How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

http://the-toast.net/2014/10/27/employer-put-fml-fmla/

by vkb • 12 years ago

404 327 12 years ago

dailen• 12 years ago

Ugh...that's heart wrenching :(

rdtsc2• 12 years ago

Aside from police brutality, all the spying and erosion of privacy, corruption at high level (like regulatory capture), the medical and insurance situation points more to the fact that this country -- US, is not a civilized country.

It is a country with a high GDP, strong military, good natural resources, strong manufacturing. All those nice things. But it is still not a civilized country.

jahnu• 12 years ago

A thought from Jimmy Carter comes to mind. He said countries are not really 'democracies' or 'not democracies' but rather that democracy is either strong or weak. Similarly, one shouldn't say the USA is uncivilised but that some of it's civic institutions are weak in some ways. Additionally they do not uniformly share the same strengths and weaknesses across the entire country.

hderms2• 12 years ago

I think that's an enlightening way of looking at things, but doesn't quite bring the same shame as referring to ourselves as an uncivilized country.

Perhaps if the national debate was about being a civilized country instead of framing it as 'socialism' we'd eventually be able to move into the modern era in the context of social policy.

kiba• 12 years ago

All of which is based on your perception of reality, all of which comes from news.

News are by definitions things that almost never happen.

Define corruption level, quantify it, and then we can talk.

wil421• 12 years ago

Its unfortunate that there are not laws preventing things like this from happening. Too many people in the US do not want the government to impose laws or regulations just because they oppose any government interference what so ever. Even if the interference will benefit everyone.

People have a choice where they work. Had this happened to me I would be high tailing it out of there but professors dont have that luxury.

rdtsc2• 12 years ago

It is sad how people who would benefit most from it can easily be brainwashed to vote against it. This is summed best by the ironic "get your government out of my Medicare" slogan. It is not a real slogan but it is used as a joke to illustrate the underlying logic.

moconnor• 12 years ago

As a counterpoint from civilized Germany, after the birth of a child both parents are granted 14 months paid leave (at 2/3 salary up to ~$3k/mo) to split between them. Usually the mother takes 12 and the father 2 concurrently. The state pays for this, not the employer.

You also have the right to 3 years unpaid leave (extended with further children) and the employer must find you a similar position when you return to work.

So far this has neither economically crippled the nation nor made it impossible for its companies to compete on the international market, nor driven all the manufacturing and blue-collar work abroad.

I'm just astonished how such different systems can coexist. What are the benefits of the American system and who receives them? A lower tax burden? Is it really that much lower to be worth it?

kaitai• 12 years ago

The real "benefit" of the American system is that it keeps everyone eager. It keeps us grateful to have a crappy job at all. It keeps us ready to trade salary for benefits, or vice versa. It keeps us at jobs we don't like for the medical benefits we think they give us and our families. It reduces the bargaining power of labor.

Is this good in the long term? Maybe not, but it is the American aesthetic. It goes hand in hand with the perpetual hope that we will win the lottery/start the next Facebook/work our way up the ladder and then we too can benefit from low taxes. That's why poor Americans defend the privileges of rich Americans to the death: if we ever make it up there we want those privileges to remain!

vlunkr• 12 years ago

Uncivilized, really? We certainly have issues, but I think that's a bit much. Those are all very real problems, but for the most part our day to day lives are very civilized. And there are ways to fix these problems, it just isn't easy.

chrisBob3• 12 years ago

I strongly agree. Its interesting how the US chooses policies some times. The culture here is very different from most other civilized countries.

Countries with no national paid maternity leave policy: US, Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and Liberia [1]

Countries who have executed people in the past 25 years who were under 18 at the time of their crimes: The People's Republic of China (PRC), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United States and Yemen. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave (also noted elsewhere in the comments)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Juvenile_off... Admittedly this fact is cherry picked. The US has since changed the policy

atonse• 12 years ago

Few things make my blood boil more than people that robotically say things like "It's the policy" with the kind of compassion and empathy that a robot would show, and then go about their business without a care in the world.

ep1032• 12 years ago

This is what edmund burke meant when he said "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," and Arendt meant when she coined the term "The banality of evil."

But I always thought it was put best by some blogger I read years ago. They said that in the fantasy or religious worlds, evil is something that just exists so corporeally that it might as well be a noun. An evil rock is evil by definition.

But in the real world, such things don't exist. Evil is not a state of being or can be encapsulated in an object. The closest definition to evil that can be defined from a real world viewpoint, is the undertaking of action that is done (usually out of selfishness) at the known expense of others.

Anyway, that's exactly what you are reacting to. That's objective evil. And not to go full godwin, but our society has had large public trials where we collectively decided that simply acting in accordance with one's job is not a moral defense.

omurphyevans• 12 years ago

Just a tiny nitpick - Arendt was a woman - Hannah Arendt to be more precise.

RayVR• 12 years ago

*she coined the term "banality of evil."

Pxtl4• 12 years ago

At the very least when dealing with monstrous policy, the correct thing to do is refer them to somebody who has the power to change the policy.

markkanof• 12 years ago

Agreed. However, in this situation, it would be in tight competition with the HR person saying "You're changing your story!". Absolutely disgusting. Is this a discussion with an employer or an interrogation of a criminal.

jrs235• 12 years ago

That stinks. For others looking to have children you may want to research short term disability options.

http://www.babycenter.com/0_maternity-leave-the-basics_449.b...

jmount2• 12 years ago

Nasty treatment. And in many places you can't even attempt to bank the sick-leave in the first place.

LanceH2• 12 years ago

Or bank any leave at all. My current employer wipes vacation days on Jan 1.

CapitalistCartr2• 12 years ago

My experience with employers in general is use any benefit you accrue as soon as you reasonably can. Don't save stuff up; it makes you vulnerable to your employers incompetence or greed.

tgb• 12 years ago

Aren't they generally required to pay you for accrued leave or is even that not required?

earlz• 12 years ago

This. Also, flexible sick days(ie, "unlimited").. it works out nice for when you get the flu or whatever and don't have to worry about how many sick days you burn, but a major event like this doesn't really apply and you'll end up needing to burn vacation days or take unpaid leave to recover, not to mention wanting any bonding time

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

In some places, that policy is in place to encourage employees to actually take time off. If it wasn't use-it-or-lose-it, some people would never take leave.

cafard2• 12 years ago

There should a name and shame on this one. What is the university, and what does it think it is doing?

minimax2• 12 years ago

This is a systemic problem here in the US. It would be counterproductive to try and single out one actor when the issue needs to be address comprehensively.

asgard1024• 12 years ago

Why not? Sometimes people desperately organize boycotts of institutions that they want to behave, but it never succeeds, because everyone needs at least one of the institutions (for example, everybody needs to be employed).

I think maybe there could be a lottery and people could collectively agree and randomly single out one actor and boycott it for some time. That would force at least that one actor to care and enforce competition. Who cares about fairness, if everybody is guilty?

MrZongle2• 12 years ago

I disagree. Naming the bad actor would hopefully shame them into changing their policy.... which in turn would put other unnamed bad actors on notice and encourage further naming and shaming by individuals working for them.

If you want to move the earth, starting a landslide is a lot easier than strip-mining.

sp332• 12 years ago

Actually, it's better without a name because it's a widespread problem. If she gave a name, people might think that it's an isolated incident.

eksith4• 12 years ago

Author info at the end says "Karen W. is a Duke City denizen..." I'm not sure if that's misdirection, but "Duke City" is another name for Albuquerque, NM.

Edit: This is interesting. Not saying it's University of New Mexico, but it is in Albuquerque and this includes a reference to her exact phrase "pregnancy or prenatal care" : http://policy.unm.edu/university-policies/3000/3440.html

And, on their FAQ under #21: http://hr.unm.edu/benefits/fmla.php#faqs ... Mentions "serious medical condition"

As well as their contract : http://hr.unm.edu/docs/labor-relations/united-staff-unm-(usu... mentions "pregnancy or prenatal care"

eli7• 12 years ago

Please don't do that. Posting personal information about people who did not wish to have it public is super uncool. I'm sure if she wanted to name the university she would have.

thejaredhooper• 12 years ago

The focus is the policy, not the policy's enforcers.

