Your argument makes me think about this satiric article : https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...

I live in a country where it's exactly what we do, and it's fine. I took a 7 months paid parental leave as a dad recently and my company congratulated me for the birth.

In fact, Mexico has 12 weeks. And Greece has 40. I'd rather be a parent in the US than Greece or Mexico. Policies don't exist in a vacuum.

And Sweden has 480 days. Poland 1 year. Switzerland 20 weeks. Ireland 26 weeks. UK 52 weeks. Canada 50 weeks. Norway 12 months. Denmark 52 weeks. France 16 weeks for mothers and 4 weeks for fathers. I can go on. There's 120 such countries in the world.

BTW that leave is on top of 20-30 days of paid vacations each year and unlimited paid health leave in most of these countries.

Notice that most of these also have free healthcare and free or cheap university education. Which is also "impossible" apparently :)

Also notice that some of these countries have higher or similar GDP per capita to USA. Also ALL of the countries I mentioned have lower gender salary gap than USA. And most of them have higher women workforce participation.

Somehow the argument used against paid parental leave turns out to work in favor of it :)

If you choose to ignore almost all developed countries other than USA (that have 20 weeks or more of paid paternity leave ) and cherry-pick Mexico as your counterexample - you should at least be aware what you're doing. You are searching for excuses to keep your ideological delusions going.

This isn't complicated, it works everywhere it's been tried, it's a simple change, the costs are marginal compared to benefits, even countries with GDP per capita one tenth of USA can afford it.

You sound exactly like this: "8-hour work week can't be done, the argument that other countries do it means nothing - in USA it won't work. I prefer to work 12 hours a day 6 days a week in USA than to work 8 hours in Wenezuela after all".

In the US, households have 10% more money than the second closest competitor (Luxembourg), and 20% more money than next closest (Germany & Switzerland).

I think that's a much better comparison than GDP (which isn't necessarily connected with employment), and shows how these tradeoffs work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

Realized capital gains, dividend income, income on rents. I'm not sure how the calculate disposable income. If I have 200M in stock that I could sell, is that considered disposable income? If I earn 2M in dividends that I reinvest, is that considered disposable?

Unemployment in Greece is nearly triple what it is in the US (14%).

Policies don't exist in a vacuum. Everything has trade offs. Until you accept that you'll never have a productive honest conversation.

[0] https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wiwrsa/ersa06p257.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemploym...

All else being equal, providing a large benefit that's most likely to be exercised by one type of worker will discourage employers from hiring that type of worker.

This shouldn't be complicated or controversial. It's basic incentives.

Resources do not come out of thin air. Something has to happen for it to change:

1) Govt provide income to family engaged in child raising activity. -Need high level of tax base and political support to actually fund it.

2) Govt open free and quality child daycare. - Again need political support and competent administration to do it.

3) Force private employers to pay. - Only business survive are with high income and revenues. Not gonna work with conservative politics.

4) Go back to old joint family structures where grandparents stay in same home with couples and provide "free" child care. - Needless to say absolutely not gonna work. Its antithesis of progressive vision of society.

5) Keep giving examples of other countries. Useless until one look at whole societal structure and find why many other things work in USA but not in those countries.

Could you expand a bit on this? My impression was that it just became a cultural norm in places that could afford this, driven by the basic need to cultivate own "spaces".

This implies that Greece's unemployment is a result of their parental leave policies, which is, of course, not true at all.

Greece is used as an example particularly because of its bad economy; If a country that's doing as badly as Greece can do it, why can't the US?

If you want examples of "successful" economies doing it, there are plenty of those too.

It very much is part of the answer as it gives successful examples and as such proof how it's very much realistic to achieve, if effort was actually put into it.

Which is a much more constructive PoV than acting like even American problems are so exceptional that all of them need equally exceptional and unique solutions that no other country before could have figured out.

> Policies don't exist in a vacuum.

Indeed, that's why between Greece, Mexico and the US I would easily chose Greece, which has nearly half of the infant mortality rate of the US [0].

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.DYN.MORT

Any tax financed benefits for everyone like this, pensions, maternal leave, unemployment, health care etc are really just an institution forcibly saving money for you, on your behalf. So that you don't have to be responsible for saving money yourself, and don't have to take the risk of over spending or mismanaging. And for that service you will pay the price of salaries for all the people working in these institutions.

What's even the upside if you're just trading universal tax to paying a for-profit corp monthly instead? Skipping the queue through wealth instead of need?

The upside like I said, is that you save all that unnecessary work in the bureaucracy around the parental leave systems. Just look at sweden for example, it's a huge mess around the parental leave, they have a centralized agency now to micro manage every single household in the country with exactly how many days here and there, they will stay home with their child. It's basically central planning for child care.

And there are tons of edge cases and contradictions and bugs in this, of course. It's even become somewhat of a virtual currency now these "days" that parents are given as a gift from the state. Every single family in the whole country is now basically a welfare case that has to be processed through this machinery, with all the applications, paperwork etc, regardless of how well they actually manage on their own. It's incredibly costly, inflexible and inefficient, compared to just giving people higher salaries and letting them manage their family time themselves.

