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Starting Now At Netflix: Unlimited Maternity and Paternity Leave
vivaoporto writes: Netflix announced Tuesday that, during the first year after their child's birth or adoption, employees will be able to take off however long they feel they need to. They can return on a full- or part-time basis, and even take subsequent time off later in the year if needed. Netflix will "keep paying them normally." Time comments that Netflix's policy "deserves high marks for extending leave to fathers, as well as understanding that the entire first year after childbirth can be challenging for new parents".
It's not really unlimited if it's limited to a year now is it. Bad title. Commendable policy though, much better than what many places offer.
I see this can be efficient and useful inside a company with mainly highly-educated workers, with stringent admission standards. But would such a thing work in society in general?
So, more or less how it is for everyone here in Norway.
I'll remember this next time they raise prices. Dicks.
HINT: Just because you squeezed out a crotchloaf doesn't make you special.
does that mean 2 years?
...it's mandatory for companies to provide up to 3 years maternity leave.
I see this can be efficient and useful inside a company with mainly highly-educated workers, with stringent admission standards. But would such a thing work in society in general?
It could. The US trails the rest of the civilized world in maternity/paternity leave policies by a WIDE margin. It works if we insist everyone play by the same rules. There is no competitive advantage to be gained if everyone is allowed to take leave to care for a newborn. It would be harder for small companies to do this but there are ways of working around that too with a little government help. Basically this sort of policy is just a way of showing that you actually care about the well being of your fellow citizens. I can't figure out why so many people in the US think that is somehow a bad thing.
Take as much holidays as you want, come to work when you want, etc...
Check this presentation about the Netflix Culture (http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664?from=ss_embed).
Basically they want high performers, and if that means you perform high coming to work 20 hrs a week, so be it. It also means if you're pulling 80 hrs a week and are just getting by, that's not enough. You don't get an A+ for "trying hard", you get an A+ for achieving high performance. That's all that matters.
Speaking as an executive at comcast, where our bundled services provide savings and the dark lord reigns supreme on throne of bleached bone, We've had similar perks for our staff for quite some time now. Among our generous benefits are:
unlimited child sequestration: If you've recently had a child, you're welcome to bring them to work and store them conveniently inside the 'b' compartment of the second floor copier. Older Comcast employees might know this as the waste toner bin (it has been made child friendly.)
the paternal mines: Did you recently have a child and are wanting to spend more time with them? Head down to the fourth floor (past brittanies cubicle) and into the insufferable mines of the black goat with a hundred lips. There, you'll enjoy the warm aroma of burnt flesh amidst the screams and wails of countless babes. take advantage of our open door policy while youre there and get to know Comcasticles, the dark lord to which we all pray, and who feasts upon the marrow of so many broken. Manilla envelopes have also been moved here to make room for the new fax machine upstairs.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'll remember this next time they raise prices. Dicks.
Yeah, they're real "dicks" for actually giving a shit about their employees. You would prefer they work in some third world sweatshop I presume so you can get discount? How nice of you.
So, as someone who doesn't have children, this is just another example of how I'm being forced to pay for your kids; Netflix will eventually be more expensive, because I've got to pay for your spawn.
Netflix even more, because, you know, I'm supporting shite more.
As long as he gets his cheap jar of pickles, he doesn't care. There is more to value than how much something costs.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
How about we create rules that foster responsible procreation? If someone wants kids they should have the means (money, time) that is required to take care of them before getting pregnant. Netflix did something helpful for new parents, sure, (and people working at netflix are probably people we'd rather be having more kids than Joe Bob and his sister/wife Fanny Mae) but there are people out there who take their "right" to have kids and stomp on my "right" to not pay a dime for their terrible decisions. We shouldn't be incentivizing having more kids in any settings, we should de-incentivize having kids when you can't afford it (ie. jail time).
-SaNo
It's because it's never that simple. First of all, a government mandate that it refuses to pay for is an act of political cowardice.
