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posted by martyb on Thursday August 06 2015, @04:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the in-dependent-views dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:05PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:05PM (#219218) Journal

    That's exactly right, and a parallel trend line is student loan debt which is destroying the ability of the young to ever build equity. That's equity that could be used to anchor families, neighborhoods, all the things we associate with a stable, functioning society. It's also equity that could be used to start new businesses that generate new advances and jobs.

    All that gets thrown away so that the financial system can extract all wealth from everyone and secret it away in numbered accounts offshore to keep a very, very small handful of bankers in hookers and blow.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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