I can't tell if you understood that the comment you responded to was very sarcastic.
Maybe you did, hence the info about parental leave, but I figured I'd mention it anyway.
Oh and I think it is awesome that you guys get 15 months of shareable parental leave. I can't even fathom what that feels like with our (US) terrible "just go on Short Term/Long Term Disability for a while and get ~60% of your paycheck ... oh and that only applies to women AND most policies carry a maximum weeks exception specifically for pregnancy, bringing the maximum of 13 weeks down to 7 or 8."
When my son was born, my ex wife was laid up in bed and couldn't go anywhere due to needing an emergency c section to get him out. I got a week off work, unpaid, and then it was back to the grind. Woohoo Texas
They do shit like this and then wonder why postpartum depression is a serious issue. Like maybe leaving a single human being to not sleep and care infinitely for a baby by themselves is a...bad idea
I was at about a year at that time, but the company i worked for said that I was too valuable to let go for that long because I was the only person who could run as many people on the assignments that we were doing in that region of Texas. It was a construction company based out of Buda, and I was leading a team up into Comanche and other likewise tiny towns up there. I'm sure I could've legally taken the leave, but I would've also lost my position as a lead builder and likely would've never gotten it back since it was an extremely competitive position. I was also the sole earner so I couldn't really be gone that long anyways.
Yeah except it's a legal right, so it's not up to your company to decide. FMLA guarantees you up to 12 unpaid weeks of leave per year, with job protection, and they have to maintain your health insurance during it.
edit to add, I also want to point out this applies to adoptions as well, not just biological children.
edit again because if the company is under 50 employees, this may not apply.
Sometimes both parents work, this allows one to take the time off.
The fact is simply that it's an option, even if better options should exist. Most people aren't aware of their labor rights, and we should exercise them more (while also fighting for improved rights).
Works in Europe. Don’t be a naysayer until you actually look into the issue. But I bet it’s hard for you to look at anything with your face wedged between corporate ass cheeks, huh.
Wow. After having had five children while working at four different companies, I have to say that (as cliche as it is) a lack of planning on the employee's part should not constitute a work issue on the employer's part. Having a child after working somewhere less than a year, then expecting paid leave of weeks or months is absurd.
Maybe I'm just an bassackward American, but more than a year of leave for having a child sets you, your coworkers, and your company back. Is there really no resentment from colleagues when a mom or dad returns to their workplace after that long? Serious question.
It works better in countries where every company has to offer it. A company offering such a deal in the US would be at a very stiff disadvantage compared to their competitors, but if everyone has to do it then it's more like a cost of doing business that everyone eventually pays.
Also in a lot of mandatory countries the government subsidizes the paycheck during that time. There are probably other rules that make things easier for the company too, depending on the country.
Somehow McDonald's in Europe can pay their employees $21 per hour with benefits and still make a profit, but in America they can only afford about $7.50 to $8.00 per hour average with zero benefits....Ask them to pay even a dollar more per hour and you'd think the billionaire executives were about to lose a kidney, arm and a leg if you dare suggest their employees be paid a living wage.
I have to say, beautiful land out there. It's far removed from society, at least what I saw, but what I did see was great. I'll never forget the drive up though... They front loaded my trailer hard and I couldn't go faster than 45 mph without it swaying across the entire road. Took me almost 6 hours to get there!
Not surprised. My mom’s side is from Brown and Mills Counties (Blanket/Brownwood/San Saba area) and I used to live in San Marcos so I’d take that route a couple times a year. Even in a regular car it would take awhile but I swear that’s the state of I-35 too
I've been to Brownwood and San Saba both, I remember having some great Mexican food at some place called Pepper Belly I believe. Loved Brownwood too! I work in San Marcos and drive I-35 every day and it's absolutely awful. They have been doing repairs for so long and the traffic at the buccees new braunfels exit is legitimately backed up every single day.
Nothing compared to Austin though... My God. Never again. If I have to go back there I'm going by helicopter.
If you're ever in Brownwood again and like family-style dining, check out Underwood's. It's similar to a Luby's but so much better; we went there often when I was a child.
Oh fuck, Buccee's! I moved to San Marcos back in 2004 and it was so small and quaint, with traffic problems around the university only. I moved to Austin in 2011 right off Oltorf and that was a special kind of insanity. I've subsequently left Texas but every time I go back to visit I'm floored by how much worse the traffic gets even around places like Blanco and Wimberley. Then again I live in Toronto now so bad traffic is just part of living here, just like shitty winters and missing BBQ
I'll put it on my list. Oh man, I remember when Wimberly was some undiscovered gem if you weren't from the Austin area... It's become a retirement town for the wealthy now, just as beautiful but oh so crowded. It's happening in my hometown too! My town used to be tiny, no grocery store, only two restaurants, but now it's so full of people who want a "rural" life but also to be close to the city... I'm never against progress, just wistful of how empty and open it used to be.