Yes it really is that simple. And who said anything about a government mandate without funding? There absolutely should be funding to help small businesses out on this and yes this will mean raising taxes.
Other than that, if the government mandates employers pay for such long leaves, it will hugely penalize small companies, and prospective employment of women.
Only if our policies regarding that leave are as stupid as the barbaric policies we have now. Right now if a worker has a child they have the un-enviable choice of keeping their job or spending the appropriate amount of time with their child which is particularly hard during the first year of their life. If everyone (male and female) is guaranteed leave without fear of losing their job then it will not disadvantage any group or company of any size. We raise taxes and help small businesses out with funding employees who take parental leave.
Is worth it's weight in gold, makes me want to knock up the babystitter.
The Duggars will be right over to put in applications.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
See, the thing is that people LIKE to work. At least at work they like to do, or at a pinch work they're not actively annoyed by doing. And people not annoyed by being made to do their work do BETTER at their job than those who do it under duress.
So what happens is that you get leave and deal with the new life and when that child is ready, you really really want to get back to work.
IMO one reason for post-natal depression is losing your friends. "In the old days", women didn't work a job and worked, if anything, at home. Therefore they had a baby and didn't have to lose contact with their circle of friends. Now, unless you're in the top 10%, you need two incomes to survive, so when the wife has a child, they not only have the drain of post-birth recovery, but they are now completely alone and forced to spend all their time with the child.
And even the best baby is a strain.
So it feels like you're abandoned, chained to the child. Not all the time, but the dull repetition of it will be greater than your joy at the new life at least at SOME time before the child is going to school.
And it's depressing.
And, hell, there are many fathers who *have to* miss the early years of their child to earn money. Robbed of the time to connect. And only after having any sort of contact, but then only outside work hours and on the short holidays.
Well, every employee in Germany can take this sort of leave for about 1 1/2 years.
I also suspect that if you actually tried to take that year of paid leave (especially if you're a father), they would suddenly find a way to fire you or cut your pay.
I doubt it - a year of p/maternity leave is actually a legal requirement in places like Canada. Finding a way to fire someone after returning would get a company into very hot water very quickly. However, depending on your company, you do not get your full salary for the year and it drops after some number of months to the statutory p/maternity leave pay. I took a week off when our kids were born without any issues.
It could.
Actually it does: Canada already has a legal requirement for one year of p/maternity leave which can be shared between parents as wanted. However your salary will drop if you take more than some number of months off depending on your company.
...they'll be paying everyone $70k a year minimum just like Gravity Payments.
Of course, that didn't work out too well
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Much better than the company where I'm at. You (for males) have to slowly build up and take vacation to have any time off with your child. With my first one, I planned to take off two weeks and they called me in in the middle of my "really" long break. I was so pissed...I should have quit because what they called me in for wasn't even critical at all. Probably just the big asshole boss trying to flex his fat management muscles.
To steal a known expression, there's no such thing as a free vacation or maternity/paternity leave. Of all the people who don't get overtime pay, how many of those do you know who spend less than a typical work week at the office? Saying it's unlimited replaces clear and predictable limits with limits imposed by vague and arbitrary social norms and underhanded management pressure to work more. You think you can pull off delivering 100% in 80% of the time? Go ask your boss for an 80% position with the same pay, if he's not willing to do that he's not going let you take a day off every week either.
These are the kind of things that should be set on the macro level as part of your employment relationship. We expect you to work so many hours a week, you get this many weeks of vacation and various other benefits and you get paid this much. Because at the end of the day, you're both going to look at the totality and ask what's my employer/employee really giving me for what I give him. On the micro level there should always be a price to pay, if my employer wants me to work more he should pay more and then it's only natural that if I want to work less I should get paid less.
