Mooooternity leave

This is an article advocating for parental leave. It mentions one unintended consequence of moo leave; women are paid less,, or not hired at all.

While I can understand taking 6 weeks to heal after squatting out a loaf, demanding 9 months or more of maternity leave is unreasonable. How can smaller businesses function when their employees are out for extended periods? Expecting co-worders to cover a moo's extended time off without any compensation is unreasonable and unfair when you consider that CF people get no such comparable benefit in the workplace

The comments are great.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/upshot/when-family-friendly-policies-backfire.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1

Great post, good article comments.

I would like to only confirm that this is definitely gonna result in the "silent discrimination" -
mentioned here on the thread "Can't Be a Foreign Wife Without Having to Hear about Sprogs and Sprogging".
That means as a woman you most probably won't be even hired because you could breed even though
you don't want to.

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Peace
This is an article advocating for parental leave. It mentions one unintended consequence of moo leave; women are paid less,, or not hired at all.

While I can understand taking 6 weeks to heal after squatting out a loaf, demanding 9 months or more of maternity leave is unreasonable. How can smaller businesses function when their employees are out for extended periods? Expecting co-worders to cover a moo's extended time off without any compensation is unreasonable and unfair when you consider that CF people get no such comparable benefit in the workplace

The comments are great.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/upshot/when-family-friendly-policies-backfire.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1

The comments are typical. Mostly a bunch of mama bears, shrews, and white knights discussing what they're "owed." That's not how a capitalist society operates. Business needs productivity. Productivity and sales equal profit. Profit pays employees. Less profit = less pay for everyone else. And paid maternity leave = less profit.

So let's see a show of hands... how many of the worker drones on this board are willing to take a cut in pay so the Moos can have paid maternity leave? Anybody? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

If things like paid maternity leave were such a great idea, and so good for business, why aren't the Moomies starting their own businesses and enacting such policies?!? They could have the most "family friendly" businesses in America!

It's not only that! The company has to re-hire moo after her mooternity leave. That means moo can take full maternity leave - 2 years (EU country where I live). The employer has to find someone who will fill the vacancy for 2 years!

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mrs. chinaski
It's not only that! The company has to re-hire moo after her mooternity leave. That means moo can take full maternity leave - 2 years (EU country where I live). The employer has to find someone who will fill the vacancy for 2 years!

I'm not sure what socialist utopia you are living in, but one of the "progressive" voices on the NYT seems to want the utopia to be extended even further...

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Utopian Dreamer
I am quite sure there are equally valid studies which say that the profits were much higher when companies were allowed to employ slave labor and child labor, and the government was either completely okay with it or looked the other way.

At some point in the civilization, one has to wonder what the heck is our goal, and who the heck is this civilization for?!

It is a known fact that men contribute disproportionately less in way of raising the child. One way to address this is to have a trust fund funded by deducting "equalizing child support" payments from any income the father may have right from the time of pregnancy. We should do this for all fathers -- even for fathers who stay married and are part of the family.

Another similar "generational fund" should be created by taxing all working adult population to retroactively pay and compensate the society for raising them to adulthood from a wailing, naked, helpless little critters.

We can pay for all this socially progressive programs from that fund.

If all that sounds too complicated and convoluted, we can do what any civilized society would do. Build handicapped ramps without taking the shirt off the guy in the wheel chair. i.e. Implement the right progressive policies -- self-funded or short-sightedly maligned as an unfunded mandate and tweak them till they work.

Translation: Bust your ass to pay for other people's kydz.

These government planners are going to make our lives wonderful. The US spent decades and trillions of dollars defeating the USSR. I can't believe so many of our citizens are endorsing policies that the Soviets would be proud of. :kill

I ain't no liar. It's even 3 years in Finnland!!!

WTH is with the Utopian Dreamer?
Trust fund, generational fund - OMG. You win :-)

I have the feeling that one already contributes enough by paying the taxes...

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mrs. chinaski
I ain't no liar. It's even 3 years in Finnland!!!

WTH is with the Utopian Dreamer?
Trust fund, generational fund - OMG. You win :-)

I have the feeling that one already contributes enough by paying the taxes...

Utopian Dreamer is the nickname I gave to the dolt who left that comment.

People work for themselves and their own security. The thought of busting one's ass so Moomies and Kydz can have a "generational fund" is absurd.

To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the problem with ideas like these is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money.