PeterisP• 12 years ago

Pretty much every country in the world, both 'first-world' and poor countries, has it better than USA in this regard.

Let this serve as a warning for young (age-with-a-potential-to-have-a-family) people who might be tempted to relocate to California - you have to ask for a significant premium in salary, since even in good companies (the OP lists multiple items where her job is considered 'above average') you're simply not getting as good conditions as the absolute minimum mandated elsewhere even for the cheapest entry level jobs.

Locally, a shelf-stacker in the most cost-cutting-oriented local supermarket gets far better maternity leave conditions than those described here.

ceejayoz3• 12 years ago

Yup.

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/BnDi8KlIIAA750F.png

US provides zero weeks paid maternity leave. Pakistan provides 12. Venezuela manages 18. Canada does 50.

Per Wikipedia, the US joins Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and Liberia as the only countries to not provide paid parental leave of any kind.

jnsaff22• 12 years ago

Estonia has 78 weeks of paid Maternity OR Paternity leave, parents can choose which one stays home and gets to take care of the baby.

benihana• 12 years ago

Who pays for it? The State or the employer?

Pxtl4• 12 years ago

Important to note that these are government leave programs. A big problem in the USA is that it is expected that your employer handle this stuff.

Here in Canada, the employment insurance system - a payroll-tax-funded program that handles short-term unemployment benefits - also handles parental leave. They offer 4 months for birth mothers and a an additional 8 months for any parent. The money is tiny - something like half your salary capped to a poverty-level wage, but it's better than nothing and good employers will subsidize it somewhat.

My wife and I split the leave with our 3rd kid. 5 months for her, 7 for me. It's easily some of the happiest days of my life.

There is no reason that private companies should be expected to shoulder this burden. It's practically punishing them for hiring women who want a family. This is the exact kind of case that government exists for.

Domenic_S8• 12 years ago

Canada's 50 weeks come after a 2-week waiting period, and pay 55% of weekly salary up to $500. Not exactly the land of milk and honey.

Also a little unfair to compare the whole of the US as one nation -- family leave is handled at the state level. CA, HI, and a few others have somewhat sane family leave laws.

Osmium2• 12 years ago

Let this serve as a warning for young (age-with-a-potential-to-have-a-family) people who might be tempted to relocate to California

It's interesting. This is a difficult conversation to have. I have good personal reasons for wanting to relocate to California (I'm British/not American so this is difficult), though logistically it doesn't seem like that will/can happen. What I don't understand though is why so many people want to move to the USA just because. From a purely outside perspective, it seems like it's fairly low down in terms of standard of living/worker's rights/healthcare/etc. For the lucky few (of which those reading here might be over-represented) it's great, but otherwise... I just don't understand. Even for salary I don't see it–I'm entering a short postdoctoral programme at the moment and my salary in the UK is about 1.7 times what I would expect in the states, and it's not like my salary in the UK is even that good(!) and I know full well I'd be worked to death over there too.

I just don't understand. But it's such a can of worms (personal politics, patriotism etc.) that it's difficult to talk about. I will say this though, it really is a beautiful country/continent, and all the people I've met seem pretty happy.

sologoub• 12 years ago

UK to US is not as straightforward as say Russia to US (my path). Yes, Russia offers a lot better protection on paper, but what most people don't think about is that in most of the world what is written is very often not what is in practice.

The US state of post-doc employment is well documented to be abysmal. I never had to go through it, but had the privilege to work with people that had and gave up, going tech route instead.

Because of taxation and general consumerism, you get great standard of living as long as nothing bad happens. On average luxury goods are cheaper in US. You even have the option of Oregon to avoid sales tax on big purchases all together (doesn't work on cars easily).

The weather/nature in Bay Area is amazing too. Los Angeles is a bit more desert-like, but still great.

Can't speak for east coast though.

fennecfoxen• 12 years ago

I'm entering a short postdoctoral programme at the moment and my salary in the UK is about 1.7 times what I would expect in the states

It sounds like you're working in academia, a sector which is under pressure from way too many people who would like to enter it. It's pretty likely you don't want to and won't get to work in the United States in this sector: the market is very saturated.

For other positions in the United States, it's more plausible to find comparable or better salaries. In many areas you can also expect lower tax burdens and lower costs of living, especially if you're interested in owning a small home of your own or if you expect to operate a motor vehicle (your petrol prices are twice as high as ours because taxes). Rising medical costs are an ongoing concern, and recent reform attempts have done an excellent job at not fixing this, while possibly also undermining the economic recovery in general. :(

"Workers' rights" are in fact more limited, but the labor market is typically much more dynamic and as such when there is hiring going on in the economy at large, it's much easier to actually get hired to begin with and change jobs to a better employer. It's especially much easier to break into new fields as a young person -- youth unemployment has long been a chronic problem throughout much of the EU, including the UK, and it's only at the bottom of this last recession that the US has reached similar levels, despite many EU nations having more favorable demographics which should mitigate against it. (The US has more illegal immigrants than some EU member nations have citizens.) So this is sort of a risk / reward tradeoff.

Now myself, I'm pondering a job offer which would put me in London in a year, so I'll get a glimpse at things over there in practice before too long. :)

sosborn4• 12 years ago

it seems like it's fairly low down in terms of standard of living/worker's rights/healthcare/etc.

While this is certainly true when you discuss the bare minimum legal requirements, many employers here go above and beyond the requirements and offer benefits that are equal to what you find in other countries.

maerF0x02• 12 years ago

Learned this the hard way. My rough math is this for SF:

1.5xCurrent Salary -- Because everything is expensive here

+ $10k / marginal tax rate -- for relocation and flights home

+ 500/month forEach dependent spouse -- Medical Dental Vision

+ 250/month for each child dependent -- Medical Dental Vision

+ X -- to replace spouses's Salary because they cant work

+ Y / marginal tax rate -- spending money to keep spouse sane because they cant work and cant stay home all day doing nothing

Edits: small clarifications, gross Y up by tax rate

jonathanwallace• 12 years ago

Is insurance much more expensive in California?

AtmaScout• 12 years ago

That is a nice breakdown. Thanks for posting it.

darklajid• 12 years ago

After spending a year in TLV your math makes a lot of sense for in my experience as well.

Don't underestimate X and Y, people...

thrwy10• 12 years ago

Spot on, you couldn't have put it better. Especially X and Y for H4 dependant spouses.

supercanuck2• 12 years ago

I wonder how being a woman at Netflix and other such companies with their unlimited vacation policy is like .

_dark_matter_• 12 years ago

Not sure about Netflix, but I know that when I was at Twitter they offered 12 weeks of paid vacation leave (paternity and maternity). Some of this was mandated, and paid for, by the state.

darkstar9992• 12 years ago

Looks like Californians are lucky enough to get 16-18 weeks paid maternity leave.

http://siliconvalleymamas.com/2013/03/understanding-maternit...

supercanuck2• 12 years ago

For PFL in California, the maximum is $1,000 something per week and you get the money on a Bank of America Debit Card.

CapitalistCartr2• 12 years ago

I wonder how a simple law stating that "sick leave" can be used for having a baby would work for this.

chiph• 12 years ago

Escalate.

gambiting2• 12 years ago

It's completely insane that US doesn't have unlimited sick leave like EU does. It's just backwards and ridiculous - if someone is ill, then they are ill, what if they don't have any sick leave left? You fire them? I literally can't stomach this. When I was little I always thought I would emigrate to the States to work - now I would pay not to go.

michaelochurch6• 12 years ago

Outside of the Valley and New York, where there's less competition for talent, there are many companies that deduct sick days from vacation. This allows them to say that they offer 15 days (which, by US standards, is about average) of "PTO" in recruiting when it's actually less.

When companies pull that shit, you see people getting a lot sicker, because people come into the office when they should be staying home. The month of February becomes a constant, never-ending cold.

masklinn• 12 years ago

Outside of the Valley and New York, where there's less competition for talent, there are many companies that deduct sick days from vacation.