I have in my contract that I have five weeks vacation, it doesn't mean I have to take all five weeks or that I can't get more time off but that's then a deviation from the norm explicitly written in my contract. If I wanted a sixth week, it's naturally with no pay. If my boss wants me to work another week, that's clearly for extra pay. If either of us aren't happy with the total value the right place to take this is when negotiating salary, not trying to force me to work extra for free or trying to stretch my vacations to compensate.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Maybe they should look at how things are going at Gravity Payments.
IMHO, this is B.S. Nobody EVER took paternity leave until a few years ago and the world didn't end and kids grew up plenty well-adjusted.
We've had that for years where I work. Just tell the boss you knocked up his daughter.
Have gnu, will travel.
*SIGH*
Just remember, every new above and beyond benefit they give out like this ($15 for a burger flipper?), YOU the customer will have to pay more....it will be passed onto you.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That first year your kid is likely to catch all kinds of colds especially as you introduce them to daycare or their older siblings bring back crap from school. I think all of us parents would of loved the ability to be able to either work from home with the sick child or be able to take those days off without loss of income.
My wife and I have decided to not have children at this point. So chuck decides he wants kids and they have one. If I work at Netflix I'm now stuck picking up chucks work load for a year. What if I can't even have kids? What if maybe I have s three year old so I missed out. To me a year is ridiculous and unfair to other workers.
Workers with kids already get to just jump up and leave where I work when they need to. Hey my kids sick. Now I'm picking up their work. Well I'm gonna start saying my cat is sick and leave or I gotta pick my cat up from daycare. Fuck people with kids they always get special treatment for choices they made in their personal life and want to foist it in everyone else
And how does wanting companies to do this kind of compensation for personal choices reconcile with the whole get out of my business vibe these days? .... Seems pretty contradictory to me.
Hey evil corporations I value my privacy don't spy on me or get up in my personal life! Don't hold what I do in my free time against me! If I want to do drugs at home or pose naked on the interwebz or whatever you can't fire me for it! Oh but if I choose to have a kid you better pay me and give me time off for i!t
Everybody screams over population and oh climate change (it's a fraud anyway) yada but everybody wants to subsidize and incentivize child birth. Pay me to have one at my company. Give me tax breaks so its profitable to sit at home and pump out kids. Or now abort it so PP staff can get a Lambo.
Ps your unlimited time off headline is BS wording.
I already see a lot of posts that basically say, "Why should I have to pay for someone else's paternity leave?" This is a good move that will definitely be controversial to the young, single techie set. If the demographics are to be believed, Millenials are having even fewer children, much of the reason being that they don't feel stable enough to settle down and, well, procreate. There is also a huge number of younger people who hate even the idea of having children, so you often hear complaints like, "Why don't I get to take a day off when you have to take care of your sick kid?" "Why can't you work 60 hours a week like the rest of the single people?" "Oh great, the procreators are raising prices for everyone."
I have 2 kids, 4 and 2, so I'm just climbing out of the early childhood no-sleep, constant work Twilight Zone of fatherhood. One of the reasons I stay with my current employer is flexibility. We don't have an official paternity leave policy, but I do have a boss and several colleagues who've been through this whole thing before. My boss has basically told me he knows I'll have to be out sometimes, and have days I'm not productive and is completely supportive of that because I more than make up for it later on. We're not a Silicon Valley startup managed and staffed by single 20-something males, so I think that accounts for some of the difference. The company I work for has a pretty long average tenure basically because the work we do means we can't just burn through developers and IT people on a revolving door basis. People need to stick around and learn/master the problem domain. The company isn't the most in-tune HR-wise, but line management knows what's needed to keep the ship moving.
I doubt a Scandinavian style parental leave policy will ever fly in Libertarianland, but it would be nice for more employers to do something other than "burn through all your vacation, then back to work" or basically do what mine does -- cutting new dads and moms slack when needed. As long as people don't abuse it, it works. If the economy has shifted to the point where both parents need to work to avoid a looming financial disaster and not be miserable, then this seems like a good compromise. I think a company putting this into official HR policy gives themselves a good recruiting tool.
