We also live in a world where the stock market ceases to exist if there isn’t a new generation of consumers and workers. (Facebook’s stock price is predicated on the idea that 1 years from now there will still be young people to advertise to.) Children create internalized costs (to parents, to businesses that hire parents), but large positive externalities.
We address that situation by categorically prohibiting discrimintion. Yes, businesses aren’t spared the costs of dealing with peoples’ parental obligations. But it doesn’t matter because that is a cost all businesses have to accommodate (just like the cost of providing for bathroom breaks and lunch breaks and other accommodations for human needs).
My sister was laid off from her employer of 8 years 3 months after her first child was born. She was a top performer, and they'd been throwing raises and bonuses at her before she got pregnant. Over the same year or so (there were 3-4 rounds of layoffs), every single pregnant woman or mother with kids under 2 that she knew at the company was also laid off.
I mention this story, and people ask me "Is that even legal?"
And my response is "Of course it's not, but if you've got a 3 month old newborn at home, have just been laid off, and are trying to conserve cash so you don't go bankrupt before getting another job (which, BTW, you will never get if you sue your former employer), are you really going to sue them? Where will you find the money? Where will you find the lawyer? Where will you find the time?"
And then even if you do, they are going to trot out a multimillion-$ defense team who will argue that they laid off 40% of the company, they sold off a business division, the price of oil was down 2/3 from its peak, and all of the layoffs were necessary for the survival of the company. All of which might or might not be true. Look at just a few women's story and it's pretty clear they're breaking the law, but factor in macroeconomic concerns and you can muddy in the waters just enough that they might win.
That's the problem. "It's illegal" does not automatically mean that you can't get away with it. In fact, if you're wealthy and pick the right targets, you can get away with a damn lot of things that are illegal.
To say you have no options is incorrect. Bona fide violations of law are routinely handled by these agencies at no cost to the victim and are very often successful.
https://www.eeoc.gov/federal/fed_employees/filing_complaint....
https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/wysk/conciliation_litigat...
https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/fmla/13.aspx
Edit: ADA to DOJ
Which is also illegal, but companies openly get away with it every day.
The worst that ever happens is a slap on the wrist when all the major companies have non recruitment ("no poaching") agreements with each other, suppress wages, get caught, and have to pay a token fine.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/business/supreme-court-ra...
Silicon Valley is a small place.
One revelation of the Damore affair was that Google managers a) participate in blacklisting and b) are utterly brazen about it
They look overqualified and not a good fit with the team culture.
Hell, it even bridges genders, I've seen male friends on extended sick leave got the shaft via PiPs, where the time-correlation was uncanny to say the least, and the cost to pursue it seemed disadvantageous to them at the time.
My suspicion is that there's a perception that because we don't back the "Laws Laws Laws" aspect of it 100%, some people read us as "opposed", when in reality I'm arguing that _laws are not sufficient_ to achieve positive outcomes. Unfortunately, many people are... very opposed to engaging in this discussion, so the best I can do is guess.
EDIT: (And, lest I spam the thread more, thanks@meti for mentioning EEOC, I honestly didn't know that existed prior, and I'll be sending it to one friend right now)
What we have to fix is the idea that because someone undertook an enforcement action that they are a risk. If your company treats it's people fairly, you generally have nothing to worry about. If when presented with blacklist info people reported it (especially when it is illegal) the culture around this would improve.
What baffles me the most is that my (US) employer practices rampant positive discrimination when hiring women (I don't mind, btw). And I find it hard to believe they're unique in this. How does a company go from "we ned more gender diversity" to "let's fire the young mothers!"?
WRT "how to fix this".... it's one of the few things that my country has done fairly well, but it'd be unthinkable in the US: you can legally take up to 2 years of maternity leave (or paternity leave, but not both; I think social security covers most of the costs for the company). It's at a fraction of your salary, and there are incentives to come back to work sooner, but you can also stay the full 2y. If you come back sooner, the company is often just grateful, they don't question "how will you handle it" because well... you could've stayed home; you probably figured it out how to handle a small child. And after 2y, nobody really doubts that you can handle work & parenting. Firing you while pregnant is rampantly illegal, I've never heard anybody have this problem - but, indeed, there is sometimes/in some companies a reluctance to hire young childless women. Still, overall I think the rule is pretty good.
It's a kind of bourgeoisie management ideology. The bosses insist that you, your time, and all of your attention belongs to them (we only want 110% players, etc).