That's a brand new level of fucked up behavior, holy hell.

zten• 12 years ago

I have to use PTO for sick days in SF. Oops.

viewer5• 12 years ago

I'm at my first job out of college and it's like that here (taking off if you're sick = PTO)

Is that not the norm?

zrail2• 12 years ago

Yes. When I was sick* I managed to work part time and use banked sick and vacation hours all the way through, but it was rough. If I had been unable to work at all I would have had to invoke short term disability, which iirc lasted six weeks. After that, I would have been fired. I had worked for the company for less than six months so I was unable to invoke FMLA at all.

These days I'm independent and have a very large cash buffer in case something else happens. Planning with cash is way easier than trying to negotiate giant employer leave policies, in my experience.

*I was diagnosed with a very treatable form of cancer in November 2012.

greedo2• 12 years ago

Yep. Discovered I had cancer in the fall of 2005. My firm told me they would be so generous to keep me employed throughout my treatment. Got fired the week before Christmas (while still going through chemo) because the company was being sold and they wanted to minimize headcount. And companies wonder why there's no loyalty anymore.

zrail2• 12 years ago

That's brutal! Chemo is one of the crappiest things that I've ever experienced, I can't even imagine having to think about looking for work at the same time. I hope you're doing well now.

shawabawa32• 12 years ago

I find the whole notion of "sick days" and accruing them bizarre.

What happens if you're sick but don't have enough sick days saved? Are you fired? Stop getting payed?

For comparison, this is how sick leave works in the uk: https://www.gov.uk/taking-sick-leave

And I don't want to even get in to how fucked up it is to have to save up years of vacation days to take some time off when you have a baby

maerF0x02• 12 years ago

IIRC many employers will stop paying you, then it starts to be a "short term" disability. And then you go through that process, which often includes X days unpaid as a sort of "deductible"

ceejayoz3• 12 years ago

I find the whole notion of "sick days" and accruing them bizarre.

Agreed. Companies here in the US are pretty stingy with them, too, causing people to come to work sick where they get everyone else sick too.

What happens if you're sick but don't have enough sick days saved? Are you fired? Stop getting payed?

You stop getting paid and can be fired if the company wishes.

Some companies are subject to FMLA, which protects your job for 12 weeks of unpaid sick leave. Its requirements rule out small businesses and new employees, though:

In order to be eligible for FMLA leave, an employee must have been at the business at least 12 months, and worked at least 1,250 hours over the past 12 months, and work at a location where the company employs 50 or more employees within 75 miles.

learc833• 12 years ago

I really think that a minimum number of sick days should be mandatory as a public health measure.

The amount of lost productivity caused by sick people infecting their coworkers per year has to be immense.

rcavezza• 12 years ago

<<I find the whole notion of "sick days" and accruing them bizarre.

I believe it's mostly for accounting purposes. Most employers allow you to borrow from what hasn't accrued. It doesn't typically become an issue until you leave the company and have used more than has been accrued. At that time, they will probably not pay you for X days you are over your accrual.

baldfat2• 12 years ago

When you say "Most" I assume you have worked 100% at places I haven't. HR and managers state in my cases, "If you don't have sick time you will not be paid and you may lose your position." Sick time starts after two or three months.

dragonwriter4• 12 years ago

What happens if you're sick but don't have enough sick days saved? Are you fired? Stop getting payed?

You stop getting paid by your regular employer. Depending on the exact nature and effect of your illness and work situation, you may be eligible for a limited duration of legally-guaranteed job-protected unpaid leave (either federal FMLA or state-level protected leaves which may be more generous), during some of which you may receive disability compensation payments which are less than your regular salary.

When you exhaust the guaranteed job-protected leave, you can be fired.

at-fates-hands3• 12 years ago

I worked at a smaller company who had two weeks paid vacation and unlimited sick days. The sick days rule was an unwritten rule, but man, did it get abused.

We had a woman who was up for a promotion and didn't get it. She went in and asked the manager why she didn't get her promotion and the manager told her, "Well, with close to 50 sick days, I'm not sure you're completely committed to to your current job."

So yeah, after so many years of getting abused, they just started a program where you get three weeks off, period. You can decide how you use it. Be it vacation or sick days, doesn't matter.

cafard2• 12 years ago

I worked for a government contractor where one accrued something like half a day of sick leave every two weeks. A lot of people thought that they were robbing themselves if they didn't burn every sick day fairly promptly. Evidently more than a few people in management did the same.

sarah20792• 12 years ago

Another thing that makes it even worse is having health insurance that is tied to your employment. So if you get cancer and can't manage to keep your time off to less than 12 weeks plus your accrued sick days then you can be fired and lose not only your income, but your health insurance as well. It is an unbelievably awful system.

coldpie• 12 years ago

Indeed. Remember this when you go to vote next month.

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

Disability insurance is meant to kick in there.

(I'm not arguing that this actually works for everyone, just that there is a mechanism for dealing with inability to work)

learc833• 12 years ago

Doesn't the ACA largely fix that? Isn't losing your job a qualifying life event that allows you to sign up outside of the normal open enrollment period?

chaostheory3• 12 years ago

And I don't want to even get in to how fucked up it is to have to save up years of vacation days to take some time off when you have a baby

This is the trade off we pay for lower taxes. (Yes certain states like NY and CA have higher tax rates, but they make up for it with more state benefits.)

bza• 12 years ago

This is the trade off we pay for lower taxes.

Why would mandating that companies provide meaningful maternity or paternity leave require higher taxes? This topic doesn't have much to do with fiscal policy.

jackmaney2• 12 years ago

Then that's a horrible, shitty fucking trade.

SeoxyS• 12 years ago

Maternity and paid sick leave policies have very little to do with tax rates.

See the CA state budget here: http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2014-15/Enacted/agencies.html

The big-ticket items are the things affecting tax rates, like 11B on corrections, or almost 50B on K-12 education, and another 50B on health care services.

x0x03• 12 years ago

When you actually count the full tax load on American employees (federal, state, and local income taxes; property taxes; sales taxes; medical insurance; disability insurance; and retirement savings), we really aren't a low-tax country. In fact, we do not actually compare favorably to most of Europe when you consider the all-in price of life.

What we really pay for is $1T+/year on our military for bombing brown people and maintaining oil supplies.

ropiku• 12 years ago

Also a EU court decided that you get sick days even if you are on holiday: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18534028

pc862• 12 years ago

Maybe I'm too engrained in the American way of thinking, but why in the world if you are sick on Christmas (when you're already being paid while off) should you get paid again in the terms of additional sick days? It doesn't make any sense to me.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

As you probably have read, the historical reason for a limit on 'sick days' was abuse by people who were unhappy with their employer for one reason or another, that resulted in some employers simply firing people who go sick, and that lead to labor organizing itself in the form of unions and well you got sick leave as a thing [1].

I think it is generally a crutch used instead of good management (like mass surveillance is a crutch against better police work, and nuclear weapons are crutch against better diplomacy) but so far we know the 'no sick leave' state (pre-union organizing etc) and the 'fixed sick leave' state (what we have today). The new thing, 'don't work when you are sick or recovering' regardless of limits, is a bit too unbounded for most folks. And because of that lack of forecastability it makes forecasting productivity or work production very difficult. Anything that makes it harder on management has a fairly tough road ahead of it.

[1] http://www.unionplus.org/about/labor-unions/36-reasons-thank...

davidgay• 12 years ago

The usual solution to abuse of sick pay, mentioned in the UK link above, is to require a doctor's certification for any leave > X days (7 in the UK according to the link, I know it's 3 in Switzerland).

jchung• 12 years ago

At my startup I've decided to have a "take what you want when you want it" vacation and sick day policy. I care about results against goals, not how many hours you work or when they are. Abusing the policy in a way that affects morale (e.g., deciding only to never show up in the office and spend a year working from your batcave) would be grounds for a warning/replacement. So far it has worked well, but with only a handful on the team. Not sure how it will scale to a team of 100 or 1,000 or more.

miahi• 12 years ago

Do you have a written policy? Care to share it?

What happens if an employee falls on stairs and spends the next two months in hospital and then another one in bed, at home? (happened to a colleague of mine)

silencio• 12 years ago

Do you set an example for your employees so they actually take those vacation/sick days?

I tend to avoid companies with "unlimited vacation" because their employees seem to take even less vacation than they would have otherwise, don't get compensated for it as a result when they leave, and feel pressured to not take it in the first place. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613526 and many other stories.) It's even worse when the bosses present a terrible work-life balance to employees.