Edit: and, surprise surprise, it's also abused and people game the system. Many parents for example use their parental leave at the same time, to make extended vacations abroad of several months.

Lucky for me I happen to be Swedish and can call you out on that absolute garbage FUD post that doesn't in the slightest reflect the general Swedish opinion of the parental leave system.

Du borde skämmas, dagisnivå.

some people don't have the liberty of that privilege. being poor is very expensive.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...

> Just do what the US does.

thanks, but no thanks.

It's a tradeoff. It might be a better tradeoff for society as a whole but this idea that there aren't some cons to doing it that way is just false.

Personally, I think if your company was able to do without you for 7 months then they don't need you as an employee. My guess is that your salaries are much lower than someone would receive in the US.

They should be able to do without an employee for a few weeks not over half a year and be forced to continue paying this individual.

What this does is affect small businesses very badly while giving the upper hand to large corporations that can afford it.

I truly don't understand this, and each time I see the stats on it sit in even greater disbelief. Why would anyone turn down the opportunity to spend, for an awful lot of companies, fully paid time off work to spend time with their new family?

Guessing I'm much less "career-minded" than of lot of these guys, but it makes zero sense to me that you wouldn't stretch this benefit as far as you can do.

Edit: appreciate all the comments! Main themes are to reiterate it's not an easy task by any stretch, and fears (both real and assumed) over retaliation for time out. I'm not yet lucky enough to be father, but I still can't square either of those between work and family time.

I enjoy work and the comradery of my co-workers. I was working from home anyway, so there was no long commute. And it gave me something to do. I'm a programmer. I like my work. It gives me an outlet for my creativity and allows me to bond with co-workers. And I care about the product and deliverables I'm working on. I don't like letting my coworkers down as they cover for me.

I took another 2 weeks after my wife went back to work.

So for the second child I had to get VP approval to take a whopping 3 weeks (unlimited* PTO, technically no paternity leave). That was essential because now there was childcare, chores, and baby care involved. It should've been more like 8w.

Higher level, the value of children to parents is declining based on total fertility rate declines.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/paid-paternity... (Men who receive paid paternity leave in Spain want fewer children, study finds)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... (Does paternity leave reduce fertility?)

As opposed to environments without prophylaxis options and where women do not have financial independence, where it was implicitly borne by women.

I doubt many people shorten their paid time off simply because they love work so much.

I still got a lot of pressure from my bosses to cut it short and work part time while I was out. One of them even questioned my "loyalty to the team" at a holiday party that I attended in the middle of it (I went specifically because I wanted to get face time with people and not be distant).

The way a lot of corporations work, you have the "policy", and then you have management interpreting that policy. Things like leave of any kind might be technically "guaranteed", but they come at a cost of fewer individual contributions to projects and lower billable rates. And, at the end of the day, you report to someone who only cares about his budget, who has control over your project assignments.

So after that, suddenly my first year was only 6 months long (something something fiscal year), and it did count (blah blah blah pattern extrapolation) and I wasn't getting good assignments (constantly set up to fail, and even though I always pulled it off, I'd get terrible reviews for the smallest of issues). Eventually, I got "laid off". Really, I was fired because my billable rates was too low (and my billable rate was low due to retaliation for having slightly more going on in my life than living at work), but the company schedules regular layoffs to axe the lowest x% of employees. I guess that is one silver lining of that awful, Metropolis-esque machine: they gave me a (very small) severance on the way out.

So yeah. You can have a company "guarantee" leave, but still will structure a reason to get rid of you.

By indirectly, I mean that when they compare me to the other people they don't seem to be prorating my "stats" for that extra time off.

IMO this as well is something where the DevOps slogan "if it hurts, do it more often" should be applied.

The "discontinuity" of an employee leaving temporarily with months of warning in advance is the easy case. If that is a serious problem for your business, it's a failure of company culture and management. How would you deal with the "Hit by a bus" scenario?

If your organziation isn't shitty, so you can handle a woman taking maternity leave, you also won't get fucked by people getting sick, and can offer paternity leave and sabbatical options to help you attract employees which, newsflash, has recently become rather difficult.

It is an answer. For example, my cousin in England was able to spend a year breastfeeding her daughters without having to go through the arduous process of pumping. Their family is alive and well, and so is the UK.

Also, I have never once heard anybody here complain that maternity/paternity leave is in some way damaging the company/employee/economy - just stuff that happens in the office.

perhaps pentagon should get involved in parental leave policy. they could probably fund it outright out of their black budget.

I mean it definitely is, since 186 other countries in the world do offer paid parental leave. The United States is a huge outlier, especially given its wealth.

That's why many European countries are progressing towards giving fathers the same leave as mothers, and making it mandatory for both (e.g. in Spain mothers used to have much more leave than fathers, but they progressively increased the leave for fathers while also making things more inflexible - fathers used to be able to "give" their days to mothers, but that no longer works, and both must take at least six weeks mandatorily).

I don't think there is a clear-cut optimal solution for the problem and every solution has pros and cons. For example, mandatory equal leave for both means losing flexibility (and there are biological arguments that mothers need more leave). But I think it's a reasonable compromise to mitigate discrimination and bias.

