Combine the two:
Posted on 09/05/2020 12:07:57 PM PDT by Theoria
Pandemic policies at tech companies have created a rift between parents offered more benefits and resentful workers who don’t have children.
When the coronavirus closed schools and child care centers and turned American parenthood into a multitasking nightmare, many tech companies rushed to help their employees. They used their comfortable profit margins to extend workers new benefits, including extra time off for parents to help them care for their children.
It wasn’t long before employees without children started to ask: What about us?
At a recent companywide meeting, Facebook employees repeatedly argued that work policies created in response to Covid-19 “have primarily benefited parents.” At Twitter, a fight erupted on an internal message board after a worker who didn’t have children at home accused another employee, who was taking a leave to care for a child, of not pulling his weight.
When Salesforce announced that it was offering parents six weeks of paid time off, most employees applauded. But one Salesforce manager, who is not permitted to talk publicly about internal matters and therefore asked not to be identified, said two childless employees, reflecting a sentiment voiced at several companies, complained that the policy seemed to put parents’ needs ahead of theirs.
As companies wrestle with how best to support staff during the pandemic, some employees without children say that they feel underappreciated, and that they are being asked to shoulder a heavier workload.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
A brilliant observation.
‘How does that explain the decline of marriage in general — even aside from any considerations for children — in those same societies that provide the most generous “family friendly” policies?’
Who said it did?
‘the breakdown of families from the replacement of family responsibilities by employer and/or government largesse.’
How does employer largesse replace family responsibilities?
Consider two employees in a department at a large corporation. One is a single mother raising two children. The other is a single male or female, same age, no children.
The single mother has her children in daycare. She walks in the door at the office at 9:00 am and leaves at exactly five in order to take care of her children. When there is a critical issue in the office late in the day (key customer needs immediate attention for example), the assignment is always given to the employee without children who usually works late into the evening, cancelling any personal plans, to resolve the issue.
The single mother will not travel overnight. Periodically it is necessary for an employee in the department to travel for 2-3 days to visit factories or customers. The single employee always gets the assignment in order to accommodate the constraints of the single mother.
Both employees do excellent work and are ambitious. The single childless employee produces more because he/she is able to work more hours. Both employees receive excellent performance appraisals.
A promotional opportunity occurs at the company, for which both are fully qualified. The childless employee feels he/she deserves the promotion more because he/she has contributed more to the success of the organization. The single mother understands the company accommodates her schedule, but feels she deserves the promotion because her performance has been excellent and the company’s HR policies champion diversity. HR is recommending the job be given to the single mother and the VP of HR has brought this particular situation to the attention of the CEO.
You are the director to whom the newly promoted manager will report. You are also ambitious. The position requires about 25% travel. The HR VP has advised you if the single mother is hired, someone else in the department will have to take on the travel in order to accommodate her special needs. Likely you personally will be that person. You know if you promote the single mother your superiors will smile upon you. You also know though that your superiors will accept no decrease in performance from your department due to the work restrictions of the single mother. If productivity in the department drops, or there is a significant customer problem because the promoted manager cannot be on site at the customer, you will be held responsible.
Who do you promote? Is your answer the same if the single mother is a person of color and the single employee is white (male or female)?
This happens every day in large corporations.
If you’re the manager, you figure out how to do the job without requiring so much travel.
Throughout my career this always has been the case - childless employees getting fewer accommodations than parents.
I was more than OK with it, because overall their lives were much more complicated and chaotic. What I wasn’t OK with was parents lying to get special treatment by using their kids as excuses. That really pissed me off, especially when I was taking up their slack.
The HR VP has advised you if the single mother is hired, someone else in the department will have to take on the travel in order to accommodate her special needs.
That right there is the problem. HR is recommending a candidate for a job even though that person can’t fulfill a key responsibility of the job.
I’m sure this DOES happen every day in large corporations. That’s why I don’t work for them anymore.
Any company that allows HR to have any role in making recommendations for hiring decisions is asking for trouble. The manager(s) who will he managing the staff should be the only ones who make these decisions.
‘Employer largesse replaces family responsibilities every time it pays someone who isn’t working.’
So all paid time off is destructive of the family?
If you have kids you get allowances made for you. And it often is at the expense of the currently childless.
As an childless single employee I was often given work that employees who were parents "could not get to" because little Johnny or Jane had a ball game or a half dozen other things that needed taken care of. I was willing to pick up their slack but I wanted to be compensated for it.
The chance of that happening varied from company to company.
Some were willing to do so, like one company that if you worked a holiday you got a day off of your choice at some other time of the year. Others seemed astonished that you should think you should get anything extra. They were a "family friendly" (and single hostile) company.
You do not have to treat all employees alike but you do have to make some sort of attempt to treat them equally.
It probably is. That’s one reason I don’t like it.
My business model is to pay employees 20% more than the market rate for their positions ... and let them take up to 20% of the time off (unpaid) over the course of a year. It’s basically the same as giving them ten weeks of paid time off, but I’m looking for a unique breed of employee who doesn’t like the traditional corporate mindset.
The NAMES of the WRITERS are WEIRD to say the least....BOYS or GIRLS??
I've also worked with many single mothers who were looking for a "safe" coworker to screw around with and it usually created a very hostile workplace between the women. Any such male coworker was also a prime candidate for false claims of sexual harassment.
I've seen company divisions transform into an "office of unwed mothers" and chase men and productive women away as it's tough enough for an office to carry one or two employees who arrive late, leave early, call out because of the kids, bring the kids in to the office, and never travel. In addition every little look, comment, or incident got blown way out of proportion and NO ONE in the company will ever call them out for their unprofessional behavior. I've watched a such few divisions even go completely under as productivity dropped to the point that corporate found it easier to realign the work internally, move the work to another location, or outsource the work completely.
In manufacturing myself, as an IT person. I’m the Mr. fixit/hardware guy.
Work from home is rarely doable. Something breaks, needs configured, manage 3rd contractor vists, hold hands, cheerlead, lead the blind, help the hapless, helpless, and hopeless.
The best WFH I could do was two days. Too much would pile up. Most of it was small-time. I don’t like double digit tickets. My goal is have no more than 5 or 6. Most of those are usually waiting on someone else or an equipment order.
[In my experience, employees with young children — especially women (for some obvious and some not-so-obvious reasons) — were universally the least productive people in every work environment.
Interestingly, this pattern seemed limited almost entirely to American-born employees. For immigrants with young children, I have noticed that it’s almost the exact opposite. ]
Combine the two:
>>People need to stop living above their means.<<
The “need” for two incomes is a myth. By the time you add in the costs of the second income the net to the household is negligible.
The two working parents is from womyn who want it all: kids AND career. Men have never had an option.
“A question that we might ask the employees who are feeling some frustration about their co-workers being on leave is what do you think is going to happen if that person quits?” she said. “You’re going to actually be stretched further.”
CONSIDER THEN, what happens when the non-leave employee decides that effort at work is not being rewarded, and no value acknowledged, and quits?? Who is stretched further then??
I have read of people who did the math and they found that they came out further ahead with one income because of all the extra expenses two incomes and not enough time garner.
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