... will be paid more.
No getting around that. Just don't expect this is change that. Part of the political push behind this is that some people want to talk off 5 years or something, come back, and make the same amount as the person that didn't take off 5 years.
Will companies offer leave? Sure. But you're also leaving.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, (I'm actually a parent), but other than the general societal benefit of paternal/maternal leave, why should parents get it and NON parents not get similar compensation?
Where's the year off of paid leave for someone who wants to see Europe, for example? People CHOOSE to have kids, why should they get paid extra (in the form of paid leave) by companies for it?
In the end, it comes in the form of a net tax benefiting people who have kids, or more kids, on the people have fewer or no kids.
My paternity leave took the form of leave that everyone in my office gets, actually, the only additional protection/benefit I got over non-parents was legal protection from getting fired for using the leave. That seems like much less of an imposition on everyone else than actually being paid.
It seems more rational and fair to me, absent a national goal of having more kids, to just offer everyone "leave" and parents can use theirs for kid-rearing, and other people can go to Europe, or go work another job and double their income.
--PeterM
I've got a *great* idea to improve family life, so that your company is family friendly: BRING BACK THE EIGHT-HOUR DAY, AND NO ON-CALL 24X7X365.25.
mark, just an idealist....
You know. unlimited downloads, but only for the first 2GB.
I agree we should make things "fair" ... especially since things like social security are paid for by future generations only people who have at last 2 kids should collect any kind of government benefit that is not paid for with current taxes.
Take a year off getting paid for downloading an offspring leaving you colleagues to cover your job. 6 weeks is one thing, but a year?
I mean, it's Netflix's choice how to spend their profits, but there's human nature to deal with too.
People without kids...if I worked there and said "Boss, I can't come to work today because I've got to take my turtle to the vet." or "Sorry I'm not productive today, I spent all night playing WoW and din't get any sleep."
Those excuses aren't materially different than "Got to take Susie to the pediatrician." or "Susie was crying all night so we didn't get any sleep." except for the whole kid thing.
Being out-of-the-office is being out-of-the-office, and being unproductive is being unproductive.
Does everyone have flexibility to take time off or be unproductive or just breeders?
If the job is worth less than the wage businesses are required to offer, that just means companies will either: A.) Go off the books, B.) Replace you with illegal aliens (a subset of A already seen in large parts of the economy), or C. Replace you with robots.
The true minimum wage is Zero.
The simple answer is that having children is a benefit to society. Those children will be the foundation for the future when you are retired - they will be doing the work. Society has decided to reward people who help provide that benefit.
Clue #1: a minimum wage job isn't something you should live off of. It is expressly for teenagers and for folks who use it as a stepping stone or fallback until something better comes along.
Who says? This is misinformation/propaganda being spread. If you look at the actual bill that instituted the minimum wage in the US (the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938), the law literally says the reasoning for setting the minimum wage is "Congress finds that ... labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standing of living necessary for health, efficiency, and general well-being of workers causes ..." and then goes on to list negative effects of not being paid enough to live. So yes, the law quite literally states that the minimum wage is something you're meant to live off of. (Feel free to read the law yourself on the Dept of Labor website.
This idea of "teenagers can do it" is only a ploy to make people complacent with low wages. Remember a teenager at 17/18 can easily be out living on their own and not have the support of family (for many reasons: family doesn't have ability to help, family has cancer and teenager needs to support them, family is crazy/insane/drug addicts, family is dead, etc.), and so even teenagers should make enough money to support themselves.
Clue #2: these jobs usually require little-to-no skill, and consequently do not bear the value of $15/hr at current inflation/valuation.
When the minimum wage was instituted in 1938, the many US jobs were in agriculture or simple manufacturing. I don't consider those jobs to be "high skill", but that doesn't mean they're not super important (without food, we die -- about as important as you can get! and manufacturing gave us the modern world, despite many of those jobs being just to screw the same bolt on over and over). So for one thing, skill does not equate with importance, and I think important jobs especially should be well paid.