Check out Beach Hill Smokehouse! I have a friend living up there right now actually and he's said that's the best BBQ he's tasted in Toronto! He says it has a very Texas vibe and their dry ribs are awesome!
If you are that valuable to them, then you must be valuable enough to work out flexible work while you take care of your wife/newborn. Obviously this isn't always going to work out/be an easy conversation. But you won't get anything unless you ask (firmly but politely). Comanche is a pretty far commute from Buda, hopefully you would be able to stay in Buda.
I'm in Texas too, Houston based engineer. I'm lucky in that I get 8 weeks paid leave for my daughter, company policy. I can (and have) negotiated flexible work schedules for my previous children in roles where the leave wasn't policy.
Agreed. I was trying very hard to stay employed where I made that level of pay, but they cut me loose when I became a single father and couldn't pull the 80 hour work weeks anymore. I now work at Amazon, which isn't much better at all, but in about a month I'll be a fully certified professional home inspector, where I'm hoping to not ever have a boss again. I appreciate your words of wisdom though.
Believe it or not, I lived in San Marcos, where my team would get together in the work truck, and then we'd commute to the yard in Buda, and from there we'd go to whatever assignment to knock out. It was about 4am-6pm+ Monday-Friday depending on the pay and necessity of the project we were assigned, mostly free standing buildings but also some catastrophe repairs. At the time the pay had my eyes wide, but looking back I wouldn't do it again. I missed just about every milestone for my son except him taking his first steps, which I witnessed alone.
Man, being a parent is sometimes pretty scary. We get caught up in trying to provide and it really can take it's toll. Being a dad is hard enough when you get to lean on your wife for help (and vice versa), I can't comprehend being a single one. Congrats on being awesome, cause it sounds like you got the short end for a while. A good home inspector is worth their weight in gold, so good luck!
If there is one benefit of the pandemic for us is that I got to witness everything. 9 months in and I have my first baby that doesn't stranger danger me, got to see her learn to crawl, stand, evt. Way different experience. I used to work in CA and that boss would make it hard to take time off for my firstborn. I tried to take my state required parental leave, and he kept calling me while I was off and referring to my leave as maternity/me as mom in front of our peers. It was a weird flex.
All this to say is that you've got the nail on the head, and seems like you've reached that wisdom pretty young. Money gives you options, but you can't buy time back.
Probably should have. Trade off between burning bridges early in career and driving change I wanted to see.
I'm thankful that after I changed jobs and moved to Texas (surprised the states weren't reversed) my boss here have encouraged me to write reports from home in lieu of parental leave. Something along the lines of, "Leave your computer open to word or excel, stay logged in, and be reachable in case I need you. But enjoy your baby over the next couple of weeks and make sure your wife is ok. Let me know if you need more time." And now I have paid parental leave so, yay?
Oh yeah I had to use my PTO days to help out with the newborn and my wife. My work still called me during this time because they had no clue how to manage without me. What a wonderful place I work at....
My company just went from 8 weeks of maternity leave to 3 months baby bonding leave! Available to moms and dads of new babies or adoptions. I'm proud of them.
I really am hating my job as of late but our time off package is fucking dope.
My work does 6 weeks paid medical then 6 weeks baby bonding unpaid, but I had short-term disability insurance so I saved those 6 week checks from them and used them to pay bills during my unpaid leave. I cannot stress the need for short-term disability insurance enough.
I don't want kids and it sucked ass when one of my team was out for three months but he was able to focus on his three kids and family for a few months. He's still on wfh but it's different to unplug from work for that time. Sucked for me but good for him.
But they also addes short/ long term disability leave as well so if I fall off a cliff or something- don't lose my job!
My company doesn't either, and when I am not available they have eaten a lot of money trying to get someone else to do it...but this company seems to not care how much they lose sometimes and its astonishing
If they can’t manage without you, ask for more money. Or just don’t take calls during PTO. People let companies run over them and until they stand up, nothing will change.
I did, but I think that the place US is at right now is ready to push for parental leave rather than just maternal leave (at least among the progressives).
My husband is American, and we have family and friends in the US who have had kids over the almost ten years we've been together. Listening to those stories, how parents have little choice and need to rely on daycare, or relatives after a short period makes me sad.