Stu54, I saw that idiotic comment. Generational fund?? Don't they already get a type of de-facto fund, with free education, free child health insurance, tax breaks, free breakfast and lunch in school, WIC, SNAP, section 8, and a host of other things?

Now they want a cash fund, too??

I want a 2 year trip around the world. Where is my fund?

Moos can fuck off.

On another note, if I owned my own business, I'd be sure to only hire older women and men. No way would I hire a young woman in her fertile years. And it's a shame, because there are plenty of young, smart, ambitious women out there. But legislation like the article promotes would really kill job opportunities for young women in the USA.

I understood that nickname. I just don't understand how that person came on such ideas ????

There were no "trust and generational funds" in Soviet Union.

There was a system in the Soviet era - everybody had to work. Those who didn't had to
go to prison due to parasitism on society.
Everybody had a job, however the 100% employment rate was created by overstaffing.
As far as moos are concerned, there was a functional system of child care. There were
two separate institutions - nursery for chyldren 0-2 (?) and kindergarten 3-5.
Moos were supposed to return to work as soon as possible.

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mrs. chinaski
I understood that nickname. I just don't understand how that person came on such ideas ????

There were no "trust and generational funds" in Soviet Union.

There was a system in the Soviet era - everybody had to work. Those who didn't had to
go to prison due to parasitism on society.
Everybody had a job, however the 100% employment rate was created by overstaffing.
As far as moos are concerned, there was a functional system of child care. There were
two separate institutions - nursery for chyldren 0-2 (?) and kindergarten 3-5.
Moos were supposed to return to work as soon as possible.

The Soviet system, along with every other communist/socialist system, is built on the premise that government central planning will lead us to a utopia. In the USSR, this was enforced by, well, force. In other nations, massive taxation pays for the collectivist mindset.

It's all billed as, "this is what is good for society." What it really represents is wealth redistribution, disguised as a moral or noble act. It's theft.

Notice how people were literally dying to escape from places like East Berlin and Soviet Russia.

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Peace
Stu54, I saw that idiotic comment. Generational fund?? Don't they already get a type of de-facto fund, with free education, free child health insurance, tax breaks, free breakfast and lunch in school, WIC, SNAP, section 8, and a host of other things?

Now they want a cash fund, too??

I want a 2 year trip around the world. Where is my fund?

Moos can fuck off.

If you really want to set the parents off, suggest that they pay for the cost of education themselves, without subsidy. They will go bananas. You'll hear every "it takes a village!" platitude in the book, I guarantee it.

Things I never hear when the debate about moo leave comes up:

1.) Where is the money going to come from? The government? Last I checked, we were trillions in debt and basically owned by China. And we have more important things to tackle first before letting breeders get paid to play house, like a national healthcare system. The breeders promoting moo leave are not the ones who can take the financial hit of a catastrophic illness or accident. Or subsidizing post-secondary and postgraduate education? Again, these breeders having kids now are going to be in a real shock at college costs in a couple of decades, if the tuition inflation isn't taken under control.

Or is the employer supposed to pay for moo leave? Okay, so what are these breeders willing to do without in order to get moo leave? A pay cut? Reduction in benefits? This is America, land of "We'll give you this, but take away five other things in the process."

2.) How do you justify getting paid for a personal choice that is not to the benefit of your employer or your fellow employees instead of that money going towards bonus pay for the sorry sack that has to now do the work of two people? It seems like breeders have ensured that whoever picks up the slack doesn't get any extra pay or brownie points for doing so and that's a giant pile of "Fuck that noise."

3.) What resolutions do you have to prevent abuse of moo leave? In all these other utopian countries of plenty, you have women taking their year of leave and getting knocked up somewhere near the end so they come back to work for only a few months before they take another year of leave. Why exactly should anybody be paying somebody several years' salary for only months of actual work?

4.) What resolutions do you have for the silent discrimination that will only increase? This happens now and we don't have paid maternity leave and the unpaid leave is only six weeks.

5.) Instead of wrapping up special privileges for those who breed and pretend it's a feminist issue, how about an equal leave system for everybody across the board? After a certain time of working, each employee earns a year of leave to do whatever they want: travel, breed, convalesce after illness or injury, take care of an ailing family member, sit and masturbate in front of the telly while eating Ben & Jerry's, whatever. Or not use it at all and cash it out upon retirement or something.

6.) Why is it not expected for you to save up the money to have kids instead of demanding society pays you to do so? This is a personal choice and personal issue. Why should I pay for it? And if I'm to pay for it, I get to fucking reprimand and discipline your little shits. When you demand money from society, society now holds the power over you. At least, that's how it should go.