I basically think back to one of the times I've been really sick but not contagious, or my honeymoon, to figure out if I like a vacation policy or not. Minus 1-2x/year for crunch times, assuming I'm keeping up with my workload, would I have taken a day off? Would I have felt like I couldn't take the time off? Would people have been receptive to me working from home? Now double that time off if I want to have kids in the future, am I still okay with it? Sad to say many unlimited policies don't make me feel comfortable on any front here.

anon42• 12 years ago

Sick leave here is unpaid (well not exactly, but something like a 3-day leave due to sickness can be unpaid). Which means that when I'm sick, I still go to work as usual and get everyone else sick. Because fuck them.

secabeen2• 12 years ago

Generally, if you work for a large employer, you have some form of disability insurance that picks up after a month or three. If you're out that long, the theory is that you're probably going to stay out, and your employer should be able to replace you and pass the costs onto an insurer, rather than pay salary for a non-working worker.

michaelochurch6• 12 years ago

The takeaway from all of this: employers in the U.S. do not care about mothers of young children at all, unless we’re consumers of their products. It might be more accurate to say that they view us as horrible useless burdens who need to be ushered back to full-time work as swiftly as possible. They will do anything in their power to keep employees from exercising their federally guaranteed rights to twelve weeks of MOTHERFUCKING UNPAID LEAVE, up to and including forcing employees to give up paid sick leave.

Wow. She is a hero for writing this.

Here's what's terrifying, and it's why our society is doomed to fail in the next 30 years if it keeps acting up this way: we need people like her to reproduce, and we're punishing them when they do.

Extreme economic inequality, a bad health insurance system, an expensive education mess that puts a huge burden on parents, declining social mobility, and a corporate structure that punishes childbirth and the raising of children (especially for women) have had an anti-eugenic effect. The thoughtless, ignorant people who live in the present are having lots of children-- just as many as ever. The thoughtful, well-educated ones are having fewer kids, because they're more attuned to the cues of society and the obvious signal that they're not wanted by this world. We're seeing an adverse differential in reproduction.

If something kills the U.S., it's not going to be China or the EU and it's certainly not going to be immigration, which is a good thing. It's going to be the adverse reproductive differential caused by a society that penalizes intelligent, thoughtful parents. (It also penalizes less intelligent parents, but they don't give a shit and breed anyway.) That issue is the one serious existential threat to us as a society.

scrollaway• 12 years ago

https://xkcd.com/603/

You guys need education, not eugenics.

michaelochurch6• 12 years ago

I'm not saying that anyone should be prohibited from reproducing. I'm saying that we should encourage (or, at least, avoid discouraging) thoughtful and intelligent people, through economic means, to have children if they want to do so, and not to wait until they're in their mid-40s and have their careers worked out, but might be infertile. I know intelligent people who don't want to have any kids, and I know smart people who want to have 4 or 5 kids. The latter set should be able to do so without having to either (a) make $1 million per year or (b) have a cousin who works at a top college and who can "fix" admissions to schools.

Also, this isn't about some classist fear. I'm arguing that we should help intelligent people in the working and middle classes. (The rich don't need any help.) The problem is that, even when you control for social class, fertility and IQ seem to be negatively correlated.

Even if you take genes out of the picture, it's still the case that thoughtless, stupid people make bad parents. Even if there's no adverse differential in genetics, there's still the risk of one in culture.

grecy• 12 years ago

I think it can be simplified further:

employers in the U.S. do not care about employees at all, unless we’re consumers of their products. It might be more accurate to say that they view us as horrible useless burdens who need to be ushered back to full-time work as swiftly as possible. They will do anything in their power to keep employees from exercising their federally guaranteed rights to twelve weeks of MOTHERFUCKING UNPAID LEAVE, up to and including forcing employees to give up paid sick leave.

CalRobert2• 12 years ago

My wife and I moved to the EU about two years ago on something of a lark (we're both politically left-of-center people who prefer transit to driving everywhere, and we like seeing castles in the countryside). We have every intention of staying here as long as possible, and the VASTLY superior policy and attitude towards quality of life is a huge part of it. The US hates its own people and cloaks the sentiment in language touting "economic freedom".

Fortunately, the US also is home to one of the most environmentally damaging populaces in the world, so if anyone is going to have fewer babies, it should be them.

tragomaskhalos2• 12 years ago

Also true in the UK, but for a different reason. Here, a huge raft of citizens live above the level of the welfare system but below the level of financial comfort afforded to a relatively small professional elite. This group is financially squeezed in so many ways that it is unusual now to see parents in said group with more than 2 kids. This is an extraordinarily serious problem, as effectively the engine room of society is no longer numerically self-sustaining.

At present, the only de-facto solution appears to be immigration, which of course creates huge tensions and problems of its own. But it is an enormously difficult task to reform the welfare system to create the appropriate incentives (or, equally, disincentives) without also victimising the weakest members of society.

boothead• 12 years ago

You couldn't make this shit up! Except someone already has:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

It would be a funny film if its central premise wasn't so terrifying!

drostie3• 12 years ago

I normally really like you and upvote your comments as thoughtful, but in this case I really have to disagree. Eugenics arguments are deeply flawed. They are based on an assumption that the nature-vs-nurture debate is decided firmly in the nature direction, and that assumption is wrong.

"[A] point-of-view is worth 80 IQ points. If we're born in 10,000 BC with the IQ of Leonardo [da Vinci]... not a lot is gonna happen. Because it's not a question of being smart; we--we aren't a very smart species. We can accumulate knowledge, and that helps, but most traditional societies have accumulated a lot of knowledge. The things that make big changes are changes in our context, like the invention of reading and writing, the invention of modern science four hundred years ago. Those completely changed the way we look at the world." [1]

People who are smarter individually are generally not smarter because they had smart genes, but because they've practiced more. I mean, I think talent exists, sure, but I do not think you can distinguish easily between innate talent that is somehow biological versus learned talent acquired by practice which has since been totally hidden from view (a childhood hobby of drawing, for example). Smart parents have smarter kids because they practice them more in thinking in smart ways.

It occurs to me rereading your comment that you don't outright say genetic differences -- but it seems to be a present subtext. I guess this issue has hit home for me since a long time ago: it's a private peeve of mine, when people say that adopted kids are "not really your" kids. I've heard several variations of those words and each time it bugs me because of course they are your kids. I have two adopted siblings, and two biological siblings, and because we are closer in age and went to similar schools, I am much more like my adopted siblings than my biological siblings. Of course I am; we did the same things as children.

It's not that genetics has nothing to say on any matter, but that its influence on your present state is much smaller than you'd think. Evolution happens over much longer time-scales and represents a slight force in an extremely noisy environment, something like a random walk with a slightly biased coin. Even if someone had a genetic predisposition to smartness, this might be based on a 'chord' of genes which need to work together, highly unlikely to be inheritable. Over the next two hundred years we don't need to watch a 'reproductive differential'; we need to watch an 'education differential' and a 'cultural differential'.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXoSK4tLxK8

josho2• 12 years ago

If you are born poor in America the statistics show that you will stay poor. Despite the belief that there is mobility between classes in the US, that is largely decreasing. Thanks to cutbacks on public schools, a regressive tax system, etc the upward mobility in the US has been steadily decreasing.

The parent's point has nothing to do with genes, but rather their hypothesis is that the poor as a % of population in the US will grow. While the educated white collar demographic will decrease.

michaelochurch6• 12 years ago

Upvoted because you don't deserve to be downvoted for this post. It shouldn't be light gray.

I'm taking an agnostic viewpoint on whether the qualities we want are genetic or cultural and educational, an whether IQ is a valid measure of intelligence.

I generally agree with most of what you're saying. However, even if we assume that desired traits are cultural, it's still bad for the world to penalize thoughtful people.

Evolution happens over much longer time-scales and represents a slight force in an extremely noisy environment

I disagree. Evolutionary progress took billions of years because nothing in nature favors complex organisms so strongly that amoebas would turn into cats with a straight-arrow certainty. Natural selection is very slow and noisy, as you acknowledged, which is why it happened at an evolutionary (e.g. slow) pace.