When a child enters the picture, they have concrete evidence that the thing they believe is not true, and that's a subconscious threat. They need to either admit that their shitty paper distribution company is not actually the be-all-and-end-all of existence, or just eliminate the threat.
Which is to say that this behavior _is_ dumb, but it does serve a function in preserving the ego of management.
That is one thing unions are good for.
If she doesn't have the time to work on a lawsuit, why would she have had the time to work at her job?
On a tangential matter, I think many people would agree that society should consider financial help for children in poverty. But who should pay? The potentially poorer neighborhoods where they reside? The businesses in the area? Or the national government?
From the businesses. Paid paternal leave is already a legal mandate in just about every country. The US is very lacking in this regard.
As Rayiner accurately points out, children are clearly necessary from a societal point of view. Thus, it seems "most fair" for the whole society to bear that, and for it to not be unevenly distributed such that it generates perverse incentives for business owners.
Companies that pay higher salaries by their choice incur higher payroll costs. That’s just how that works. Trying to engineer the system to even that out somehow is just introducing bureaucracy and costs into the system. The only case I do have concerns about is small employers who by chance might get hit with the costs of a large proportion of their staff taking maternity/paternity leave at the same time. That could be crippling and possibly there should be some special programme to help those companies out.
If designed properly it would not. High-income employees would get more pay out of the program, but they would also have to pay more into the program. It would be a wash, just like employment insurance or social security.
I also think that some industries, such as education, have substantially more women than men and thus will shoulder disproportionate burden. I also think that richer areas will shoulder the burden more easily.
I think these things point to a collective model of burden. I think bigger companies should shoulder uneven burden, but I'm not sure if different industries or areas should shoulder substantially different burden.
Note I’m not taking a blanket all regulation is bad stance. I support regulation to protect pregnant employees and family life. I am recruiting right now for a contractor to cover for a pregnant employee in my team (in the UK). I just think in general the simplest approach is usually the beast, or anyway the least worst.
I would also argue that burden to compensate companies for employees taking time off for personal or family matters (regardless of sex, reproductive plan or status) should be shouldered at the state or national level, and not at local level where there may be higher disparity in both burden and capacity. If both men and women are allotted mandated time to attend to family, and both men and women warrant access to funding for their employers, then companies would lose incentives to discriminate because presumably everyone would want their time off.
If the federal government compensated businesses, then startups and small businesses wouldn't be exempt from protection, nor unequally stressed relative to bigger businesses. As another commentator pointed out, the UK has a similar model.
Your third paragraph you say that this points to collective burden, so you actually don't agree that larger businesses should shoulder higher burden. You are more worried about the actions of the company then the moral implications to actual human beings, so you are highly immoral, noted.
I also think that some industries, such as education, have substantially more women than men and thus will shoulder disproportionate burden. I also think that richer areas will shoulder the burden more easily.
Your third paragraph you say that this points to a collective burden, yet in this one you say richer areas will shoulder the burden more easily. Aside from this being a statement as vacuous as "the sky is blue", you are also completely missing the fact that higher education is already highly subsidized by alumni, government and corporations. If you are talking about k-12, yeah they are funded by local property taxes already, and are completely irrelevant to this conversation, as this conversation is about corporations.
I think these things point to a collective model of burden.
It's hard to tell what you actually think.
Yes, and in those other countries, the vast portion of the cost (just like the cost of health insurance) is borne by the government, not the business.
For example, in the UK, 92% of the mandated parental leave costs are paid by the government (technically it's a refund but you can get an advance on it). Employers can (and often do) offer more if they wish.
source: https://www.gov.uk/shared-parental-leave-and-pay-employer-gu...
Your own example seems like a great point to make of the exact sort of perverse incentives one can create though. Tons of discussions lately about the gig economy and lack of worker protections. I'm not convinced this isn't at least in part related to the cost of full time workers vs. contractors.
As I said in my response to Rayiner, saying "We disallow this legally" simply isn't sufficient to prevent behavior, to my eyes. As a society, it's illegal to pursue corporate fraud, yet a board of political luminaries will back it, to be topical about things. It's illegal to discriminate vs. age, yet those threads pervade HN.
Would I like to live in a world where we didn't need to play incentive games/work around unconcious bias, absolutely, but that's simply not my (pessimistic) view of things.
I think a part of existencebox's point is that this prohibition doesn't entirely work, because companies discriminate anyway, and craft the playing field so that they either don't get caught, or that the cost or repercussions of fighting back end up being too high for an individual to bear.
