Under the Canadian EI model, if your workplace doesn’t have much in the way of sick leave, there is up to 15 weeks’ disability benefits through EI. Again, EI is not limited to parental leave, but offers a variety of benefits for those who have to take time off work.
(And of course there are no medical bills, but that’s for a different thread. 
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Yup. I get the dead tree edition, so I almost never go to their website.
Doing the crossword puzzle on it in pencil really screwed up my screen.
Thanks for posting the link.
I figured. Glad you pointed us to it.
I recommend readers of this thread check it out. Several states going their own way, which allows comparison.
The university I work for doesn’t have paid maternity leave, but they do have a voluntary program that I would love to see extended to a lot more work places. We’re allowed to convert some of our earned time at a rate of one-to-three to be used when we’re sick ourselves for 6 or more days or to take care of family (no 5 day wait of using regular earned time first like for ourselves, ftr), and we’re allowed to carry this over up to 150 days total, though we can only use 2 weeks leave on someone else a year. The part I really like - other than 27 hours turning in 2 weeks! - is the definition of “family” means your spouse, your child, your parents, and any other members of your household.
So if ZPG’s employer had this policy too and her uncle lived with her, she could use this leave to care for him. And my grandboss was able to take this leave when her roommate had surgery last week. Allowing us paid time off to care for our parents regardless of where they live and anyone who lives under our roof is fair to those of us who don’t have children but do have other caretaker obligations.
Its not free, its part of the insurance system. This is not a feel good item. It seems like people think that maternity leave is just time to frolic and bond with newborn babies. It takes weeks to physically recover from childbirth, babies do not have large enough stomachs to sleep through the night (meaning 4 hours of straight sleep) until they are at least 10 weeks old (and many babies take much longer than that) so at least one parent does not get a good nights rest every night.
So at least the first 10 weeks of maternity leave and the first two weeks of paternity leave are not really luxuries so much as they are moderating significant hardship.
I am mildly pro-family/pro-life and I can’t imagine anyone that is genuinely pro-family/pro-life objecting to something that is so pro-family and pro-life. If family values conservatives really want to show that they are pro-family rather than anti-women, then they should get out in front championing things that are good for families rather than just bad for women.
I know this sounds a little sexist but my wife and I tried pretty hard to share the parenting responsibilities equally but the fact that my wife lactated better than me and had a profound bond that came with 9 months of gestation and childbirth kind of threw that whole notion out the window after the second week when she didn’t physically need me around anymore. Maybe other couples are able to pull this off more equally than we did.
It costs employers their portion of the insurance cost but that insurance cost is usually paid for all employees regardless of age or gender.
Babies are a natural side effect of intercourse. Should intercourse be limited to the relatively wealthy or the extremely poor? Should we really have a society where you have to be 35 years old before you can responsibly have children? If I could do one things differently in my life, it would be to have children earlier but financial and career concerns prevented me and my wife from having kids would graduate from college before we retired.
Nope, just for having babies. Can you point to a country that give paid leave to care for elderly parents? Everyone has elderly parents even those of us who have children.
You only pay for the replacement, the parent on leave draws from something like unemployment insurance.
The employer only pays for the temp. And we socialize all sorts of costs that kids create from schools and playgrounds to the extra costs associated with childproof bottlecaps.
If you asked your wife, I bet her perspective might be different even if she never intends to have another child again.
I suppose there are some tax benefits (that don’t even come close to covering the bare minimum costs of having a child) but aside from that what are these other non-need based parental benefits that parents are getting?
We all have parents, even those of us with children. The issues are separable and the only reason they are linked in your mind is because the FMLA has linked them. No other country in the world links the two the way you are proposing.
Its paid but the benefit is usually more in line with unemployment or disability benefits than full salary. 10-12 weeks for women, 2-4 weeks for men seems reasonable.
It depends on how permissive you think we ought to be about abortion and whether you think a higher birth rate is desirable.
What are all these socially provided benefits you are talking about?
Yeah, those people are jerks. Picking up slack for maternity leave is a management problem and in larger organizations, its actuarially consistent enough that any decent HR team can account for it. Smaller businesses can usually make do with temps. This is not supposed to be a windfall for employers who get a reduced payroll while everyone else just works harder.
