My assumption was that the comment was regarding benefits that don’t already exist - i.e. a change from the status quo. If that was not the intent then I retract.
While I’m generally in favor of paid family leave for the greater good, the costs can’t be just hand waved away. Ultimately they will come out of either the taxpayer’s pockets, employee’s take home (Employers look at total cost including benefits. Rising insurance costs have been behind low raises at many of the places that I have worked.), higher prices for the consumer, or the business will stop doing the business that they are no longer competitive at.
I would be curious what posters from countries with paid leave have to say about the fact that those countries typically have higher unemployment and use more temps/contract workers even in good times because permanent employees are very expensive because of built in costs like this. The poster from Norway touched on this a little. Do the temp/contract employees also get paid family leave or is it only the permanent employees? Thanks I’m genuinely curious about this side of the debate so I can have a more informed opinion.
moldmonkey, I think your posts touches on why we shoud discuss the real societal trade-offs (apart from childless coworker resentment).
Personally, I am already troubled by the current trend to hire based on short-term projects. We don’t have a strong enough safety net to support a large population of workers with unstable incomes. And if unpaid parental leave is a detriment to families, I can’t imagine that high unemployment wouldn’t be as well. It seems to me we need to shore up our current social safety net in anticipation of the the potential negative consequences of paid parental leave, rather than assuming there won’t be any negative consequences and being caught by surprise.
The US has a reasonably healthy fertility rate (~2) even without immigration. The EU does not (~1.55). We don’t need extra policies to increase “domestic production,” and when you consider immigration, such policies would possibly put us on an unsustainable path.
Considering the EU’s fertility rate, I don’t think paid parental leave does much to encourage procreation. It just seems to make sure those kids are better taken care of.
Out of curiosity, was this vacation time or unpaid leave? Not that your management wasn’t wrong in both cases. I understand you - my wife’s aunt lived with them all the time my wife was growing up, and her death had as much impact as my mother-in-law’s death - more because the aunt was younger.
Impossible to say without more data. The EU might well be even worse off without their policies. Fertility rates around the world range from 0.8 to 7.6, so obviously other factors play a much greater role. Even within the EU, the rates are highly variable. But it does seem like leave policies could tip things by a small amount; perhaps a couple tenths of a point.
There are a lot of factors beyond paid parental leave. For instance, a lot of EU countries do not have employment at will, but have employees under contracts, so that you can only leave (or be fired) at the end of a contract period. Do you have data showing they have more contractors? The US has tons to avoid paying benefits and for very short term employment.
I don’t know why parental leave and vacation policies would increase unemployment. Having someone off for a year and having to hire a replacement should decrease unemployment. Increase taxes on the other hand, definitely.
I’d suspect that generous vacation and holiday benefits reduce the average amount of time worked far more than parental leave benefits.
Earned vacation leave. You see my being gone “so much” would interfere with the status quo of having a non-child burdened person around to work all the time various parents needed off to go to soccer games.
Hope you are looking for another job. When I worked for what was primarily a manufacturing company they had obnoxious official vacation scheduling rules - which we in research didn’t have to follow. But in a normal office environment …
I worked in a place where one manager was famous for almost missing the birth of his child because he had to go to an important meeting. Some managers are just dicks. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some people with kids got pushback for taking time off to stay with them when they are sick.
Nope, like I wrote, it was my ex-supervisor that was such a jerk.
It’s neither finished nor terrible coherent, but here is the product of a bumpy ride home tonight:
Scenario 1:
Mothers take off 1 year at full pay, paid by the feds with money collected from you and I through some sort of income-related tax. Benefit is not taxed.
Other scenarios could include benefits of different size and duration. They may include fathers. They may include child care in addition to or in lieu of time off. Benefits may be capped. Benefits may be taxed (or not) in exciting ways.
Assumption:
Any change we make will magically adjust female workforce participation, as a ratio with male workforce participation, such that this ratio is equal with Norway’s.
I’m using the World Bank’s 2010 employment to population ratio, 15+, male and female (%) (modeled ILO estimate). I would prefer to use data with an age cap, maybe 65. Anyone got those data? I’m not sure how it changes things. WB has ages 15-24, but I didn’t see other ranges.