------------------------------------------------------------
"Why children take so long to grow? They eat and drink like pig and give nothing back. Must find way to accelerate process..."
- Dr. Yi Suchong, Bioshock

"Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born."
- Garrett Hardin

"I feel like there's a message involved here somehow, but then I couldn't stop laughing at all the plotholes, like the part when North Korea has food."
- Youtube commentor referring to a North Korean cartoon.

"Reality is a bitch when it slowly crawls out of your vagina and shits in your lap."
- Reddit comment

"Bitch wants a baby, so we're gonna fuck now. #bareback"
- Cambion

Oh whatever. Abortion doctors are crimestoppers."
- Miss Hannigan

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mrs. chinaski
Great post, good article comments.

I would like to only confirm that this is definitely gonna result in the "silent discrimination" -
mentioned here on the thread "Can't Be a Foreign Wife Without Having to Hear about Sprogs and Sprogging".
That means as a woman you most probably won't be even hired because you could breed even though
you don't want to.

I know this shits true, ive been actively trying to get a job for nearly 2 years, a guy friend of mine applied for a job a fortnight ago, got an interview, went on to interview stage 5, now is just waiting on a drug and criminal background check (which he shouldn't have a problem with) to see if he got the job, two fucking weeks for a guy, 2 years for female me and not even a second stage in person interview.

im actually really tempted to apply for a heap of jobs as a guy, just to see how many call backs I get verse the female me who gets none.

In all of this, nobody ever seems to consider the root question of why we, as a society, should want people breeding such that we should encourage it.

I wish that instead of promoting pronatalism, countries would work to get us out of this unsustainable pyramid scheme of ever-increasing generations. We're running out of resources and the earth is overpopulated, and all they can think about is the size of the tax base in 50 years, as if our current system, with this level of prosperity, could continue forever. It's just a blip in the course of human history, not the norm, and it is unsustainable. We're already seeing the effects of climate change and a lot of people are experiencing the effects of too many people, too little secure employment. The last thing we need to do is encourage and support people in the very selfish act of reproducing. We should be discouraging breeding and investing money into figuring out if there is any way to achieve a sustainable society with zero or negative population growth and carbon neutrality.

@ Studio54:
"The Soviet system, along with every other communist/socialist system,
is built on the premise that government central planning will lead us to a utopia." - THIS

The Soviet system didn't work as 100% employment rate reached by overstaffing was not
competitive. In addition to this, the people were in general not motivated to work because everyone had the
same salary no matter what. The system was socialism combined with dictatorship - no freedom
of speech, persecutions for different opinions. That's the reason people wanted out.

That system had some positive aspects but all in all it was bad, not functional and not sustainable.

But I think the system we have now is also not good :-( It's bad but in a different way.

@ exile: Yes, it is alive and kicking.

There is a big car manufacturer in the proximity of my home town.
This manufacturer wanted to employ five engineers.
Men and women from the same university (nearly identical scores,
identical diplomas) applied for the jobs.
Only men were hired.

When I lived in a different town I met 30+ women who were CL and unemployed.
They confirmed to me that nobody would hire them because of the silent discrimination.
You cannot ignore the fact that they are far too many of them.
Some of them crack under the pressure, they become moos to save their face -
being a moo is socially more acceptable than being an unemployed CL woman.

Re: generational fund - what happens when many of those kids end up being a burden on everyone else? Can we tax the breeders who raised their kids badly so they ended up being criminals or morons or deadbeats? Let the breeders pay extra to build prisons and clog the criminal and family court systems with their spawn. Let the breeders pay more in public school taxes based on how many kids they send to them.

The generational fund needs to work in both directions.

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mrs. chinaski
I ain't no liar. It's even 3 years in Finnland!!!

I live in Finland and that is true, maternity plus parental leave here is 3 years and the employer pays it plus they have to find a replacement. The so-called silent discrimination is very heavy in Finland just because of that and it has been written about it a lot. Women of childbearing age although they are educated, receive jobs with much more diffculty than men (and here we talk about the same professions) or they receive temporary jobs and have much more troubles in career advancing. And i repeat, it's not about the profession anymore, the same thing happens in male/female dominated fields, it doesn't matter.

I can offer you an article on the subject unfortunately in Finnish but if you are curious run it in google translate.