Perhaps if we were more willing to look at the actual negative effects (on job performance) caused by pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing, we could actually create incentives to "pay for" those negative effects and stamp out discrimination.
But no, instead we just "prohibit discrimination", without trying to find remedies for the reasons why companies want to discriminate in the first place. It helps, sure. But it falls far short of actually fixing the problem.
Pregnancy and child rearing has a real cost for most businesses, and it is not surprising that discrimination occurs as a result. Trying to ignore those issues and simply make discrimination illegal will never be particularly effective because the underlying issues have not been addressed.
I think we would be better off acknowledging that those issues exist, but fostering a culture where making sacrifices to support families is considered absolutely worthwhile since it is such a fundamentally important part of our society.
There should still be laws against discrimination, but we should not expect the existence of those laws to police our behaviour. A person's behaviour is primarily controlled by what they believe is right, not what they believe is legal
Every company just thinks it gets to be that one company. It's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario.
And of course, any growth is bad in the current situation since the current level is so unsustainable - population should decrease, not increase.
Which resources are currently constrained? You'll find most of the growth is occuring in "low-maintanance" developing economies that don't consume as much (energy, food, goods, or any random metric per capita) as developed economies.
My counter-thesis: it's not the growth that's unsustainable, but the wasteful and environmentally unfriendly throw-away consumerist lifestyles.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-7-billion-people-live-in...
Employees are a benefit, not a cost. The fact employees have requirements of their own is something that happens in organisations run by humans for humans.
If you think employees are a cost, you're doing business wrong - and doing humanity wrong too.
This really comes down to a political issue - who is business for? In capitalist economies, business exists primarily to make money for shareholders and management.
The belief that this can excuse all kinds of incredibly inhumane behaviours is far more of a problem than the fact that women get pregnant and need time off.
Now - you can argue there is huge inconvenience in not having someone turn up to work for a while. From one point of view, it's certainly not ideal.
But a mature business should be able to deal with all kinds of challenges, including human issues, technical issues, political issues, and financial issues.
Being amazed and blindsided by a pregnancy, or even multiple pregnancies, suggests poor planning and a brittle culture. It's not evidence of freebooting capitalism, so much as of not being very good at management.
I think more couples should think about the effect that thier (not just her) career will have on thier family and choose to make the necessary lifestyle choices accordingly.
I married my wife in our mid thirties and she had two kids she was raising by herself - in a good neighborhood (meaning they weren't struggling). We've made plenty of career limiting choices to put our marriage and our family first. She took a pay cut to work a job with fewer hours and less pay and I gave up all of my side hustles and refuse to work a job that requires extended frequent travel, long hours, or a long commute.
I don't expect a business to accomadate my family choices or to reward me as highly as someone who is willing to put in 70 hours a week. On the other hand, a business shouldn't expect me to sacrifice more than 40-45 hours a week with my family for their benefit. I'd much rather lose my job than lose my wife.
If you’re talking about the general time treatment that parents have vs non-parents, then I don’t know what to tell you. 40 hours a week is pretty attainable especially with flexibility around work day, which a progressive workspace like google should be able to support. If the problem is that google is set up to expect people to work themselves to death, that’s not smart and they should focus on that problem instead.
It's spreading out the costs to everyone instead of focusing it on the one company that suddenly happens to have 10% or 30% of its workforce suddenly gone.
It seems much fairer to all parties involved.
Correct, look at the German approach.
I'm not sure if the government subsidizes the companies for the lack of production, but the state mandates 1 year paid leave, and up to 3 and ability to get the same job back.
Now I know that is totally impractical for the tech sector, taken verbatim.
The US can learn from it anyway.
What a field we're in when ranked output is all that matters at the cost of being human with human needs. I needed a kid as much as my wife. I guess I shouldn't expect any different by a field dominated by a bunch of male douchey autists.
The policy solution is:
- A per-child negative income tax sufficient to cover the risk/impact of employer discrimination.
- Give mothers and fathers equal leave.
- Limit the compulsory work week to 50 hours for salaried (or overtime hourly) employees.
- Penalties for violating the above sufficient to convince lawyers to take the case on a speculative basis if the client has a legitimate case.
That balances out the differences between genders and parents/non-parents sufficiently that anyone with sense wouldn't take the risk.
Wouldn't this just lead to employers discriminating, on the grounds that "hey, you already got your tax benefit to make up for it"?