NO:
F: 60
M: 67
F/M: 0.90
US:
F: 53
M: 63
F/M: 0.84
Why look at the ratios of ratios (i.e. F/M)? The US has a lower overall employment to population ratio than Norway. Accounting for that gives us a female employment to population ratio of 57% if our policy works. I’m also assuming no change in male workforce participation. I do not know if that is appropriate.
US after leave-policy magic:
F: 57
M: 63
F/M: 0.90
Costs:
The direct cost of the benefit
We cultivate ~4M babies each year. Adults who work make ~$30k/year. That’s $120B/year. This number is bogus in so many ways. Who wants to talk about why? We should find a better number.
Taxes not collected
These moms are out of work for a year. Income and payroll federal receipts ($1764B in 2010) divided by number of workers (154M in 2010) comes out to $11k/worker. This is artificially high for several reasons, but we can fix it later. $11k/worker x 4M babies = $44B in taxes not collected.
Administrative costs
We can probably estimate this by digging into other federal benefit programs, but I have not done this.
Companies have people leaving for a year
They have to hire and train replacements, or coworkers have to cover. I don’t know how to calculate the burden on the economy. Companies can’t run lean…bad for global competitiveness…blah blah….
Coworkers so jelly
Behold the field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren. Next?
Benefits:
Increased tax revenue
Greater participation by women in the workforce increases tax revenue, which another poster tried to estimate.
We see from above that our policy pixy dust is going to increase female participation from 53 to 57%. That’s 3.4% more workers working (not 2%, not 4%.) 3.4% of $1764B = $60B
Skilled workers keep doing the things they’re skilled at.
Instead of dropping out. Maybe this sends the economy blasting through your garden fence like that guy on COPS who was sampling the phencyclidine. Unstoppable. But I don’t have numbers.
Greater pool of skilled workers.
I think that’s good? It makes for more interesting conversations with strangers IMO.
Unknown:
A policy change may influence birthrate
An influx of people who want to work in a time when people have trouble finding full employment may do…something. Norway apparently introduced their policies during a time of increased worker demand. Do we have that here now?
How do we deal with non-wage compensation? Say I pop a baby out and go on leave. Is my company still paying my health insurance? My disability insurance? Matching my 401k contributions, assuming I can still make them? Most posters in this thread seem to lean toward moving costs of any potential benefit away from companies, but costs come in many flavors.
Income for business owners gets weird. I pretended it doesn’t happen.
There are more holes here than on my old labcoat, but I think it’s moving in the right direction.
In a bit of a hurry but-
In Norway, there is 3,7 % unemployment and very little use of temporary employees. The exception is covering for people who are away. In fact, most commonly on maternity leave. In general, in most couples the mother claims most of the parental leave, and so is the one with the absence long enough to need a temporary hire to cover it.
The father normally only uses 10 weeks of the leave. Such an absence is more like an extra long vacation from the perspective of the workplace, and so there are mechanisms in place to cover.
Traditionally, when you graduate, your first job is the most difficult one to land. In Norway, you commonly end up either going to some remote community in the back of beyond, or cover a maternity leave for your first job. A significant percentage of graduates entered the job market through someones maternity leave.
Employers are also more willing to take a chance on someone when their contract auto-terminates them after a year.
Norways fertility rate has increased from a low of 1.66 in the 80s to 1.98 in 2009. This has coincided with the rise of policies to make it easier to combine jobs and careers. However, I do not know if other nations have had a similar experience, it may be an example of correlation without causation.
I agree that we’d need a larger data set to say anything conclusive.
I wouldn’t be surprised if something like your country’s policies counteract a trend that we see here in the US, in which working women are delaying having children. That age is higher right now in Norway in the US (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2256.html , although not from the same years). I’d want to look at the trends. It’s been rising here. Dunno about Norway.
My bolding. It reminds me of something Winston Churchill said, when asked why the govt during WWII were continuing to fund the arts. He said “well, what are we fighting for?”
And Churchill was a Conservative.
It would depend how it’s organised, but in the UK at least small companies do not lose out because they can claim the maternity pay back through tax. So there is at least one example of a country where the company pays for some of the maternity leave but doesn’t lose out.
Also, in the UK, you never get 100% of your pay. For the first six weeks you get 90%, and then £138.18 or 90% of your average weekly earnings (whichever is lower). That means you still have to budget quite seriously in order to be out of work for more than six weeks.
