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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: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:16PM
Yes, I thought I said that. The high taxes in Germany come back to you in the form of excellent social services. The question in my mind is: is this efficient? By the time the government has paid a child care worker, they have also paid half-a-dozen bureaucrats to approve the paperwork. I expect it would be a lot less expensive to let people keep their money and purchase child care directly. The unspoken benefit is egalitarianism: everyone gets the same quality of social services, regardless of their income level. That is an important benefit for German society, but is has quite a price tag attached to it.
The same for vacation: there is really no reason why someone in the US can't negotiate with their employer for more vacation, in return for a lower salary. The problem seems to be that decent vacation in the US is unknown, so no one does this. That's actually weird, because government workers do get a lot of vacation [federaljobs.net] (after three years, you get 10 paid holidays plus 4 weeks of vacation every year). I think most people in private industry have no idea that this is true, or they would ask for the same from their employers?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:35PM
A big problem in the U.S., when considering social benefits or re-distributive policies, is that there are so so many people that want a cut. Not just bureaucrats, although that's a big problem (no federal government programs ever actually get cut. When they say they are cutting, what they mean is they are cutting back on the planned increases), but it's also all the cronyism. Food stamps are not coupons mailed by a government agency - they are "EBT" cards managed by large banks (that get a cut). Welfare is handled the same way, and most unemployment benefits. Medicare and medicaid are full of for-profit corporations (insurances and health providers) that are all getting more payment than they would if people were paying out of pocket (and the fraud and abuse is rampant).
And trying to cut down on the fraud and abuse is typically just another layer of bureaucracy with its own attendant bloated administration and political wrangling, all costly. I would say that AFDC and EITC are better, but the IRS is now very corrupt, and refund fraud is now costing about $20 billion a year.
A lot of this is enabled by the incredibly complex tax code. The tax code is now over 75,000 PAGES! Full of crony perks and loopholes for all the buddies of everyone that has had a modicum of influence on Capital Hill for 15 minutes during the last 30 years. Money flows to the wealthy and well-connected, some crumbs of it is passed out to the poor to try to get support from constituents, and the middle class are squeezed all the time. About 1% of the politicians that get sent to Washington are actually interested in doing anything about it, and if they start to get anywhere they can look forward to a visit from the NSA about all the dirt they have collected...
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Thursday August 06 2015, @09:26PM
The answer is Basic Income: everyone gets the purchasing power to obtain these services directly, and the entire bureaucracy can be eliminated wholesale (except for a small contingent whose job it is to disburse the basic income).