You need to remember the effectiveness of a law is penalty * odds of getting caught. You just need to make discrimination unattractive financially and provide some incentive to the parents to cover the risk.
My ex was a really smart guy, but not much of a people person. He once told me that most of what he knew about being a good manager he learned from being married to me. Otherwise, he would be good at the technical parts of his job, but he wouldn't be any good at dealing with people.
Part of what I knew about dealing with people came from being a full time parent. I'm also much more of a people person than he was, but potential gets developed by practice and real world experience. It doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Possibly you can create an option that allows employees to self-discriminate. Say, "drop down to 30 hrs/wk with some work-from-home flexibility" for a significant drop in pay. You'll get roughly the same level of performance in many creative arts like programming, but since it's the employee's choice to take the company isn't responsible for "discriminating".
Companies are nothing but made up of people. The irony is at one time or another these same people would have wanted the exact same benefits for themselves but they don’t like extending those same benefits to others.
If they can’t act in the larger national interest on a few of these occasions then they won’t have a population to sell to.
Apple sells globally, should Apple also pay for the welfare of the countries where it sells its product?
The corporate tax rate has been reduced to something like 20%. Most companies in the US pay much less than that. The state is already subsidizing a lot for big corporations.
Some part of which flows to investors who purchase securities. Capital gains and dividends are taxed.
Companies can't earn record profits without government running deficit (by healthcare/infra expenditure) and without people running out of savings (by spending on the goods and services being produced)
Part of the value produced will be taxed in the US while the individuals and governments all over the world run out of saving and run into deficits respectively. All that flows to the US. Stopping this is much worse for the US.
Yes. And they do in countries which charge VAT. They should arguably be taxed on the profits they make in the territories they sell in, but that is much harder to do in practice without international cooperation.
> Some part of which flows to investors who purchase securities. Capital gains and dividends are taxed.
Capital gains are only taxed when they are realized. E.g. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway hasn't paid a dime in taxes on the 15.4 billion dollar capital gains on its 16.7 billion dollar stake in Coca Cola (a position he initiated in 1987). Since Buffett has indicated he isn't planning on selling Coca Cola ever, those capital gains won't ever be taxed.
> Companies can't earn record profits without government running deficit (by healthcare/infra expenditure) and without people running out of savings (by spending on the goods and services being produced)
Of course they can: by becoming more efficient or by growing GDP.
> Part of the value produced will be taxed in the US while the individuals and governments all over the world run out of saving and run into deficits respectively. All that flows to the US. Stopping this is much worse for the US.
Nonsense. If you had looked at the OECD government deficit data [1], you would have known that the US is running one of the biggest deficits in terms of % of GDP (4.94% in 2016 vs 1.546% for the EU as a whole, or a surplus of 1% for Germany). Similarly, personal savings are 2.8% in the US [2] vs 10% in the EU [3] or 50% in Japan [4].
Of course, this has little to do with the balance of trade, as you seem to be thinking. The US runs a trade deficit: it imports more than it exports. This is offset by capital inflows from abroad, meaning that a bigger and bigger share of the ownership of productive assets are being owned by foreigners. Returns on those assets will accrue to foreign investors.
[1] https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-deficit.htm
[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/indicators
GP mentioned the Corporate Tax.
VAT is an indirect tax. It's not a tax on profit but consumption, often paid by individuals.
Supplies used as input by companies are vat exempt.
Capital gains are only taxed when they are realized. E.g. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway hasn't paid a dime in taxes on the 15.4 billion dollar capital gains on its 16.7 billion dollar stake in Coca Cola (a position he initiated in 1987). Since Buffett has indicated he isn't planning on selling Coca Cola ever, those capital gains won't ever be taxed.
I also mentioned taxes on dividends.
Buffet is not the only one operating in market.
Of course they can: by becoming more efficient or by growing GDP.
And how can they grow GDP or become more efficient without investment? Where does that money come from if not from the individuals (buying product/service) and government (spending on infra/healthcare)
Nonsense. If you had looked at the OECD government deficit data [1], you would have known that the US is running one of the biggest deficits in terms of % of GDP (4.94% in 2016 vs 1.546% for the EU as a whole, or a surplus of 1% for Germany). Similarly, personal savings are 2.8% in the US [2] vs 10% in the EU [3] or 50% in Japan [4]
Not sure what you are trying to prove by this random data.
US is the largest Foreign Direct receipent.
Yes, Europe the largest buyer of the US securities.