Throw in artificial selection (e.g. our impact, intentional and otherwise) and the genetic mix can change rapidly. Elephants in Africa are becoming tuskless due to poaching, dogs are a human-made subspecies of the wolf, and fruit flies, with their rapid generations, can be brought to "evolve" well within a human lifetime.

dmm• 12 years ago

I think we should have paid maternity leave and I think the federal govt should pay for it. If you force employers to pay for it you discourage the hiring of young women.

patrickmay• 12 years ago

"I think the federal govt should pay for it."

Please have the decency to be explicit about what you are saying. No government, federal or otherwise, has any means to pay for anything. All money comes from taxes. All taxes come from individuals. What you are really saying is "I think all of the taxpaying individuals in the United States should pay for women's maternity leave."

Once you recognize that, I can do no better than quote P.J. O'Rourke: "...remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head.

Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don't pay taxes, you'll be fined. If you don't pay the fine, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot.

Thus I -- in my role as citizen and voter -- am going to shoot you -- in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck -- if you don't pay your fair share of the national tab.

Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, "Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?"

So, would you kill your mother to pay for someone else's maternity leave?

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

Every decent behavior anybody has in public can be explained by 'holding a gun to their head' by the same chain of logic. You spit on the sidewalk, you get fined. And so on.

This holds the average citizen in contempt, and I reject the whole sophomoric chain of 'causation'. People behave because they're civilized and orderly and want their community to thrive.

So lets get the conversation back to, how do we want to maintain a standard of living that benefits us all. Through taxes and rules and institutions, like we have always done.

mturmon• 12 years ago

I wouldn't kill my mother for that.

But fortunately I wouldn't have to, because she pays her taxes. And is proud to, last I checked.

As you can tell, I reject your whole line of thinking.

It makes a bunch of assumptions to carry the situation to extremes, and then innocently asks, "you wouldn't want that extreme outcome, would you?". The same argument can be made against any form of regulation whatsoever.

mpyne• 12 years ago

That contorted chain of logic is quite striking. And even then you miss the other questions you need to ask yourself.

"Would my kindly, gray-haired mother refuse to pay taxes for this?" "If she didn't, would my kindly, gray-haired mother really manage to escape from prison?" "Even if she did escape, am I certain that she would be shot instead of apprehended and re-arrested like the majority of other escapees?"

And this is, of course, all conditional on the idea that the government would simply throw you in jail right off instead of garnishing wages or seizing assets to cover the tab (you know, the things that would actually happen).

And the best part about all of this is that, all you've really come down to is the idea that maybe the parent commenter didn't realize that governments can't pay for things without taxes, as if that very basic feature of how governments work had momentarily escaped dmm just as he was typing to an HN <textarea>.

lutorm4• 12 years ago

"...remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head."

Wow! I never noticed, and I've been paying taxes for 25 years...

lutorm4• 12 years ago

A more serious response:

As a member of a "society", be it a country or a family or anything between, you have to abide by the customary procedure by which decisions affecting everyone are made. (Maybe they are majority vote, maybe they are by autocratic rule, maybe they are endless discussions in an effort to reach consensus, or whatever.) In some cases, you may disagree with the outcome of such decisions, and it is then up to you to decide whether the advantages of remaining associated with the group outweigh the disadvantages. If the answer is that they do not, you are (in most cases in the civilized world) free to leave. Such is the case here, because you are in fact free to not pay taxes to the American government: There is a procedure by which you can resign your American citizenship, and no gun will be held to your head. (You will however be forced to pay $2500 or something for the privilege.)

If you remain, you do so because you think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, even after having lost the argument about whether maternity leave should be paid for by taxes. No one is holding a gun to your head, even in the most extreme situation imaginable.

So please stop that absurd line of reasoning.

aperrien2• 12 years ago

As you said, nothing is free. If you refuse to pay for the upkeep of the society that you are part of, you can either leave, or be removed from it.

humanrebar3• 12 years ago

This makes my blood boil, too.

I'd also like to point out that skimpy paternity leave policy is also bad for mothers. Some mothers are fortunate to have friends and family willing to pause their lives to help with the transition and recovery, but some really need the father around to take over running the household, especially if there were complications during the birth.

jacalata2• 12 years ago

Lack of paternity leave ties directly into social assumptions that the mother is the carer, the "mommy track" at work, and through to the assumption of custody for the mother. I don't understand why it isn't a bigger issue. You should even be able to get feminists and MRA guys to work together on this one!

humanrebar3• 12 years ago

I agree that paternity leave should be more generous and universal, but there a physiological reasons (tenderness, hormonal changes, breastfeeding, etc.) why mothers may not be able to work.

I can recognize that while still thinking the entire family, and society as a whole, is shortchanged by undervaluing the contributions of fathers to families with newborns.

While some legal reforms are probably needed, I don't see why employers shouldn't be called to task for their policies in these areas. If corporate leaders can be called to task for off-the-cuff statements, why can't they be called to task for something with such an immediate and obvious impact?

EDIT: I'll also add a coda here to point out that most pregnancies are unplanned. Expecting new mothers and fathers to have prescience with respect to parental leave is unrealistic at best.

eli7• 12 years ago

Myself and all the feminists I know are definitely in favor of paternity leave. I'm having a hard time imagining an argument against it.

tragomaskhalos2• 12 years ago

In the UK our [pm]aternity leave allowance is not exactly enlightened, but even so this left me open-mouthed. Scandinavian readers or readers from other countries that actually bother to look after their workers properly must be utterly incredulous at your treatment.

minimax2• 12 years ago

At this point, the male students would nod and go on about their days, and the female grad students would stick around in an increasingly panicked state to ask about that whole saving annual and sick leave thing, since their contracts don’t include leave.

I was 100% like the male students until fairly recently when my girlfriend and I started having serious conversations about having children. The conversation was something like this. her: "What does your employer offer for maternity leave?" me: "lol idk." And then I got a pretty stern look. In the US the only legal guarantee you get is that you can leave for 12 weeks unpaid and you'll probably still have a job when you get back. There is zero guaranteed paid leave. It's completely shameful and it's a stone age policy compared to the rest of the Western world [1]. It's also something I think the typical HN reader hasn't spent much time thinking about so I'm glad to see this on the front page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave

Domenic_S8• 12 years ago

"Zero paid leave" is not quite true, it's left to the individual States to decide that. CA, DC, NJ, HI, NY and PR each have paid family leave. If your state isn't in that list, complain to your state government.

It's still complicated though. I took paternity leave last year in CA and it was like this: there's a 7-day waiting period, so the first week was straight PTO. Then PFL pays 55% of salary up to I think $1k/week, so you make up the difference with partial PTO. That can go on for up to 6 weeks; if memory serves I took 4 weeks total off.

All in all not terrible. I realize I'm fortunate to live in CA where there is a PFL policy, and to work for a company that's with-it enough to process these claims quickly and competently. I truly feel for others like the woman in the article.

rhc2104• 12 years ago

To add, you get more time off for disability if you're a birth mother in California.

http://www.edd.ca.gov/disability/FAQ_DI_Pregnancy.htm

So from 4 weeks before birth to 6 weeks after, you can also get 55% of salary, up to $1,075/week. Then you can take on the additional 6 weeks of paid family leave.

ska3• 12 years ago

One common view is that 4-6 weeks is, in fact, terrible.

Of course it's all trade-offs, but the US is a long ways from most similar countries in this respect, and I can see people getting frustrated with it. In many places there are reasonable options to manage a combined year of parental leave, for example.

jordanpg• 12 years ago

Amusing to see this on the same day that Tim Cook shocks no one by coming out publicly but making headline news everywhere.

For all of the tremendous focus on so-called family values in the United States, it seems that what is usually meant has something to do with sex. If only all of that energy could be focused on serious policy problems like this one.

cdoxsey2• 12 years ago

In the US the only legal guarantee you get is that you can leave for 12 weeks unpaid and you'll probably still have a job when you get back.

(1) Most companies provide better benefits than what is legally required (2) The US has a robust and very expensive welfare system (3) Unlike something like cancer pregnancy is not an accident. If you can't afford to pay for children, don't have them.

