Parental leave, and childcare more generally. In a society with privatized child-rearing where increasingly both parents work, the childcare issues are just brutal. For parents and children.
This feels like something that (together with healthcare) should be decoupled from the employer as much as possible.
It may be reasonable to handle childcare and healthcare individually with privatised services. It may be reasonable to have them handled centrally for almost everyone by the government, as in Scandinavia.
But having to rely on your relations with employer for these issues is just begging to be abused, and often is - where the employees are sufficiently vulnerable, they get abused even more by this.
Completely agreed. Mandating that employers pay parents not to work is hugely problematic; for starters, it creates an economically rational incentive to avoid hiring women of childbearing age. If society believes that having children and taking time off to raise them should be encouraged, then society should pay for it, not individual businesses.
Meanwhile, in Sweden, parental leave is shared by both parents. Out of the 16 months total, each parent is guaranteed two months, and the couple can divide the remaining 12 months as they wish. Many still give the woman all of it, but there's a growing trend to split it equally. Among my peers - university educated upper middle class - everyone splits it equally.
And, when parental leave is mostly split equally, you remove the basis for discrimination against women in this area.
By requiring that the male parent take part of the parental leave, it encourages men to get more involved with their children and family life and being a father. Which is a good thing IMO.
(This is presuming there is exactly one man in the relationship, there could be 0, 1 or 2)
Correct. However part of the thinking/motive of this approach, is that many men who want to focus on children are not able / comfortable with taking time off, and programmes like this help them. The theory being that this approach harms less people than "no restrictions which in practice means women take all the time off".
That preference is for the most part a social construct that is further reinforced by the salary gap between men and women. By encouraging couples to split parental leave equally, you lessen the hiring discrimination against women in child-bearing age, which in turn lessens couples' preference for letting the least-paid parent take the most parental leave, and thus you have a positive spiral leading to more gender equality.
I personally struggle with the idea of offering benefits based on your family status. I realize this is not a protected class and probably isn't because it is a very common form of discrimination. People with children generally receive preferential treatment and additional benefits than their single/child-free coworkers.
To me, the future should be free of workplaces offering parental leave and children benefits as it discriminates against those that 1) don't want children or 2) can't have them.
It's not "discrimination" any more than having bathrooms is discrimination against people who have a catheter and urine bag, having a company parking lot is discrimination against people who don't have cars, having retirements benefits are discrimination against people who drop dead at 64, or having birth control covered by insurance is discrimination against the forever alone.
Under 20% of women are still childless by 40-44 (i.e. the practical end of their child-bearing years), and that number seems to have peaked. That means 80% of women (and presumably men assuming things are at least somewhat symmetric) will have children at some point. It's a basic biological function that is relevant to the large majority of the population at some point in their lives that society has unsurprisingly found a way to accommodate.
Not to mention that having and raising children generates a large positive externality. You benefit in the present from the assumption that people will continue to have children in the future. E.g. investment into Silicon Valley is modulated on their being tons of 18-25 year olds to watch advertising 10, 20, 30 years from now. Raising an educating a future taxpayer is literally an investment in the country and in all the businesses that will still be around 10, 20, 30 years from now and need young workers.
"... having a company parking lot is discrimination against people who don't have cars ..."
Interesting comparison. It's not unusual for companies to offer a cash alternative for employees who don't use the company parking lot.
Maybe child care will end up something like that. For example: providing a cash bonus or complementary gym membership if the employee doesn't make use of the company daycare program.
Perhaps ideally it would be just a general sabbatical period. Those who have children can use that time to fill the traditional maternity/paternity time and those who cannot/will not have children can use that time to do whatever they please.