As US become more attractive to the foreign investors. The trade deficit will increase and will be financed by the foreign investors. Where is the problem?
Make the penalties for such discrimination large enough that, even when factoring in the uncertainty that they will be applied in each case, they outweigh any conceivable benefit.
threatofrain got it right. This is a problem we need to address, but the solutions I've seen thus far don't take unfortunate pathologies of human psychology into account, and when we don't do that, we get very surprised at the lack of results down the line. You're more than willing to try to live in a world where you say "Because we said X this is what's going to happen" but I find that to be far less proactive than trying to ask what actual responses are, as distasteful as they might be, and ways to address them.
My concern is that Rayiner's response, "we prohibit it because we made it a law" is still ignoring the key point. _it's too goddamn easy_ to discriminate and paint it as something else, too many reasons I could turn down ANY applicant, for me to just brush it off as "a law is sufficient." I believe that if this is a problem we _really_ want to fix, it's going to involve delving into some unpleasant trains of thought that aren't really "acceptable conversation" right now. I just worry that by ignoring it, the problem goes unaddressed, and we potentially foment resistance against it.
It feels naive to me to think that just because a law is "full stop necessary" in our moral frame of reference, to think that's sufficient to implement it effectively such that it generates the outcome you want in the long run.
1. Having a child incurs a cost to employers.
2. Regardless of legality, a business will try to minimize this cost.
3. Since it's illegal during an interview to even touch upon the subject of having kids and what a candidate's strategy may be to remain a productive employee while raising a child, employers may be even more discriminatory towards _everyone_ of a child-bearing age, in order to avoid discriminating against recent or soon-to-be parents.
So, how can we alter the incentive structure for employers such that they're not tempted to discriminate. Should we shift the cost burden of child rearing to the govt? Or should we allow an employer to ask you about your plans for having children and how it will affect your employment
Rather, it addresses the specific issue of there being an economic incentive to discriminate, intrinsic to all businesses.
Addressing that issue is compatible with concurrent solutions that outlaw the discrimination on moral grounds, or do so more strictly, or provide more aggressive enforcement.
virtually no one who posts on this website will be better off after the revolution. why dedicate your life to screwing yourself?
Major corporations may have a lot. The random corner shop with two employees certainly doesn't.
I'm disappointed that we're not able to engage in better faith.
If you're not even willing to consider the idea of regulations to deal with the matter pragmatically (such as the govt stipend suggested by the person you were replying to), then the situation is just going to continue unchanged.
that's a contradiction in terms. What's "it"? What could you spend and why is it worth less than it's supposed to? I'd argue that it fails because most direct attempts to stop murder involve more murder. Which is to say, no, we could not, or we would've done it, but of course the reasons are very difficult. An easy solution is to restrict the definitions, which is necessary, because death is awfully complicated for the mind to process, but therefore also subject to abuse.
And, individually we have less interest in our neighbor procreating. But in a benevolent reading, tptacek's quoted question could be reduced to "how will you be able to care of young children, given that we require a high degree of commitment to the company?"
Yes, we can make it illegal, and enforce strictly, and yes we should do that. However, as long as their is a cost to companies when women take maternity leave, you are going to have to keep fighting the battle because companies will find new and creative ways to discriminate to save money.
What we need to do, in addition to enforcing anti-discrimination laws, is to have maternity and paternity leave mandated by law, and paid for with taxpayer dollars. The cost of having and raising the next generation should be shared.
We can all agree that the discrimination is wrong, full stop, but we need to be pragmatic and realistic in how we combat it.
What's a state of affairs we can reach such that people don't become preemptively discriminatory for lack of being able to examine factors that would impact workplace performance? We agree, societally, that we shouldn't discriminate against parents. However, we don't live in a world where a business is spared the cost incurred by that. That's just not the pragmatic reality of employment in the US at this time, and my fear is that if unable to ask "do you have a good track record or gameplan for keeping up with the unique obligations of childbearing" we'll err on the side of paranoia in hiring, and the discrimination will occur in seeking to AVOID potential conflict or discrimination.
A govt stipend was one way I could see this, in that the business doesn't have to bear the cost and can offload work. I'd still be concerned that a business might be afraid about context switching/onboarding, but it's a step forward. Unfortunately, I don't even see that becoming a reality in a country where paternity leave is still the exception and not the rule.
There almost seems to be a "psychological game theory" question lodged in there, apologies if I was rambly in stating it.