Posted on 05/26/2015 9:13:16 AM PDT by reaganaut1
In Chile, a law requires employers to provide working mothers with child care. One result? Women are paid less.
In Spain, a policy to give parents of young children the right to work part-time has led to a decline in full-time, stable jobs available to all women — even those who are not mothers.
Elsewhere in Europe, generous maternity leaves have meant that women are much less likely than men to become managers or achieve other high-powered positions at work.
Family-friendly policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and go a long way toward making it possible for women with children to remain in the work force. But these policies often have unintended consequences.
They can end up discouraging employers from hiring women in the first place, because they fear women will leave for long periods or use expensive benefits. “For employers, it becomes much easier to justify discrimination,” said Sarah Jane Glynn, director of women’s economic policy at the Center for American Progress.
Unlike many countries, the United States has few federal policies for working parents. One is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which provides workers at companies of a certain size with 12 weeks of unpaid leave.
Women are 5 percent more likely to remain employed but 8 percent less likely to get promotions than they were before it became law, according to an unpublished new study by Mallika Thomas, who will be an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. She attributed this partly to companies that don’t take a chance on investing in the careers of women who might leave. “The problem ends up being that all women, even those who do not anticipate having children or cutting back in hours, may be penalized,” she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Next up. “Should a certain percentage of young women have to undergo sterilization in order that all women can achieve “true equality” with men? After all if family friendly policies are holding back some women obviously too many women are stilling deciding to be moms. Shame on them for not putting the Sisterhood first.
Lets pass ObamaCare so that all full time employees will get medical coverage. Oh? That resulted in fewer full time jobs and more part time jobs?
Oh Well.
Lets raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour to make things more fair for the poor. Oh? That resulted in fewer jobs?
Oh Well.
For many decades I’ve been in a fast paced business with lots of key employees (highly paid, some 6 figures). It hurts everything when one of those key people are gone for extended periods. I hire a lot of women, but no more for key positions. I have a couple who have had kids (2 each) over the last few years. One is always taking time to tend to her kids. This is a real business killer.
Well, then, after the employers are mandated to provide certain benefits to certain people,
they’ll just have to be mandated to hire and pay those people as if those benefits weren’t required.
How do you fix consequences of a bad law, if you’re a lefty?
You outlaw the consequences.
It’s not just “family friendly”. Back in 1966 my parents were trying to rent out our house before we moved to Seattle. One night they went out and told me (I was in 6th grade) that if anyone called on the house that sounded black I was to tell them it was already rented.
This really concerned me and the next day I asked my dad why they told me that. Here is his response:
If we rent to white people that turn out to be deadbeats, we can easily evict them. If we rent to blacks that are deadbeats it’s much more difficult to evict them because of the new laws protecting them.
“For employers politicians, it becomes much easier to justify discrimination charges,”
Make it worse, get credit for trying to make it better- rinse, repeat...
In my workplace, employees with children are contantly taking time off for kids, much of which is never accounted for. As an example, coming in 1-2 hours lare (snow days etc) or leaving 1-2 hours early (games, sickness, doctors visits, etc).
I have no problem with this IF it is recorded towdards PTO, but these shortened days never are. So people with no kids or empty nesters are quite simply putting in more hours per week - I’d be aware of this if you are hiring to a productive workforce.
I hope you are very careful about what you are doing, and I assume you are if the salaries are in that range. Just sayin’.
An employee has to earn his/her total compensation package, no matter what its composition, or he/she is worthless to his/her employer.
I’m 24 and expecting my sixth baby in September. This is what I wanted to do with my life and it would be totally unreasonable to expect an employer to shoulder the burden of my choice of lifestyle.
Granted I’m an extreme example but the point is that I made a CHOICE, right?
The left prattles on and on about a woman’s right to choose but then they expect the whole world to subsidize that choice with free condoms, free abortions, free health care, free child care, and ridiculous paid leave policies.
Imagine MY employer having to have to keep me on the payroll over the past six years while I was pregnant most of the time? How would that be a responsible policy for the employer? What about their profits and their other employees? What about their customers who’d be missing me pretty much most of every year?
Bottom line here: Men and women are NOT equal!
And if the left wants to say that we are then women should not have more rights in the workplace (or anywhere else) than men.
You are not far from the truth. Expect to see *extreme* scrutiny, of the IRS and other types, of any business that doesn’t have pretty equal percentages of male and female at each level of pay and power.
Aww. “Backfire” = not achieve the Marxist dream of “abolition of the family”.
Thanks for sharing your story. You are right that men and women are not the same. I heard someone say that men and women are complementary, in that, they fill different roles in the family. Both roles are important. Your role as a.mother is very important.
We have heard for decades that the business world should be more family friendly. We have done a lot in that area, but, there are still many areas which may never achieve numerical equality.
Certain facts just cannot be ignored. Among those facts are that females are the ones who bear children. And that children demand a great deal of time and action from parents. And this time and attention is going to come st the expense of a professional career for many.
This is one reason why over 62s are preferred in hiring and retention. They get Medicare, so no Obamacare penalty. Too old to have kids and maternity leave, and if health issues are a problem, they retire instead of taking maternity leave.
The attitude now a day's isn't the Owners or Entrepreneur rights. Is that Socialist thinking of "What can they be forced to do for me."
The Government makes Employers do these things, people who benefit from them vote for the Government People. Much Larger Business absorb the cost to keep down competition. Everyone wins. Except the average person.
As usual.
Should not the concern the income of the family and not any particular member of it? It is the family that is the basic economic unit, not the individual wage earners. If a family judges that it is better that the husband work full time and the wife either part time or full time at home with the children, who should complain?
Very careful.
The Marxist ideal is to destroy all biological connections and have males and females interchangeable.....the State breeds the “children” and doesn’t allow women to recognize the infant they gave birth to—like in Plato’s Republic-—the utopia (like Marxism) where the woman is nothing but a breeder for the State and the State controls all the ideas that are fed to the child.
Removing mothers from the formative years of children is essential to the destruction of secure bonding essential to create emotionally strong people, people of character. State doesn’t want individuals who are self-reliant and understand Natural Law (have Common Sense from living with their biological mother and father and are expected to master skills in real life situations (that which creates TRUE self-esteem).
The group think factories and removal of children from the Natural family is essential to destroy the Christian Worldview of Individual Natural Rights from God. The State has to form “collective” thinkers (which removes Logic and Reason intentionally and creates emotional puerile people incapable of Virtue ( Virtue is necessary for Freedom and autonomy.)
I had five children, BY CHOICE, but the “system” tried to force me to abandon my children for “true” “productive” (ha ha) “WORK”. The raising of children is the most important “job” in any State ( for the future—as Lenin knew) and the only reason America came into existence was because of the Worldview of people who did NOT conform to State slavery and collective ideology. They believed in Individualism-—which is ONLY learned OUTSIDE of “daycares” (artificial institutions) which only exist to destroy autonomy and “thinking outside the box”.
A Lincoln or Ben Franklin could not have existed in today’s culture. The State would have put their parents in jail and removed the children. The system is ROTTEN and EVIL and UNJUST and UNCONSTITUTIONAL. All Just Systems promote Virtue only, at all times-—not slavery, or vile behaviors/theft/welfare/sodomy.
This “Prussian” Marxist system of mandatory “education” was aptly commented on by G.K.Chesterton (a genius)-—that the only purpose of mandatory education is to destroy the Common Sense of the Common people.
I didn’t get all the way through the article. Did they make the comparison of family-friendly policy results having unintended consequences to the potential unintended consequences of jumping the minimum wage to $15/hour?
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