A poster above wondered how her employer could manage her $100,000pa salary while also employing someone else; that’s not the way it works in other countries so there’s no reason to expect it to work that way in the US.
The mandatory leave in the UK is only 2 weeks, not six. It would be really unusual to find a woman who actually wanted to go back into the office in that time. It would aso be really unusual to have a mother who managed to hide her pregancy, have a baby, and choose to go back to work two days after it was born, all without her employer noticing.
It doesn’t apply to self-employed people who work from home.
There’s no mandatory leave time for fathers or other second parents. This is because the mandatory leave time is for health reasons, which is why it’s higher for factory workers.
Mandatory leave time for women who’d had caesarians can extend to six weeks if they drive to work because insurance won’t cover them in such a short time after that operation. Car insurance in the US must be a bit laxer about insuring people after surgery.
This is actually a pretty sound argument but only if your only desire is to increase the birth rate.
I think you also make a good point but not one that’s good enough to say “no parental leave.”
Your company should be able to get a temp in to cover at least some of your co-workers’ responsibilities. Is there any job where at least 60% couldn’t be covered by someone who just turns up on time and can read and write well? The 40% is where you earn your high wage, but are you absolutely irreplaceable for everything you do?
Your co-worker should try her best to complete projects (etc) as much as she can and not take on projects (or be exected to take on projects) that will cover her maternity leave, and leave a good plan in place for her temp. Pregnancy, unlike unexpected illness, is something everyone can plan for. And in your example it’s ten weeks, so there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
I also wish I could add that, if you do have to take on lots of extra work you should be compensated for it even as a salaried employee, but I recognise that this is unlikely to happen. Planning for an absence, and hiring a temp for at least some of the role, however, is not that big a deal, however, and it would be a terrible company that couldn’t do it.
As an aside, in the UK at least, teachers do sometimes take on extra responsibilities due to their colleagues’ maternity leave. It is voluntary though and can be an excellent way to get extra responsibility without having to interview for it so is actually beneficial to the teachers.
A British Conservative during the mid 20th century. In other words, he was to the “left” of all American Republicans in this post-rational era, and to the “left” of many Democrats.
Please take your Marxist ideals and go back to North Korea or Europe. 
The Business Section of the Times today has some data on this, from California mostly.
The California law has doubled the time women take off to six-seven weeks - still pitiful compared to Europe, but better. Almost of this increase has been for high school graduate workers and black mothers. The increase for college educated white mothers was minimal. The effect was reduced the disparity among these groups.
Mothers who took the leave were 6% more likely to be working a year later than those who did not. In NJ, women who took the leave were 40% less likely to get aid or food stamps in the year after the birth.
In California again mothers who took the leave worked 15 - 20% more hours than those who didn’t, and their hourly wages increased by 5%.
Okay, but it is still tough on employers, right? Nope. 89-99% of employers said that it had no negative effect on profitability, productivity, turnover and morale. 87% said it did not increase costs. 9% said they saved money, because of decreased turnover and benefit payments.
This article?
[QUOTE=SciFiSam]
It reminds me of something Winston Churchill said, when asked why the govt during WWII were continuing to fund the arts. He said “well, what are we fighting for?”
And Churchill was a Conservative.
[/QUOTE]
There’s another Churchill quote even more appropriate to this discussion:
[QUOTE=SciFiSam]
It would depend how it’s organised, but in the UK at least small companies do not lose out because they can claim the maternity pay back through tax. So there is at least one example of a country where the company pays for some of the maternity leave but doesn’t lose out.
[/QUOTE]
As mentioned earlier, different countries use different methods. The Canadian method is that while an employee is working, each pay period the employee and the employer both pay contributions to the Employment Insurance fund, run by the federal government.
Then, when the employee takes parental leave, the fund pays out benefits; the employer doesn’t pay anything to the employee on leave. If the employer hires a temporary worker, the employer pays that temp. In most cases (other than minimum wage jobs), the temp usually works at a lower rate than the employee on leave, so there’s often a small savings for the employer. (Training costs for the temp could off-set that savings to some extent, of course.)
I’ve been in the work-force for close to 30 years, and I’ve never heard anyone grumbling about someone taking parental leave. It’s just one of several benefits offered through the EI system, and most workers will need one or another of those benefits at some time during their employment career.