FWIW most tech companies provide very generous benefits, though I'm pretty sure it's only possible because a lot of employees never take advantage of them. (Most programmers aren't having a dozen kids)

bronbron• 12 years ago

Most companies provide better benefits than what is legally required

Cool, let's just bank on the generosity of companies.

Unlike something like cancer pregnancy is not an accident. If you can't afford to pay for children, don't have them.

Did you even read the article? These people can obviously afford to have children. They can't afford to become unemployed because they had children. Short of being independently wealthy or raiding your personal savings, no one can afford to become unemployed for an extended period of time because they're raising a child.

Let's not even get into the fact that this is obviously disproportionately affecting women. I don't need to take sick leave because my wife gave birth - I don't have anything to physically recover from.

NateDad6• 12 years ago

Poor people deserve to have kids, too.

aperrien2• 12 years ago

(3) Unlike something like cancer pregnancy is not an accident. If you can't afford to pay for children, don't have them.

It's not an accident, it's merely one of the foundations of any healthy society. I'm willing to part with a bit of our collective wealth to help raise them.

PhasmaFelis• 12 years ago

(1) Most companies provide better benefits than what is legally required

Gosh, I'm sure that's comforting to the OP.

OP: "My car's samouflange broke at 60mph and now I'm quadriplegic." cdoxsey: "Well, most samouflange-failure incidents only result in minor bruising, so everything is fine!"

AlyssaRowan• 12 years ago

I knew America has awful employment law, but wow.

the_ancient15• 12 years ago

Why? It was your choice to have a child why should your employer pay for it, and why should all your fellow employees that did not have children have to work harder to cover for you while you are on paid leave?

I think it is selfish for new parents to demand all this time off, you were hired to do a job, do it, if you can not or unwilling to because you have made a choice to make a major change in your life then i am sure someone else will be happy to get paid do to your job.

SCdF2• 12 years ago

You'd hope it was because you considered your country (and the world as a whole) a community where we all help each other out, and treat each other how we'd like to be treated. The implication of "user pays" is that the rich live life basically as they always have (because costs of life events don't scale with your wage), and the poor are utterly fucked.

You may believe it's selfish for new parents to demand time off. I believe it is selfish for people who are more fortunate than others to not contribute more tax and help lift those below them when they're in need.

jen729w• 12 years ago

The word is "society". I, for one, like living in one.

Also as a single 38 year old man with no desire to have kids, I'm glad other people do. I'm happy for my (Australian) tax dollars to support them.

trhway• 12 years ago

It's completely shameful and it's a stone age policy compared to the rest of the Western world [1]

not that i agree with such policy. Yet logically i can see the other side of that - why encourage people to spend their time and effort during the most productive years of their life on basically their personal sideprojects - children - instead of contributing to the economy when US can "import" through immigration any kind of people they want - from toddlers to ready-made programmers to almost ready-made doctors - thus saving a lot of societal resources which otherwise would need to be spend to bring up and educate such a person (add the risk that not every child becomes a highly productive member of society and some even become a burden like go to prison). Basically the same logic why iPhone is built in and imported from China :)

shas3• 12 years ago

Hope you are not trolling, because your assertions about the 'other side' are egregiously wrong and pseudo-logical. 1) Toddler's do contribute to economy (fertility rate, up to a point is positively correlated with economic growth). Ageing populations are bad for the economy [1], 2) Well-being and good policies are correlated and causally linked to better productivity [2].

[1] e.g. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/09/02/baby-boom-or-e... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/do-happier-...

diafygi• 12 years ago

I understand why Karen feels she must redact the name of her employer, but it would be so very helpful if she named names. It would educate the rest of us to avoid working there.

computerjunkie• 12 years ago

Its disappointing to see this happen in 2014.

onion2k2• 12 years ago

Mothers in the UK get a full year of maternity leave at 90% pay for the first 6 weeks and then about $200/week after. You can elect to return to work earlier (although you have to take at least 2 weeks). You can start the maternity leave up to 11 weeks before the due date.

And the UK isn't even particularly progressive about this sort of thing. Norwegians get 13 months at 80% pay followed by up to a year unpaid. In Spain you can take up to 3 years unpaid.

gadders• 12 years ago

It can go up in the UK depending on your employer. IIRC my wife got 6 months on full pay and then 6 months on the statutory (government) maternity pay.

onion2k2• 12 years ago

Absolutely, good employers do much more than the minimum. But that's true in the US too.

StronglyTyped• 12 years ago

The problem has nothing to do with the country. The problem is that the HR clerk, like all HR clerks, is an idiot.

john_b• 12 years ago

The (unstated) objection that can be inferred from the article is that because the US has no firm protections here, it pushes the burden and costs of these programs onto employers, who are incentivized to minimize spending on these programs (and thus the benefits).

themoonbus• 12 years ago

Sometimes I'm immensely proud to be part of this country (second-generation immigrant), but reading things like this make me feel like I live in the most backwards place in the world.

The richest country somehow can't provide a basic standard of living for so many of its citizens.

mcfunley• 12 years ago

It's really easy to get the wrong idea about post-childbirth from just watching your friends have kids on Facebook. I think it's commonplace to assume that the birth is the difficult part, because nobody posts about their trauma in the weeks that follow. Birthing a child ranks on the scale of sick-day-worthiness somewhere near a gunshot wound. This woman's treatment is deplorable. (And yes, the whole damn system is deplorable.)

hderms2• 12 years ago

Pretty disgusting all around. I guess I'll never understand the mindset of people who would perpetrate things like this on innocents in the sake of short-term profits. Long-term profits are probably harder to make the case for when they're based on treating your employees like garbage.

gknoy2• 12 years ago

How is this not bounds for a lawsuit?? I suspect that had she mentioned a lawyer, they might have been more accomodating.

laichzeit02• 12 years ago

My boss once told me "90% of the ridiculous policies are in place to prevent the 10% that abuse it". It's a sad shame, but there are people that really abuse sick leave and the rest of us have to pay for it.

In South Africa all employees are entitled to AT LEAST 4 consecutive months of maternity leave, up to 1 month prior to giving birth, or earlier if a doctor says so. You're also required by law not to return to work for at least 6 weeks post giving birth, unless a doctor okay's it.

http://www.labour.gov.za/DOL/legislation/acts/basic-guides/b...

mratzloff• 12 years ago

It's a sad shame, but there are people that really abuse sick leave and the rest of us have to pay for it.

Are you saying some mothers are abusing sick leave to care for their newborns?

CanSpice• 12 years ago

I'm not sure how you would go about getting pregnant just to "abuse the system". "I know, I'll get pregnant, go through nine months of hormonal and physical changes that'll mess with my body in crazy ways I didn't know existed, go through a major medical procedure, and then keep another living being alive while going through even more hormonal and physical changes just so I can get some paid time off work."

Your boss is crazy.

laichzeit02• 12 years ago

Yeah sorry I wasn't clear, I meant stupid policies in general, like fixed working hours, set time for lunch breaks, not using printers for "personal use". Normal people wouldn't abuse thigs like these. Oh crap I need to print out a proof of payment. Shit I can't use the work printer because it's against policy. Fuck I have to waste my lunch break going to the post office. Another guy is printing out pages and pages of lecture notes for his kid. How do we solve this? Create a draconian policy like "NO printing for personal use". That's the typical knee jerk corporate reaction to managing the 10% of people that abuse things instead of having to deal with abusers on a case by case basis.

dionidium• 12 years ago

It's a sad shame, but there are people that really abuse sick leave and the rest of us have to pay for it.

That is one (very popular) way to look at the world. Alternatively, we could accept a certain amount of abuse in order to make sure that good folks get what they deserve.

eksith4• 12 years ago

But even the U.S. justice system is (ostensibly) geared toward "it's better to let 100 guilty men go free than convict 1 innocent man" with the presumption of innocence and all. While the justice system is hardly the paragon of impartiality, it's at least on paper just. I'm just astounded so many places aren't so.

Preemptive denial of privileges in anticipation of abuse is very wrong and I'm not entirely convinced these policies were enacted post abuse in many workplaces.