I just don’t get who objects to this stuff. Conservatives should like it because it is pro-family and liberals should like it improves social welfare.
Describing this as pro-family or not pro-family is not accurate. Give me $10,000/month to raise my family. No? Why aren’t you pro-family? It doesn’t work that way.
Family values don’t mean that you pay for everyone else’s family. I don’t really know if there is a monolithic interpretation but this is not it.
Even if it’s rolled into the existing framework of disability or unemployment type insurance, it’s a marginal increase in cost. It’s misleading to say that the employer wont pay for this.
It appears to make good business sense. I think that those who oppose this don’t understand the issue of turnover and the benefit of happy employees. This is the “let’s cut everyone’s wage to the bare minimum and curse them as lazy bums if they don’t hustle for $5 an hour” philosophy.
There is a large middle ground between no leave or protections (which is less than what we have now) and 940 weeks at full pay. I think we’re closer to the former at the moment. What is ideal? Should the federal government do it, or the states? Is the federal government allowed to do it? How do the costs and benefits weigh? Quantitatively, not just the good feels vs the bad feels. And who pays for those costs?
Fortunately, we have some states trying it out on their own. I like that. We don’t have a ton of data, but we’re getting more. From the linked article, it looks like the program in CA helps keep lower-income women working. The costs in the three current programs are covered under existing state disability insurance programs, which tax income up to a certain level. Max annual payment is <$1000. The program with the largest weekly payment is RI’s, which tops out around $750/week. I don’t know how it’s taxed; my guess is as unearned income.
Congratulations, Ruken! You’ve just discovered the Reductio ad absurdum fallacy! If a bit of rain is good for the crops, just imagine how well they’ll grow at the bottom of the ocean, amirite?
Moving on…
Two couples I know have recently had kids. The first couple works at Microsoft- where the mother got ten weeks of maternity leave, and the father got five, as I recall. Contrast that with my other friends, who got a grand total of three weeks. Those are all salaried, well-paying positions… now imagine what it’s like for someone who’s working hourly. I remember when my son was born, I had to be back at work the next day- I can remember how much that sucked.
Also, keep in mind that those parents will all be taking far more absences than I will, just because they’ve got kids- doctor’s visits, illness, snow days… I don’t begrudge them that parental leave at all. I get to go on vacations and put away more money than they do. Raising a family is hard, and happy employees are productive employees.
I’m actually getting more than a little sick of American Exceptionalism (“It can work everywhere else- Except America”). What the hell’s wrong with us?
I guess I mistakenly assumed that people who were for family values would be pro-family. And I think pro-family means you support policies that are pro-family. Or does pro-family simply mean anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage? Because if that’s all “pro-family” means, then they’re just making up words to make their intolerance sound more palatable.
There is a large gap between saying “give me $10,000/month because I have a family” and lets have paid maternity leave. I would support extending our public education system to include free childcare and free college for those who can get into their state school but those are much bigger ticket items.
I just wanted to point out that forcing women to have children and then failing to support policies that makes a very difficult time in child rearing a little more tolerable while parading around as being pro-family seems inconsistent and maybe a little misleading.
Well, it depends. If you agree that corporate income taxes are actually borne (at least in part) by the corporation and its owners and not the corporation’s customers and if you agree that that the social security payroll tax is actually borne (at last in part) by the employer rather than the employees then sure, the employer bears some of the cost of this proposal. A lot of conservatives do not agree with this and claim that corporate taxes are borne by consumers and that employer side payroll taxes are actually borne by employees.
I never said this would not cost employers anything, heck the benefits of having paid maternity might not even produce a net positive for employers as a whole but we have all sorts of policies that put people ahead of employers and I don’t see why this can’t be one of them. Does every new policy idea have to be good for corporations and employers or can we have a few policies that are good for people?
I think the context you are picking up might be stuff from earlier posts where people thought that employers would end up paying two salaries when they hired a replacement for the person on maternity leave.
I don’t think we’ve had links yet to actual federal bills that have been introduced. S. 1810 and H.R. 3712 were attemped in 2013. I’m taking a look.
