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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.
It's the standard amount of time in Canada. There is a regular marternity leave as well as a parental leave which can be divied up between the parents as they see fit. The total time adds up to a year of leave.
So, more or less how it is for everyone here in Norway.
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.
Ask Sweden. This is pretty much the legal minimum there.
This sounds like it would be the case, but in this instance there is no evidence to support it. Comapnies that have ehnacted longer term maternity and paternity leave have reported that they have had little to no disruption in the work force. This is probably because it generally isn't a surprise when the baby is born as you generally have at least a couple months notice to train a replacement for the duration of the leave.
Also as the GP pointed out many other civilized countries offer vastly more leave, and it hasn't overly detracted from worker productivity. The average German worker is still light years ahead of the competition in productivity. And this is the country that MANDATES time off before and after childbirth under the Mutterschutzgesetz, Maternity Protection Act of 1968.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
If it's so hard to do, why are we the only western country that doesn't provide any guaranteed paid maternity/paternity leave AT ALL? There are small companies in Europe, and if it's available for both men AND women then that mitigates the hiring bias you are concerned about. There is already some hiring bias against women based on the possibility that they may become pregnant; I don't think this would make that any worse. Pregnant women are also a protected class for the purposes of hiring/firing decisions.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Other than that, if the government mandates employers pay for such long leaves, it will hugely penalize small companies, and prospective employment of women.
Yeah that's why small businesses don't exist in the scandinavias, or canada, or basically everywhere else in the entire fucking world where they have not only universal healthcare of some form but also meaningful parental leave.
Also giving fathers paternity leave equal to a mother's maternity leave, and making sure they take it, is in fact the only way to not affect women's employment any.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
The reason many think generous (or even just minimal) maternity/paternity leave is a bad thing is that some folks are solely focused on businesses. The employees working for the businesses are viewed as cogs in the machine whose only purpose is to churn out more profits. Any time off means that the cogs aren't functioning during that time which could mean the overall machine might not churn out quite as much profits. This is, in their view, a bad thing so any time off for the cogs is viewed negatively.
This doesn't just extend to maternity/paternity leave, you see this attitude in companies where taking ANY time off is viewed as bad or where you can take time off but you'd better bring your laptop and phone with you so you can answer e-mails while on vacation. This also gets perverted into the "death march" at some software companies where the cogs... I mean employees are worked 80 hour days to get a product out. The management figures that if the cogs get burnt out from overuse, they can just ditch them and replace them with new ones. They might even be able to replace them for ones that will work for less money and complain less about being overworked.
Keep spinning, cogs. You've got a profit to generate!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
...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.
I'd like to add on to this. The logical conclusion of GP's post is that everyone should retire once they have kids. Or, only incompetent people should breed, so that "good" employees never have to take any time off for children's sake.
Did I enter a Dilbert strip somewhere along the line here, or am I misunderstanding GP's point?
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
We've had that for years where I work. Just tell the boss you knocked up his daughter.
Have gnu, will travel.
Dear Douche,
Anybody working full time (or near full time) should be able to afford to live out of abject poverty without government assistance. What about the $4000+ an hour the CEO of said burger flippery makes? No outrage there, eh? Also, $15 an hour shouldn't be a benefit...more like a 'living wage'.
Yet, as someone who moved from Australia (a place with much more generous vacation, parental leave, healthcare etc. benefits) to the US, after you factor in everything (Federal income tax, State income tax, Medicare, Social Security...), my overall tax burden per year on the same income in the two countries is identical almost down to the dollar. But I can tell you I get sweet FA for my tax dollars here, by comparison. I even pay into Social Security which I will likely never qualify to receive (since it requires being a citizen or LPR and to have worked at least a certain number of years in the US).
So I haven't personally experienced "much lower taxes" here in the US. Overall taxes are definitely lower than many European nations, for sure. But not lower than quite a few other OECD nations that still have a bigger welfare state than you guys. My theory is that it comes from the inefficiency of having to administer tax at all these different levels, whereas in Australia the only mandatory deduction from your pay is basically the Federal income tax ... that's it.
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 fully support your eugenics program.
Ummm, what he was talking about isn't eugenics.
I've never seen an expectation of the parents to be financially responsible anywhere as being remotely called eugenics.
That would be more like family focused economic policy. Which sounds like something we'd see on the 700 Club.
He was implying that a person should have enough liquid assets on hand so that they do not need to be paid to take a leave of absence. He's suggesting that this program at Netflix would encourage riffraff to reproduce. He was indicating that those who are independently wealthy are somehow more worthy of passing on their genetic heritage. He wants to criminalize reproduction amongst the poor. That sounds like a eugenics program to me. He took it to a much greater extreme than "Hey you really should try to avoid having more children than you can afford."
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.
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.
---Shouldn't be, but is. Reality sucks. We have people in their adult years working fast food. It is a fantasy that only teens should be 'flipping burgers'.
Clue #2: these jobs usually require little-to-no skill, and consequently do not bear the value of $15/hr at current inflation/valuation.
---Neither does working at a factory in many cases, but that seemed to be deemed 'middle class worthy' in the 60s-70s where a single worker could support an entire family. What you're saying is 'you deserve to be destitute, you unskilled scum'.
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.) /hr would hasten that. All the more reason to support things like a basic income now (perhaps with some civil service requirement), since the mass unemployment problem is only going to get worse.
---Can't argue with that. Automation is coming, regardless of where the minimum wage is. No doubt that raising it to $15
Clue #4: sucks to say it, but no one owes you a living -anything, let alone a "living wage" (whatever that means). Safety nets and charity are for those unable to help themselves, and obviously for those among us in temporary desperate situations, but that's it. Meanwhile, if you are able-bodied and not mentally defective, then it is up to you to better yourself by any legal means possible.
---Ah yes, the 'brutalist' libertarian view. I guess that's where we differ. I'm for treating all people with respect, and providing a safe place to live/eat/prosper. Not 'too bad, so sad, fuck off.' Ideally, regardless of borders, but that's more of a long term thing. You seem to still think that if you're 'able bodied' there is good work available, and you're just lazy if you don't grab it. I'd consider that pretty naive given the population explosion the world has experienced in the past 50 years alone.
Where/how do we pay for all of this idealism? It's pretty obvious that money is essentially made up and totally fiat. It's also pretty obvious that a tiny tiny percentage of people hoard a crazy-huge sum of that money. Arguably, keeping it out of circulation avoids hyperinflation and all that. Considering that over 70% of our economy is consumer-driven, wouldn't giving those consumers more money to...consume with...the economy would benefit immensely? I think such benefits would far outweigh any inflationary risks, but I'm no economist.
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
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