Here it says that a baybee costs the employer at least 10 000€. Some women have 3 kids in a row and take up to 9 years of maternity leave which means roughly 30 000€ loss for the employer. The owner of a hairdressing shop went bankrupt when six of her employees went on maternity leave at the same time, costing her around 60 000€. Also some employers hired a replacement for the moo just to find out that the replacement got knocked up and also took mooternity leave. This article is from 2009, now the employer's costs can rise up to 15 000€ per baybee.

It is full with these kinds of articles and all kinds of proposals of what should be done. One of them which is heavily sustained here is passing the mooternity bill on the taxpayer...like that Utopian dreamer commented. Taxpayers pay anyways for all kinds of parental benefits but that would mean paying even more. And this idea has at its basis the fact that those kids will one day pay for your pension.

I really do believe the employers who avoid hiring women of childbearing age if they risk going bankrupt like the hairdresser. I would do the same. Business is business. But looking at my situation i sometimes want to shout out all my anger because i am the one losing. I am looking for permanent employment and can't get it because of the above mentioned issue. And i am not the only one. The Finnish CF group i joined is full of these sad cases in which women are just overlooked because they might be potential breeders.

And nobody believes you if you say you don't want kids. Most moos do that but once they get the job, pregnancy immediately follows. I was looking for these articles on mooternity leave and found some really scary threads where women were discussing that as soon as they get a permanent job, they'll get pregnant.

And it's also true what mrs. chinaski said: being an unemployed moo is way much better in the eyes of everybody than being an unemployed childless woman.

@ blackpearl: That's what happens when laws are made by and for breeders.
F*ck it!
We who live in the EU understand this problematics.
Those from US cannot relate because they have a different system.

I think that those laws have also an another purpose - they help to conceal
the fact there are not enough jobs out there. Women who have university degrees
and cannot find any job eventually become moos and stay at home and government
can happily say that the unemployment rate is a single digit.

"those kids will one day pay for your pension" -> this is often used as an argument.
The social security system here where I live is one big Ponzi scheme. An average Joe
pays in the system always more than what he gets out of it. One man calculated that he would
have to receive the pension for 40 years to reach a break-even-point. He calculated the retirement
with 70 :-) So I call bull$hit on this.

It's a year here and the bitches either call the HR office the day before they are supposed to return saying they're not coming back, or they come back already knocked up with the next one.

And we also have Duh leave (what the fuck do they have to recover from?), free IVF, monthly kiddie checks, tax breaks - and the gubmint is pushing for even more breeder benefits. Last one I heard: breeders get a tax break if their sprog joins a sports team. What?! Back in my days, that was called a hobby, NOT a necessity. :cen

Thank you for the info.

I read once an article on Celeb*tchy and in the discussion, US moos kept complaining
that they have to pay for the birth and that they don't get enough leave for their Pre$hious.
As the owner of CB lives in Berlin, she explained to the crying moos how it is in Germany
and EU in general. As a reaction, moos kept complaining about the hardships of mooohood
in the US even more.

I think that you will experience some serious changes.
This NY article is only testing how the general public will react on the suggestions.
As the CF people are the minority, the majority - breeders - will demand further incentives.
From what you have posted, I believe you are on a way to European standards.
More incentive for breeders WILL come.

I have certainly seen women experiencing the discrimination described. I don't know if I was lucky or if the fact that I'm in a male-dominated field helped because companies saw me as a way of looking more diverse and don't see one or two women out of a large group as hurting the bottom line that badly. Now that I'm getting older I worry more about age discrimination than sex discrimination because my field is not at all friendly for people over 35.

Since companies cannot legally ask about reproduction, I think CF women should take to dumping a copy of their sterilization proof during interviews. Except then, of course, you get hit by all the negative stereotypes about unwomanly women who won't have kids.

I loathe these femoonists (they are not feminists) who are only out to get their entitlement and don't think about other people in other situations at all. The only equitable solution is sabbaticals for all, paid for out of money held back during earlier employment, but you never see that solution floated even though it would benefit breeders as well by diminishing the scarring effect of periods of unemployment by making it commonplace.

A sabbatical for ALL? That would be great. That's what I call justice.

But yeah. As great as this suggestion is, we know that's not gonna
happen. In the end, CF people are supposed to work non-stop and subsidize
the breeders who will as "thank you" continue to bash them for being CF while
taking all system advantages they can get.

@ yurble: What do you do? In which field is 35+ considered too old?

I thought 35 is old only when you are a model!