Furthermore, have you seen secretary and human resources job these days? Also requires pretty low skill (mostly just typing and sending emails and filling out forms -- anyone who can read and write can do it, really), but look at how much these people make (in my area, you can get jobs in HR making upwards of $50k with only minimal experience, much above minimum wage). If we were going by your metric, these paper-pusher jobs should be making low pay and important jobs like farmers and restaurants that provide me food should be making more.
All of this is an aside from the real goal of minimum wage, which is that if you do ANY type of work for anyone, you're important to someone and should be able to support yourself doing that work. If you're not needed, why did the company hire you? I'm tired of this idea that companies are entitled to cheap labor; if your company requires effectively slave labor to exist, then how about we state the truth that your company is failing, not doing well, and maybe should go bankrupt due to mismanagement rather than keeping it chugging on the backs of the poor?
Clue #3: when you price human labor too high, automation becomes more attractive. There are already machines that can effectively replace fast-food cashiers, and are cheaper to operate and maintain than $15/hr people. There are also machines coming online that can operate the back-end of a fast food joint as well, which will also just come under the wire as being cheaper (but would come out ahead by being reliable, on-time, etc.)
That is going to happen no matter what because of corporate greed to always maximize profit. Even if we paid people $1/hr, at some point people would need to eat and sleep while a machine could work all night long straight, cranking out more widgets. We can't compete with technology.
What we instead need to do is have real discussion on what the future economy looks like when jobs are phased out by robo
If only your parents had come to the same conclusion before you were born. Are you the kind of asshole who bitches about handicapped people because they get closer parking spots and bigger bathroom stalls or get to sit in a wheelchair all day while you're using your legs like a sucker?
Sounds like what everybody with a job is entitled to here in Norway
And how does wanting companies to do this kind of compensation for personal choices reconcile with the whole get out of my business vibe these days?
When someone says, "Get out of my business", you know they don't mean, "Don't give me stuff."
Kind of like how we want government to give us roads, schools, defense, health care subsidies, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, but government is teh evil because taxes, the War on Drugs, and Snowden.
As a married person who has decided not to have kids:
I agree that a generic paid leave program would be fantastic, and I would probably jump on that opportunity. But I personally don't feel like maternity/paternity leave is unfair, because I will already be saving hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next ~20 years that would otherwise end up going to my kids. Larger house, schooling, clothes, food, tutoring, first car, family vacations, college tuition, etc. People with kids have a LOT more expenses than people without kids. I don't need the same tax breaks or paid time off because I don't have the same financial responsibilities or time commitments.
[Children obtained during employment outside of physical or surgically assisted birth are not elligbile wth the exception of adoption while employed. Children born , obtained or adopted while not employed at Neflix are ineligible.] .
(next logical step)
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, (I'm actually a parent), but other than the general societal benefit of paternal/maternal leave, why should parents get it and NON parents not get similar compensation?
Netflix has unlimited vacation time available. See http://mashable.com/2012/04/13... What is your question about?
No one handicapped chose to be that way.
Everyone who has a child chose it*. Even if they were using birth control, they damned well knew the consequences if it didn't work.
*barring rape of course.
Wish I had mod points here. I get really surpised about the arguments regarding "what about single people and where's their compensation"? It's quite simple, getting kids is paramount to keeping the society alive. You don't pay taxes for yourself, you pay taxes to benefit the society around you. It's not about YOU, it's about US (which you are a part of). Our duty in life is to work and pay taxes; this keeps civilization alive. Happy people are more productive, and have a higher chance of making babies, so having a content population is important. Sometimes, doing "the right thing" (i.e. procreating) can be difficult, so it's important with nationwide incentives and subsidies. Making these things up to whomever is a person's employer is unwise, since they don't have the long term perspective needed (they will most likely not reap the benefit of your child's labor, and they have no guarantee you'll work for them for the rest of your life). You also risk increasing social inequality for no good reason, potentially helping to destabilize the society.