Schwolop• 12 years ago

Do those 90% of ridiculous policies cost more than the benefits that enforcing the 10% of abusers abide by them achieves? Sorry, horrible sentence structure, but hopefully you get the point - I purport that this bureaucratic absurdity is misguided.

at-fates-hands3• 12 years ago

Is this the difference between working in academia and working at a large corporation?

Most of the large companies I worked for had 12 weeks paid vacation and then you could do an additional 12 weeks which wasn't paid for the primary care giver. Otherwise, as a non-primary, you still got 2 weeks paid.

Also, I remember several female sales people abusing the system pretty well. They'd get within a month or so of their due date, then go to the doctor and get mandatory bed rest. Company would send them home and keep paying them 80% of their commission plus their salary based on the last three months of their commission rates.

I also saw a lot of guys claiming they were the primary so then both parents could get their 12 weeks of paid time off to spend time with the newborn together.

gknoy2• 12 years ago

As a father, I spent an astounding amount of time in the first month of my kids' lives caring for them, and then also caring for my wife.

If the father is going to spend 12 weeks with the newborn and the new mother, you can bet your ass that they're likely not sitting around playing CoD or watching TV. I basically did everything except for breastfeeding, and it was freaking exhausting.

Non-parents have no idea how lucky they are to be able to have a spouse that has slept more than an hour a night for the past month.

at-fates-hands3• 12 years ago

>> If the father is going to spend 12 weeks with the newborn and the new mother, you can bet your ass that they're likely not sitting around playing CoD or watching TV. I basically did everything except for breastfeeding, and it was freaking exhausting.

Agreed. The guys I knew who said they were the primary did it so they could help their wives and were happy they did. Some of the guys who opted just for the two weeks said it wasn't enough, they wanted more time to spend with their newborns.

seestheday2• 12 years ago

As a parent from Canada I feel so sorry for parents in the US.

That you consider only 12 weeks as "abuse" is even more depressing.

serve_yay• 12 years ago

It seems crazy to me to have children in this country, you're always a broken limb or car accident away from absolute catastrophe. And by comparison I'm doing a lot better than most of my fellow countrymen, so if anyone should want to reproduce it should be people like me. But we have made the prospect rather unappealing.

chrisBob3• 12 years ago

I am a graduate student, my wife is a post-doc, and we are expecting our first child in the next few weeks. I actually just found out that my school recently (this summer) made a policy allowing graduate students to take up to 60 days of paid leave, so I am fortunate here at BU. I didn't realize how bad the US policies are until we started talking with our (mostly foreign) coworkers who were all surprised that my wife is still at work even though she is expecting a baby in a few weeks. We both work in supportive labs that would probably give us the time off that we need regardless of the school policy, but it is scary to think what it would be like even working in another lab at the same school some times. We really need to do more to support the women working in the US especially when it comes to family friendly leave.

acketon• 12 years ago

I am also at BU (staff) and my wife and I had our first child this past spring. Our benefits are good compared to my past employers, and I took a few weeks of paid vacation time so I could stay home with my wife and help after her c-section. I'm glad to hear that there is leave available for graduate students as well. Are the 60 days of paid leave for sick time or paternity leave? I had not heard that anything changed recently with the rules around time off.

Best of luck to you and your wife!

chrisBob3• 12 years ago

The 60 days are specified as paid paternity or maternity leave[1]. I don't actually know what the sick leave policy is. As a graduate student your schedule is flexible. I am not taking classes, but I can work as much as I want, and as long as the vacations are reasonable they aren't really tracked. I think that goes along with officially being paid for 39 hours a week with the expectation that you are there much more.

[1] http://www.bu.edu/academics/policies/childbirth-and-adoption...

gglitch3• 12 years ago

Genuinely curious - where are the markets-should-be-completely-unregulated guys on this?

coryfklein2• 12 years ago

Well, the FMLA IS government regulation, and it isn't working so well.

Besides, plenty of other governments regulate this, and they do things differently. Government regulation vs no regulation doesn't really weigh in here.

gglitch3• 12 years ago

I guess I was thinking of the abstract question of how someone would convincingly argue that the plight of new parents would be better off in general with no government regulation at all. I agree that the FMLA is grossly inadequate, but not one of the businesses I've worked for in my entire career, so far as I know, has voluntarily offered anything better.

mindslight• 12 years ago

Take time off from working, pay bills from your savings, and be comfortable with that.

That most everyone lacks savings which can be used this way is the underlying problem. This is due to an economy where any extra steady-state income gets extracted via an ever-present housing bubble (plebs' only access to money printing press. people don't buy houses - they rent them from banks) and increasing taxation to grow the bureaucracy and the empire.

These basic structural problems are masked by a constant creation of new entitlements that pacify the majority of people by directly taking care of their specific popular problems (eg this), while making it even harder to retain autonomy or stray from the herd.

zhte415• 12 years ago

In China, maternity leave is 5 months paid at the salary of the average of all employees of the company, and is taken at a flexible time before or after birth. This can mean a rise of a cut in income.

Paternity leave yet has to make such bounds.

jacalata2• 12 years ago

Wow, that's a really interesting way to set the payment level.

tortos123• 12 years ago

WHAT A NIGHTMARE!

In your case I'd speak with the highest ranked staff I could find in the UNI and let them know the situation... not even in the army are that cruel.

If that person couldn't help, I'd quit that awful environment and I'd also try to publish it through the News or something. Get some bad publicity going on for them!

This is not a place for human to work in... Time flies and the birth of a child is not something you'l see everyday!

mareofnight• 12 years ago

This is reminding me of my first intern job, when I'd gotten an email about "donating vacation days" to someone with an extended illness who'd used up theirs. I didn't have any vacation days anyway because I was hourly, but I was kind of confused why taking sick time when you're sick required having coworkers "donate" it, so I asked a coworker why donating vacation days was even a thing. Coworker seemed a little dismayed, thought I was saying that it didn't make sense for people to help out a sick coworker. I had just assumed that the company wouldn't give people a hard time about having cancer.

mercer• 12 years ago

A very reasonable assumption, I thought. Reading these stories makes me appreciate living where I live so much more, but also fear what seems to be the gradual dismantling off all that over the past years.

jackmaney2• 12 years ago

The older I get, the more disappointed I tend to become with my country.

eli7• 12 years ago

To put a positive spin on this terrible story, offering generous leave and other benefits is one way startups can punch above their weight when hiring. With regards to maternity & paternity leave it's also just the right thing to do.

I think my single favorite part about being a founder is that I get to create the kind of company that I want to work at.

yardie3• 12 years ago

employers in the U.S. do not care about mothers of young children at all, unless we’re consumers of their products. It might be more accurate to say that they view us as horrible useless burdens who need to be ushered back to full-time work as swiftly as possible. They will do anything in their power to keep employees from exercising their federally guaranteed rights

This opinion would not be out of place on this site where some users complain about other workers not working hard enough simply because they had the gall to leave at their contractually appointed time.

sipsop• 12 years ago

Just want to point out that (while rare outside of government jobs I imagine). Some employers offer very low cost insurance you can take out that guarantees you pay, for up to a certain number of months off, if you pay into it. My wife and I are in the age range where most people procreate so she will put money into this until we decide we will no longer be considering child birth. Unfortunately, I cannot recall exactly what the term for this is, but I do know it's about 9 USD a month for us and guarantees us that she will receive full pay throughout the 12 weeks for FMLA. We are located in MN and this is a government job. My main point is always make sure to be aware of what options are available. Things at most places make just having a child incredibly difficult for families (as if it's not inherently difficult enough) so do as much research as possible, until we have a better, mandated system for protecting women who are giving birth (and nursing which is a whole other subject where we need to make some serious changes for women's/families' rights).

joesmo2• 12 years ago

This seems like another way to discriminate against and hurt women.

astrange2• 12 years ago

Your comment can only describe half the situation, insofar as it takes two people to start a family.

joesmo2• 12 years ago

No. The post is about paid sick leave under FMLA. Are you seriously suggesting fathers should get sick leave for this? That's ridiculous, despite the allowance for paid leave being meager. Much more should be mandated by law but for a father to claim being sick after his partner's childbirth is ridiculous.