At what point does it become absurd, and why? We can learn from ludicrous extremes (I’ve also presented the opposite extreme in this thread) when trying to craft an ideal policy. And speaking of ideal policies, do you have any data to contribute that will allow us to find the optimal balance? Reactions to the data presented thus far? Analyses? Specifics for a plan? Other, useful, contributions?
Or just anecdotes. But then again, raising a family is hard, and happy employees are productive employees, and that’s all we need to know.
I agree with you 100%. I’m all for people not having children when they can’t afford to.
I also recall seeing the specifics of Obama’s proposal. I can’t get the link in the OP to work tonight:
“The president said the government would provide $2.2 billion to reimburse states for paid family leave programs, and called for Congress to pass a bill that would enable workers to earn seven paid sick days. His plan also included creating more child care and giving families a child-care tax cut of up to $3,000 per child per year.”
So the states would administer their own plans. I haven’t seen analysis weighing that vs a federal program.
You introduced the idea of pro-family indicating it should include various ideas. I think the idea is poorly conceived and the label is not informative. Accusations of hypocrisy relating to being pro-family are also not informative. Whatever idea you think pro-family means, it doesn’t necessarily mean forcing folks to pay for other people’s families.
No one is forcing women to have children, nor has that been part of the discussion thus far in any meaningful way. Same story as before, if you can’t afford children without forcing other people to pay for it, then dont have children. Don’t buy sports cars that you can’t afford and then try and force other people to pay for them. Don’t rack up consumer credit card debt that you can’t pay and try and force other people to pay for it. Don’t do anything and then try to force other people to pay for it.
Again, you’re introducing ideas that aren’t very relevant. No matter whether you believe costs are absorbed by the employer or are able to be passed on to consumers, increased operating costs influence decisions. This has a negative influence in hiring. Just as protected classes have a negative influence in hiring members of that class. Whether that is outweighed by the positives of offering said protections is debateable.
While I understand the sentiment, and you can throw retirement and schooling onto the list, the reality is that people have babies, don’t save for retirement, etc. I’d rather parents pay for schooling. But since I’m stuck here in reality (most of the time), I’d rather we have schooling covered by taxes than not have those kids educated. Parental leave may be similar. We may derive economic benefits from it as well, hence my attempts to tease out the numbers in this thread.
The article we’ve been discussing mentions a favorable reaction to CA’s leave program by businesses. I have not checked how they determined that. In CA the businesses aren’t paying directly for the program. And they like avoiding the costs of replacing workers. I’d like to see more information about this program and the other two.
It used to be common for a couple in their mid 20’s to be financially secure enough to afford children. I don’t know if that is true anymore. I see more and more couples deferring childbirth to their 30’s because of money.
I think its very informative to point out that some people who claim to be pro-family are really just anti-abortion and anti-gay and don’t really support policies that help families. Even if that means higher taxes.
We have all sorts of government policies that mean forcing people to pay for shit they don’t like (see medicare, medicaid, social security, the military). We all pay for shit we don’t want, policy discussions do not revolve around the fact that some people who don’t want something are still going to have to pay for some of it.
Are you aware of the pro-life movement? I for one am perfectly comfortable forcing some women to have children (i.e. I am against elective late term abortions). But I also think that we should make having a family less of a burden and I am perfectly comfortable making you pay for some of that if I think its the right policy.
Kids are not sportscars and flatscreen TVs. I am not likely to have another child but I can still support maternity leave because I see how much of a barrier it is for younger women with careers to start a family. I don’t think our nation is well served by having everyone start their families in their 30s.
If we waited around for policies that everyone was happy to pay for we wouldn’t have a functioning government and might as well replace our judiciary with a thunderdome.
Not if the employer passes on all the costs to the employees by reducing wages to make up for the increased employment taxes. And frankly a lot of things have a negative influence on hiring, so what? If the cost of the insurance is gender neutral then it is just another payroll cost and has the same effect that any other increase in payroll expenses has. Noone said this would be cost and consequence free, if it were, this wouldn’t be a debate at all.
ergo the name “great debates” You seem well aware of the cost but seem to have a distorted view of the benefits. If you limit the benefits to the benefits to the employer I can see why you feel the way you do but lets try looking at this from the perspective of society as a whole (including the employer).