Microsoft Will Require Business Partners To Offer Paid Parental Leave (washingtonpost.com)

Microsoft has unveiled a new paid parental leave policy on Thursday that will affect the more than 1,000 firms it does business with across the U.S. An anonymous reader shares the report from the Washington Post: Technology giants in the United States offer some of the country's most generous employee benefits, but the workers who mow the lawns or serve lunch in the company cafeteria -- jobs that are often staffed by outside firms -- tend to get far smaller packages. Microsoft announced a new policy Thursday that it hopes will shrink that gap, pledging it will ink contracts only with service providers who give their employees 12 weeks of paid family leave. Per the requirement, mothers and fathers who perform work for Microsoft -- biological and adoptive -- must receive 12 weeks of leave at two-thirds of their wages or up to $1,000 weekly. The announcement comes as Washington state, where the company is based, prepares to introduce paid family leave for workers, the fifth state to do so. Microsoft currently offers its direct employees 12 weeks of paid family leave at full pay, and birth mothers receive an additional eight paid weeks for physical recovery.

Comments

Re:additional eight paid weeks for physical recove

[Ol Olsoc]

I'm curious about the eight additional weeks for physical recovery. I can certainly picture it taking eight weeks to recover physically, at least in some cases with more complicated births, but that's not what we're talking about here. Maybe the first twelve weeks weren't set aside for physical recovery, but that's what happens anyway during that period. So now we're up to twenty weeks, and that's a long time.

And don't forget that next on the docket is paid Menstrual leave. https://www.self.com/story/pai... .

I'm not against time off for mothers. It's nice to have some time at home with the baby, and in some cases after a C-Section it really make sense.

But for the fathers? That's 3 months for exactly what? Moral support?

So here we have a person getting 3 months off of every year that she decides to have a child, and then an extra 12 days of leave every year that she doesn't.

Folks, we really need to look at the reality of the situation. This sort of thing tends to be well meaning, but eventually backfires. So you have a young woman of childbearing age and a young man interviewing for the same job. They are both similarly qualified. By law, you cannot ask her many questions. I had a big list of verboten questions, and often had to ride herd over a co-worker who tried to sneak them in.

Who are you going to hire?

It is actually an important question, especially for demanding positions that require a lot of training. If, as one of the women where I worked had several children over a short period of time, her replacements were putting in more time than she was for several years. Side note - every time she came back to work at her guaranteed job, another woman - the replacement - lost her job.

I wonder though if Microsoft's demand includes paid maternity leave for the replacement workers filling in while the first worker is out on maternity leave.

But back to that question of how much time off is to be expected, it will come into question, because there will be a tendency to hire the person who is going to cost your company less. Single men will have a big advantage.

another note: several women candidate interviewees would quickly blurt out their marital status, and that they didn't intend to have children or already did, so that they could sidestep the issue of our not being allowed to ask anything of the sort. Interestingly enough, they tended to be more qualified and worked out well when hired. Seems like the understood that workplace omertà wasn't working in their favor. third note. I always tried to keep the office at 50:50 regarding gender.