ShaneOG• 12 years ago

Looking at this from a country outside of the US, it's almost as if US employment laws were created with lots of help from large corporations who wanted to treat their employees like workhorses rather than people.

notastartup• 12 years ago

What fucking company is this? They are just asking for free publicity.

mikestew2• 12 years ago

"You will be shocked to hear that the updated policy was developed in part by a man who does not have children."

You will be shocked to hear that even men without children can recognize the need to retain employees that they value, because you can be sure that your competitors in the employment market will offer less misogynistic polices.

Sadly, I had to argue this very point years ago with my Microsoft coworkers. "Wah, I don't have kids, it's unfair!" Hey, I don't have kids and never will, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize the value of offering company benefits that I will never use.

exelius• 12 years ago

It sounds like OP works in academia. Unless you have tenure, the job market works in reverse in academa: you need them more than they need you. So they are free to fuck you over because there's always someone else ready and willing to take your place.

mikestew2• 12 years ago

Yeah, I'm with you. I fully realize that I work in an industry that allows me to build a hell of a nest egg, and easily find a job elsewhere. Someone posed the question elsewhere in the comments about "what if your sick time runs out and you're still sick?" Easy, I tell my employer what the deal is and provide a doctor's note if requested. They don't like it? Fine, don't pay me. Fire me? That's fine, too, I've got a pile of money for such a contingency and I'll find another job later. (That does not, however, preclude seeking the advice of an employment lawyer should I view the company to have acted poorly. If not for myself, then for everyone else. EDIT: and for the record, none of that hypothetical has happened.)

But not all, probably only few, are that fortunate. And though as I grow older and have less need for such safety nets, I also grow to realize that shit needs to change for all.

drderidder• 12 years ago

"S... O... C-I-A... L-I-S-M is the only way" (Sam Roberts, The Canadian Dream) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tutTzTYuU1Y

kclay2• 12 years ago

I went through this last year with the birth of our second son. My wife was making sure that everything would be taking care for talking to HR multiple times and they all saying she would be fine. Come time for her to take time off we were presented with a whole other story. First she would't get all the weeks off because she went into labor a week early then expected and to top that she wouldn't be getting paid over the summer (She worked as a school RN at this time). So we were out 5 months of income. Luckily I gotten into a bad habit of placing all the money I will need for my taxes at years end into my account and just not touching it. Well that bad habit saved us for sure, but now the taxes are a pain in the ass. I guess that's life.

astrange2• 12 years ago

Luckily I gotten into a bad habit of placing all the money I will need for my taxes at years end into my account and just not touching it.

If you need to pay taxes in the US are you not supposed to be paying the estimated tax quarterly, not at the end of the year?

That way you'd get more stable expenses.

kclay2• 12 years ago

Yeah thats true. There is a small penalty for that. Been trying to figure out what I can write off cause my overhead is low , can't do car, or office stuff cause I dont buy any and all the normal stuff you would write off.

Spooky23• 12 years ago

I work for an employer with generous benefit policies and am male, but even still ran into enough HR nonsense that it felt as if I was the first human working for an organization with over 150k employees who had ever had a child.

In short, I was:

- Warned that I could potentially be charged with fraud for enrolling my wife in family health coverage before the baby's birth.

- Told that I would "void my FMLA rights" if I performed any work activity while off. (Although I had 10 weeks of paid accruals and supervisory approval to take off!) The overzealous HR person tried to have my accounts disabled as well. Stopping this required that I walk into the HR Director's office and complain -- not an option for people lower down in the hierarchy.

- Charged $750 because my son had the temerity to be born after the new year, and hospitalization pre-approvals expire with the calendar year.

My wife had a whole litany of wacky things happen. It is a nightmare.

therzathegza• 12 years ago

Canada gets this so right with {p|m}aternity leave for either parent, which levels the playing field for both sexes.

Disclaimer: I am an American who is a product of the military health care system, and thinks it is a real solution for civilian healthcare. Also, I intend to move to Canada in the next <10y. There is no free health care, but I'm happy to pay the tax that supports it if it means I won't lose everything due to catastrophic illness.

vampirechicken• 12 years ago

In my experience, it is more common for a company to make you burn all of your accrued vacation and sick leave before you can get your 12 weeks unpaid FMLA leave.

pnathan• 12 years ago

As a hopefully future dad, the entire [pm]aternity discussion is totally disheartening. I simply will not be able to be at home and have any kind of paid paternity leave. Since my wife is not full-time employed, we'll have zero income. It's really frustrating & a bummer.

AndrewKemendo3• 12 years ago

I took a full month off of work after my last two children were born (couldn't do it for my first born, but that is a different story). Luckily my wife is a stay at home mom and we could pull it off with one income. I think most people underestimate the value to the family of having this time off.

As an employer though, I am conflicted about mandatory policies. Actually, let me rephrase that, I am conflicted about situations in which people take massive blocks off of work - for babies or otherwise. The reason is what you would expect: As an employer I probably cannot find someone who is a direct replacement for that employee during that period.

Depending on the stage, size and speed of an organization, having a key person out of the office could potentially break the company. I know for a fact that if our CTO took a month off of work we would probably go out of business. Now, we are a three man startup so that is clearly different than massive organizations like IBM etc..., but my guess is that the majority of companies fall into the category where losing a person for a month is crippling.

So the best thing I can come up with as a strategy for maternity/paternity leave is this: The person who will be taking the leave, upon knowledge that they are pregnant should work with their employer for the following months to identify a temporary hire who can do their work in their absence. Assuming the company could handle it, the company would absorb the new hire cost from hide, but if not a negotiation should be made about half-pay or some other compensation such that the company can afford the hire.

Without government or some other entity actually ponying up money that would compensate the company for the absence, I don't see any way to balance those books for up and coming businesses.

I should just add that at the end of the day, customers don't care that your employee just had a baby, they just want their product to work. Except in rare cases customers do not seem to be at a place where they are willing to absorb a cost like this so inevitably the cost is either born by the employer or is forced to be socialized (not a bad word here) through regulation.

Domenic_S8• 12 years ago

Luckily my wife is a stay at home mom and we could pull it off with one income.

The hidden gem right here. Build your life so that you can function well on one income (even if both partners work) and you won't be restricted by a government's policy.

lutorm4• 12 years ago

I know for a fact that if our CTO took a month off of work we would probably go out of business

Well, reality is that your CTO could get hit by a car, get sick, or not be able to work for a month for all kinds of reasons unrelated to childbirth, so that seems like a problem in general. At least when it comes to children, you have many months of warning.

Or, have you considered what would happen if your CTO said "actually, my family is more important to me than the company"? If the company fails without them, they are in a pretty strong negotiating position.

AndrewKemendo3• 12 years ago

Your point is exactly why I stated for pregnancy situations - emergencies and "acts of god" can't really be planned for outside of having some kind of contingency fund/plan.

If the company fails without them, they are in a pretty strong negotiating position.

As are all the founders in a startup, that's not really saying much.

ArtB• 12 years ago

>> but my guess is that the majority of companies fall into the category where losing a person for a month is crippling.

I'm of the opinion that this is a reason to discourage the growth of small businesses. They are too small to absorb shocks like pregnancy or family emergency that contribute to the well-being of a society.

AndrewKemendo3• 12 years ago

What? I don't understand, what is the alternative?

paulddraper• 12 years ago

There's no reason for an employer to offer special paid maternity leave for not working. It doesn't make sense, and it's not fair to others who do work during that time.

On the other hand, not offering sick leave for recovery from childbirth is just plain stupid. Recovery from surgery, recovery from C-section, recovery from vaginal delivery...that sounds like sick leave to me.

RevRal• 12 years ago

This is absolutely terrifying and ridiculous.

This basically feels like a cultural whiplash towards women for even thinking of not succumbing to the will of the patriarchy, the only option being the stay-at-home wife, as in: women need to remember their place.

Sure, you're not required to be married to have kids, but we are going to punish you for not putting yourself into that very specific lifestyle.

amaterasu• 12 years ago

Why do modern societies not wish to halt their ageing population issues and increase their tax base? Children are an INVESTMENT. Over the life of the child (assuming they remain in their country of birth of course) the taxation earned should more than offset the cost of funding parental leave. This is insanity...

udkl• 12 years ago

Isn't this a case of a bad HR rather than of 'feminism' ?

How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA

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