Making sure the country is working well should not be the responsibility of a for-profit company; it's the job of the government. Extra perks are nice, but once the "perks" amount to vital necessities like health care, vacation and basic maternity leave it would seem to me like a somewhat unhealthy power balance. Being raised in a social democracy makes me biased I guess, but I can't for the life of me understand why the U.S government isn't more involved in creating laws and making policies to ensure a general minimum of security for its workers? I would really love to hear any proper arguments against it from Real Americans(tm), since what we're fed with over here in Europe is general "US is evil and crazy" news/propaganda, making it difficult to know what's fact about your country and what isn't.
"My wife and I aren't sick, but Chuck is. If I work at $company I'm now stuck paying for Chuck's medical bills, via insurance premiums."
"My wife and I don't exercise at the office gym, but Chuck does. If I work at $company I'm now stuck picking up Chuck's work load while he exercises."
"My wife and I bike to work, but Chuck drives. If I work at $company I'm now stuck paying for a parking lot for Chuck, via decreased salary because they had to budget for it."
Sheesh.
I am not a sig.
I can give you a *huge* reason why non-American countries get "more for their taxes" in benefits: they push the costs of their defense onto the USA.
The USA does sometimes get involved in unnecessary wars, but we also do the policing of the world that other countries will not to keep chaos from breaking out. We patrol the seas around major shipping lanes with our Navy (see Persian Gulf oil tanker shipping for one example) and generally are the ones who keep ambitious totalitarian states somewhat contained.
To do all this, Americans pay for it with their taxes. Last year's Federal budget (2014) puts Defense spending (this includes Veterans' benefits) at almost 20% of the total budget. Australia, in contrast, only spends *a third of that* -- 7.1% -- of its national budget on Defense. Its Kiwi little brothers next door spend less than half that! ( Figures taken from http://visualeconomics.creditloan.com/how-countries-spend-their-money/ )
One can argue that the USA could trim back its Defense spending, and I am not here to argue that, but the truth is that the USA has shouldered the burden of defense for free countries for a very, very long time -- other countries will not pony up, preferring to free-ride and spend the difference on themselves. I can't say I blame them for doing so...
Traditionally the view was that child-bearing was an overall benefit to society, therefore everyone should contribute to the welfare of children, if not directly, then indirectly by enabling the parents to do so.
Now, you can agree or disagree with that thinking, but there should be a dialogue about why one does or does not support parent leave and that means spelling out what the purpose of it is.
Yeah it's BS and parents use all kinds of BS to justify taking childfree people's money and forcing them to pick up their slack. So if they really think this is a great policy, how about just make THE OTHER PEOPLE WITH CHILDREN who work there chip in to pay for it.
I would add to your awesome post that maternity/paternity leave compensation encourages the right people to be having kids — that is, those with the means to raise children comfortably, who are most likely to make them feel wanted and to be able to fill their lives with education and enrichment. We as a society want people to be choosing to have kids when they are best able to provide for them, which makes incentives like this even more sensible.
I'm sure a calculation was done to look at the odds of any of their technical staff getting someone pregnant where the net result was approaching infinity making the announcement of unlimited paternal time off somewhat more reasonable...
So, did you email slashdot to make your case for ending the AC? You were just given email addresses to contact directly to plead your case. If you're so certain that people will agree with you, then get your friend to email them as well in support of your call for changing from the nearly-20-year-old-M.O; perhaps that will help too.
Or you could use your free time - which you clearly have plenty of considering how frequently you post here - to go build your own site. If you think this site is awful, build something better and reap the rewards. Perhaps you haven't noticed before, but this site is not a democracy. On the other hand, there is nothing stopping you from starting a site of your own either.