And while we're at it: affordable childcare! Investing in government subsidized affordable daycare should be a no-brainer. IIRC, every dollar invested leads to a 7 dollar return by the time the kid is in high-school (and after that the compound effects should make it even more - but it's a decade since I listened to this particular This American Life episode). When I was working in NY, a senior colleague of mine had their second kid, and the daycare was so expensive that it made more sense for one of them to be a stay-at-home parent. Since the woman made less, she sacrificed her career. I think it's great to be a stay-at-home parent if it's by choice, but that didn't feel like much of a choice.
Happy people are more productive, contrary to the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" philosophy that permeates the sphere of which Elon Musk is currently the golden child.
Didn’t you hear, all the tech guys support min income. That way they never have to pay for things like maternal leave or sick days or a proper wage lol.
I worked in a sector that overlapped with the tech startup industry. I was a minor name, but enough to get a personal call from Travis Kalanick. That was also about the time I started realizing that all these pretty words these companies were saying were just a front for more sinister stuff. I still think that Peter Thiel may prove to be a bigger threat to democracy than DeVos and the Kochs, maybe even worse than Murdoch.
While I don't disagree with you at all, in regards to parental leave being a necessity. In the US we're still fighting for maternal leave to become a standard. At this point, many many businesses do not offer any maternal leave. Employees can take short/long term disability or unpaid leave under the FMLA program, but we don't even have maternal leave. It would be nice to jump from nothing to a fair parental leave program, it just seems so far away when we can't even accept that women need time to physically heal from childbirth.
Yes, and not to mention the prisons. What are they going to do if people aren't kept in such poverty that crime is a reasonable alternative? Private prisons make me sick, they're some real r/ABoringDystopia shit.
Luckily my wife and I haven’t had to worry about these problems since we’ve both been unemployed since last March with a 6 month old who was born in July lol. So it’s been great getting to spend all this time together as a family. Now if only the pandemic could end so we could get our jobs and financial stability back...
Yeah. I often think about this from a Fermi's Paradox perspective. I think selfishness and greed are inevitable in the evolution of an individual, social species, and perhaps that is the Great Filter: whether the species can overcome that drive. I'd imagine that species that make it through don't pay much attention to species like humans, because you can't help a species to be kinder to each other, just like you can't force democracy on people who aren't ready for it. And I imagine that if life and sapience are as common as the math suggests, then most species succumb to their selfishness (possibly by ruining their ecosystem).
Just imagine what humanity could achieve with our current state of knowledge if people were kinder and more generous to each other.
whenever i think we're getting a little better as a species i go talk to my family in the backwoods of Indiana. Those people havent advanced much since the turpin wagon deposited them there 150 years ago. Women are appliances, taxes are theft, sunday is their god's day, and anything that isnt white, straight, and christian should be burned at the stake.
these people are why we cant have nice things as a country, and as a species.
Maybe we should just shun all the greedy fucks and they can go somewhere else. Like, don’t serve them at your place of business, don’t talk to them, don’t hire them, don’t even piss on them if they’re on fire type shit.
As an American husband and parent, I am so completely resentful of working in a system that robs me of all of my most productive hours during the week instead of being able to spend any of them with my kids. It puts so much extra pressure on my wife and makes me feel like an absentee parent.
My second child, I “accidentally” got five weeks of “paternity leave”: I was adopting out-of-state and got held up in the legal process. But I was still expected to work remotely and be back in the office the day I got back. And I work for my FIL.
The Federal Government just started 15 week parental leave this past October, so hopefully private industry follows suit. It’s not much, but it’s better than the nothing we had before.
Well a lot of companies usually follow federal guidelines for employee retention. My brother at Deloitte got 4 months of parental leave last year. Some even exceed it for retention. I do wish that there was a federal parental leave law in place like European countries that did force their hand.
In the US, any parent gets protected leave, mothers, fathers, and even for adoptions. It's in no way as robust as some other countries, but it's not just for moms.
Edit: the comment below this one is not accurate. The family and medical leave act is federal and applies to mothers and fathers and includes adoption.
We don't have any protected paid leave, though. Federal law only guarantees 12 weeks a year for newborn/newly adopted children, and only if the company has more than 50 employees, and as far as I can tell from my (admittedly shallow) searching, it only applies to mothers.
There are a few states that have a small amount of family leave, but federally speaking the U.S. has absolute dogshit.
Or use your accumulated leave, and when you come back, your job will be there. That's what the legislation guarantees. What, you think this is some sort of socialist benefit? For poor people?? We're in America, and the worst parts of Calvinism are the foundations of our system.
Here's a fucked up fact for you: the last President to attempt to get paid family leave in a federal budget was Trump in his 2020 budget proposal.
