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On Tuesday, August 4th, Neflix announced on their blog that they would begin offering new parents a progressive parental leave policy:
...Today we're introducing an unlimited leave policy for new moms and dads that allows them to take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child's birth or adoption.
The Boston Globe picked up the story earlier today and compared Netflix's new policy to Google's, which offers 18 weeks of paid maternity leave and 12 weeks of "baby bonding" time. The Boston Globe also notes:
The US and Papua New Guinea are the only countries among 185 nations and territories that hadn't imposed government-mandated laws requiring employers to pay mothers while on leave with their babies, according to a study released last year by the United Nations' International Labor Organization.
This new policy "covers all of the roughly 2,000 people working at [Netflix's] Internet video and DVD-by-mail services, according to the Los Gatos, California, company."
However, not all media voices are pleased with this change. Suzanne Venker, author of the recent book The Two-Income Trap: Why Parents Are Choosing To Stay Home, writes for Time :
Offering new parents full pay for up to one year is akin to putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. The needs of children are huge, and they do not end at one year. On the contrary, they just begin. Taking a year off of work to meet those needs merely scratches the surface.
What does Soylent think? Should companies offer new parents lengthy paid leave after they bring a new bundle of joy into the world, or do generous policies do more harm than good?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by skullz on Thursday August 06 2015, @06:00PM
Heard about this from an NPR story ( http://www.npr.org/2015/08/06/429911928/netflixs-parental-leave-plan-is-groundbreaking-and-unlikely-to-spread [npr.org] ) where they mentioned that Netflix folks get a substantial amount of vacation as well and that they treat their employees like adults, not kids. They want them to be exceptional: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-04-12/how-to-set-your-employees-free-reed-hastings [bloomberg.com]
So this is not really anything new at all except it is "paid parent time" vs "paid vacation time".
And why a quote from Suzanne Venker? Really? A "cultural critic" who, as far as I can tell, only appears on talk TV and shills for her books? Why not have Rush weigh in on the moral implications of Netflix's internal company policies? Or an herbal rock physic?
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday August 06 2015, @11:10PM
And why a quote from Suzanne Venker?
At first I was going to go with a USA vs. the rest of the industrialized world angle, but then I happened on that piece in Time, which made me ask some of the questions that others have posed about what she was on about. So then I found myself at suzannevenker.com (trigger warning!), and hoo boy! I haven't been to mainstream news sites years (until I decided to do a few submissions) so I had no idea who she was, but I decided to keep a mental note of her in case anybody ever wants to try to tell me that there are no real women who want traditional gender roles.
I remembered seeing the odd comment here and there right here on Soylent that echoed her sentiment, and she does have some actually valid MRA¹ stuff, so I figured, why not stir the pot a little?
(Here's a recent example [soylentnews.org], with the exception that my take-away wasn't necessarily that the AC was arguing for traditional gender roles like Venker seems to be, but against the idea that feminism is the way forward.)
¹ Like feminism, the MRM (men's rights movement) does have some valid concerns, and it also has its own fair share of gender lunatics.