But even then you're right that it's a struggle to get men to take the full available parental leave, often because "just" getting paid 100% of salary isn't enough. Losing X months of career progression is often seen as a bigger deal (and a not unsubstantial part of remaining pay discrepancies between men and women in some countries).

That doesn't mean you can't get significant improvements, though.

I live in the UK, and waking up to the harsh realities of how shitty parental leave provisions and nursery provisions are here compared to Norway where I grew up was not fun...

(And yes, some people will try to discriminate, and some will succeed. )

There is a trade off in all things. Something that is being studied now, Abused children cost society a fortune in missed productivity, court, criminal, medical and social care. What is the cost for those not abused but just where the family is stressed for decades, what missed potential, what of those that fell into crime at the margin.

We forsake the growing of our adults at a cost later on. And 90% of that growing comes from the family unit. So we forsake the family unit at our own cost.

I am not saying we should all be the Waltons, but we should aspire in that direction. Schools, urban environments. Even seemingly crazy ideas like early start support, or therapy for couples every 5 years, all start to look like "stitches in time"

There may be no clear solutions at the level of "who pays for missed working days" but then we are privileging private businesses beyond the level their role in society is I suspect.

Make it mandatory ?

In my country it's mandatory for my employer to let me take my vacation days. They are risking fines if they don't make sure I do and I can't give up on these vacation days either.

The long term interests of society, the employee and ultimately of the business is something that many business struggle to realize or care about.

So we have the government, whose power reigns supreme, who can compel the business to act. Sometimes this is necessary, because business managers aren’t always good at what they do.

My favorite example was something my local conservative radio media went insane over about 15 years ago. The state passed a law that requires employers to, in writing: (a) tell the employee what their job title is, (b) tell the employee what their rate of pay is, (c) tell them what their available benefits are, and what they cost, and (d) tell them what expenses the employee will have and what they cost. (ie, uniforms, tools) Dire predictions of doom were made, small businesses were going to be destroyed, yadda yadda.

Or, despite the fact that they believe so deeply that time off to produce the next generation of workers and consumers is a net loss to their bottom line, they're actually wrong and are yet to discover this.

Parental leave should be a universal benefit for workers, period. Employers should foot the bill.

I think society should foot the bill for society-wide benefits. I do not see any reason to expect small businesses (or even large businesses) to have to worry about the costs of funding parental leave benefits, outside of having the requisite staffing.

Exactly, which is why tasking every business with calculating risks of pregnancies and funding for them is dumb. Just do it on a nation level, or at least state level.

It works in the UK and Europe because there is _some_ understanding that a prospering society at all levels can't be achieved by blind liberalism and some collective risk sharing is actually a good thing.

It is always citizens that shoulder the burden one way or another.

    Self:  Pay with your own savings
    Firm:  Pay with higher prices and lower wages 
    State: Pay with higher taxes paid to the state

Fast forward to a rather late “happy accident”, and I thank whatever compelled me to move here soon after college.

Would I have saved more than the 18k EUR in parental leave pay had I been on even a non-SV US tech salary with US-only taxes? Yes.

Would I have had a whole work and regulatory culture around me that guaranteed that I could take that year, and come back to my choice of part-time schedule for the same type of work? No.

I bet over time that fraction would grow larger as paternal leave got more normalized, especially if the parental leave could be spread out over a few years (like it can in many European countries) instead of over the first few months.

Here's how the percentage of parental leave days taken by mothers and fathers in Sweden has changed over the years [1]. Note that between 2002-2015 each parent had exclusive right to 60 of the total 480 days of parental leave (12.5%), that has since then been increased to 90 (18.75%).

[1] https://i.imgur.com/FSOK5eD.png

Anyway, businesses have had to be forced to not do things that turn out to be bad for their business, up to and including not killing their customers and employees. "Obviously it can't be better in all dimensions otherwise everyone would be doing it" is the ultimate conservative arguments, since it means nothing could ever change---obviously we have reached the optimum, right?

Ah, the dark side of American exceptionalism. "Other countries do it" is absolutely an answer. We could, if we wanted to, peruse our way through the policies used in other countries and pick the one that best fits Americas needs and demographic situation. But that isn't possible if we put blinders on and pretend that the experience of other countries doesn’t matter.

It's why the Tea Party had limited success in the early part of the decade: they were willing not to participate. And it's why Democrats lost ground in elections (VA governor's race being the key one), and will be hit harder in the midterms.

We need steady incremental progress.

It is an answer, because it’s been working well for decades in other countries. Right now I have a man in my team taking his parental leave and I as a manager have no problem with it at all. When hiring I just accept this risk and keep in mind possible mitigations (temporary reduction in capacity and expences or hiring substitution or redistribution of workload etc).

I worked with someone from a European company working in the USA. She started her full time job here while she was on an 8 month maternity leave from her old European company (which she didn't plan on returning to afterwards). It would be fucked if her old company had to eat 8 months expenses and then not even have an employee returning back after.

But we are also in population decline and that is worse than having decent parental leave.

Have you asked any actual women about that?