we can just go with my plan.