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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 darnkitten on Friday August 07 2015, @02:07AM
Partly, because we destroyed the unions. On the one hand, we allowed them (or their respective leaderships) to become parasitic and self-serving rather than taking the time and effort of participating and governing them ourselves; on the other hand, we allowed them to be crippled by corporate and legislative interests, rather than standing up for our own and for each other in solidarity; and on the gripping hand, we allowed ourselves to be convinced that unions and other forms of collective organization and action are EvilBadCommunistSocialism (TM), something to be reflexively abjured, rather than realizing that, properly used and controlled, they are tools, something to be used to protect ourselves from and to balance out the powers of corporation and/or government.
Disclaimer: I am not a union member currently, but have worked non-union, partial-union and full union shops and been a member of both dysfunctional and properly functioning unions (sometimes in the same organization).