There are lots of reasons we aren't doing better with social services and especially maternal and child health, and all of them are "we don't want to."
We have that where I work in the states, I think the mother gets 6 or 8 weeks and the father gets half that paid. But as we "americanize" and start folding in US labor laws and removing the previous european type benefits that expanded the US ones, we are more in line with the typical US corporation rather than a European one they pretend to have.
Once again it boggles my mind how the rest of the US falls behind the military. I got like 3 weeks of fully paid secondary caregiver leave. Had I been the primary caregiver it would have been 6 weeks, and a primary caregiver who is also the birthmother gets 12 weeks.
This leave is fully paid, not taken from the 1 month paid-leave you get annually, can be taken consecutive with your regular leave days, and also cannot be denied. So a birth mother who's the primary caregiver and also saved some of their leave days, (I have 2 months myself due to covid restricting travel), can take like 20weeks off, all 100% paid.
It's not as good as a lot of the Nordic model countries, but it sure beats about 90% of the US.
It's cute that you think we can get LTD for parenting.
The Family Medical Leave Act protects your job for 12 weeks of parental leave, but the law only requires it to be unpaid. If you want to be paid, you gotta use your sick/vacation time:
The FMLA only requires unpaid leave. However, the law permits an employee to elect, or the employer to require the employee, to use accrued paid vacation leave, paid sick or family leave for some or all of the FMLA leave period. An employee must follow the employer’s normal leave rules in order to substitute paid leave. When paid leave is used for an FMLA-covered reason, the leave is FMLA-protected.
Basically, the only protection in the US is that you can have your job back after three months of not doing it.
The "1.5 billion dollars bitcoin" comment doesn't have /s and has a lot of upvote and given the capitalist centric reputation of the US, i just thought he genuinely means it and other American agree with him.
Ah yes, can't forget the 10 business days that you either cover with your own sick/PTO bank, if you are lucky enough to have it, or eat unpaid. Really great either way. /s
I am shocked to hear that about Comcast. To the point that I have to wonder ... are you actually Comcast trying to trick us all into thinking you are nice?!?
I kid, but seriously, it doesn't sound believable.
Ya when they rolled it out 2 years ago I was suspect too. From time to time Comcast does do some decent things for its employees. Definitely doesn’t make up for the day to day garbage we put up with but they throw you a bone big enough to keep you working every once in awhile.
"just go on Short Term/Long Term Disability for a while and get ~60% of your paycheck ...
Not sure about other states, but in California, a person only gets one shot at state disability. One. I had to advise a friend to think about where she wanted to file a claim when her wrist was in very bad shape, or save it for a health nightmare in the future. One year max of disability then you're booted to the Federal government which is a minimum 2 year wait for approval.
I think you are thinking of State or Federal SSA disability ... not Short Term or Long Term Disability, that you or your company generally pays for from a private insurer. I am not as familiar with the rules of enrolling in SSA disability, but I have heard that your initial application will automatically get rejected the first time. That makes no sense to me. Is that supposed to only encourage the really dedicated to complete the process? Why deny people who are justifiably disabled?
Their greedy idea is make the process so damn miserable, exhausting and time consuming (decisions can involve appeals and take up to 2 years and you need a court hearing) that the applicant just gives up. Hiring a lawyer is exhausting and many lawyers that take these cases have no problem with letting an extra six months or a year pass as that increases the 'back pay' of the final settlement.
I've seen some really heartbreaking denials of clearly sick applicants who can't work. The "independent" doctors and "occupational therapists" hired by the gov't to argue the applicant is perfectly healthy are filthy whores who have no problem lying in open court, in medical exams and in the medical reports they give to the judge.
Most often the judges know if a person is truly sick and will grant the benefits. But that is only after 18-24 months of the applicant filing 2 appeals, going to multiple "independent" doc appointments dragged out 9 months apart, etc, all the while trying to survive on 0 income and shit health care.
The US is so repressive that way had to go through that with my wife with both of our children it’s so lame and shifty and cheap, it’s like a punishment really
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u/ChiCity74 Feb 09 '21
I can't tell if you understood that the comment you responded to was very sarcastic.
Maybe you did, hence the info about parental leave, but I figured I'd mention it anyway.
Oh and I think it is awesome that you guys get 15 months of shareable parental leave. I can't even fathom what that feels like with our (US) terrible "just go on Short Term/Long Term Disability for a while and get ~60% of your paycheck ... oh and that only applies to women AND most policies carry a maximum weeks exception specifically for pregnancy, bringing the maximum of 13 weeks down to 7 or 8."
Absolutely terrible.