FUCK yes. Kids cost money. Jobs are how you get money. And I say this as someone who hired a woman who then told us she would give birth in two months, and we were fine.
What you seem to be saying is that instead of looking for a job, pregnant women should rob a bank? Honestly, I have no idea what point you are trying to make.
The logic of: "Babies are expensive, therefor I cannot stay unemployed for 6 months before I find a job" seems completely sound and reasonable to me. Where is that logic lacking? What practical alternative would you propose?
You may be trying to make a point, but you're not succeeding. A sarcastic guess: robbing banks makes money, and having a job makes money so having a job is logically equivalent to robbing banks and therefore being employed is bad.
My team has hired more than one person that immediately went on leave. We literally paid them for months before they started. We did this knowingly, and I cite this with other candidates as a concrete example of how well we treat our employees.
Guess what, in our industry the people that are planning to have kids are also very likely to be senior and experienced. They're hard to recruit. Consider leave as part of the cost of hiring good people.
If you're not doing things like this, you're not actually competing for top talent.
Fraud is intentionally misrepresenting information in order to affect how the other party would act to cause a financial gain/loss. It is illegal for the other party to change how they act based on information about a pregnancy, therefore there is no legally admissible injury to the company. Legally, you're probably in about the same situation as a drug dealer accusing someone of stealing some of his goods - if you can prove that they actually caused you damages (ie: that you had a stash of drugs, or that you would deliberately not hire a candidate because they were pregnant), you're worse off than before.
They mainly hire people to replace others that quit/retired or to fill a new position created to support a team with a steadily growing workload. New hires are subject to a 3 month probation period during which both parties can end the contract at will. More than 80% of all positions are long term.
I would hope that someone looking for a long term employment at a company would be honest and upfront with something like a planned 1-year vacation. My only gripe with the parent poster is that they are hiding(rightfully so) this so close before their planned leave and thus do not appear serious about a long term employment at that company.
I sure hope you are not involved with hiring at your company because your perspective on this is a great way to get sued into oblivion.
It's actually in your best interest as the hiring company to not find out if the person is pregnant or expecting to have a child. Let's say that you decided not to hire someone for a set of reasons unrelated to pregnancy, but along the way you asked the candidate if they were planning to get pregnant. Good luck proving that you didn't make the hiring decision on the basis of knowing they would take leave. Which of course is illegal under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. This is why most companies make it a policy that you can not ask these kinds of questions so as not to taint the interview (even though technically it's not illegal to ask the questions, it's just illegal to use them as a basis for your decision).
As a candidate you might actually be acting more in the interest of the company to not tell them you are going to be having a child so as not to put them in that position? I honestly haven't thought through it that much so I could be convinced of a different opinion.
If you're planning to continue working after having a child, I think you should go about your career as if the pregnancy wasn't happening and just take the leave as appropriate. If that means you work 6 weeks before leave, so be it. You'll be back after leave to continue on.
What would the company do if instead of getting pregnant you got hit by a bus one day? I had to take 2 months of medical leave on 2 weeks notice when I got deathly ill, that was way less notice than a pregnancy. The startup I was at had only 12 people and they handled it. I'm unconvinced by all these arguments that it's too much of a hardship for companies to deal with their employees having a life.
1 year vacation? ROFL. In America 3 months of paid maternity leave is a good dead. Also, in America both parties can end a job at will at any time. Also also, referring to parental leave as "vacation" is pretty weird.
