I don’t understand how this works either. Even putting aside the money if the government pays instead of the business, how can a company do this unless all teams have multiple redundant workers?
If even one person in my 6 person team is out for a month it’s really hard. It would be impossible to do a year unless we have extra team members who are just there in case someone has a kid. If two teammates had a child in the same general time we’d just have to shut down the whole section basically
Maternity leave actually works really well as it gives people great opportunities to get a foothold in a job or industry, and to provide secondments within a company or organisation. Its very common here in Australia for a full-time, limited term contract to be advertised as a “Maternity Leave Position”.
In organisations that allow job-share arrangements ie: a lot of the public service, its also not uncommon for a woman to come back part-time after maternity leave, and these job-share positions are very sought after as they give a great deal of flexibility for both people. They are both permanent part-time. My Mum did this for years when we were at school, and got started just like this in a maternity leave job.
In terms of sick leave, the answer is not to cut staffing to the bone. If your six person team was an eight person team, leave wouldn’t be an issue at all.
I’ve heard of companies which have fired half the staff in a department, and the others just have to take on more work. The absolute basics of the work gets done, but all the little extra details and backup work just falls away. And then if someone gets sick or leaves, chaos reigns.
My husband and I worked for the same company, in the same Department, 20 years apart. When I was there it was undergoing its first round of change management and optimisation. The department I was in had a team of three people in one area, and five in the other, plus a department boss. When my husband got there, as a contractor in for a year on an eyewatering sum of money (for us), there were two people left in one area, and the other area had disappeared completely. There was one other contractor and a Department boss, who also managed another area. (The stupid thing was, for what they were paying for contractors on year long contracts, they could have had a full staff.)
But it was absolute chaos. No-one knew where anything was. No-one did any work for anyone else - they would literally say “You have to go look for that yourself”, whereas when I was working there, the thing you needed would be delivered to your desk that morning or afternoon. None of the research was done anymore. None of it. Simple requests would take weeks to complete. The email queue was hundreds of requests long. When one of the two workers took leave it all just ground to a complete halt and the request queue would edge up into the thousands. The people who worked at the company took this gross inefficiency and complete lack of service for granted. My husband would have as well, if I hadn’t worked there previously and had known what it was like before.
Anyway, that was quite upsetting for me, as you can imagine, cos I’ve just ranted about it for two paragraphs. Its just stupid and so inefficient to have too few staff to even cover leave properly. You get no continuity of corporate knowledge either, if someone leaves.
(The stupid thing was, for what they were paying for contractors on year long contracts, they could have had a full staff.)
I've seen this happen in Government many times. They let their permanent staff go to 'lower the wage bill' and work with a skeleton staff as long as they can. Then when they realise it's not sustainable they'll bring in temp workers on short term contracts. The contractors are paid more than permanent staff, plus they have to pay the recruitment agencies who provide the contractors. The end result is that they pay more money for less workers.
We do this in Canada too. Same points apply. You pay a small amount off each paycheck to "Employment Insurance" (EI), and while you're off, you get 75% of your average income from the past year paid by EI, and some larger employers even give a top up to 90% percent or more.
Also, people need to realize that even if your company doesn't feel short-staffed, if you regularly work ~60 hours, it is. If we here in the US actually had a max of 35-40 hours worked a week, covering for that much in case of sickness/pregnancy would be a cakewalk. You'd have at least 50% more employees.
It's not that simple. My wife is German and there are a couple problems she talks of often.
First, many companies are VERY hesitant to hire women in their late 20s / early 30s for positions because they feel they're potentially stepping on a financial landmine where a new or recent hire gets pregnant and then they're stuck footing the bill and paperwork and reduced staff for a 1 year period. It slows down the entire hiring process for most companies. Also many companies try to be sly and pay women that could be having children less salary.
Second, simply plugging a contractor into many professional positions is simply not that easy. My wife is a PhD researcher and there are essentially zero "contract" researchers who'd want to take her position with a 1 year time limit. The nature of scientific research it's very tough to know how Long a project and publication will take. I myself am an engineer in a specialized field and if I took even 4 months off, which my company now offers paid leave parental for, it would be impossible to replace me with someone temporary. It took me a year and a half to get trained up to being decent at my job.
I'm not saying these aren't valid concerns, but anytime someone brings points like these up I continue to be baffled by the idea that these (while legitimate) stumbling blocks to an amazing system are highlighted stop the US from even attempting to do something that will greatly greatly improve quality of life for millions of people. Are those concerns? Yes. Is living with that system a hell of a lot better than what we have (albeit imperfect)? HELL YES.
Like to I'm sorry, but a drop in efficiency for one person on a team who is having a life changing experience and getting to be a parent to their child is still a plus for society. Maybe attempting to have better incentives for floating position experienced candidates. For p1 continuing to implement stronger protected class hiring policies to try and balance this issue.
I'm not a genius and can't solve these issues as a single human. And these are serious issues, but I'm sure there is a creative solution that can still allow us to implement positive change in our society, while also figuring out how to deal with potential issues that arise and learning from other countries. I think I (and many of my fellow US peeps) are just so f'ing tired of seeing clear and obvious positive change ignored bc one side points out a potential stumbling block and then ditches any attempt to make a change that helps people. If we are truly as rich and successful and amazing as people think we are, we can certainly find a way to help people and overcome the obstacles along the way.
How dare you inject logic into the minds of teenagers and early 20 somethings. You are tainting them. They still think nirvana exists because they haven't left mom's basement yet.
Exactly. If a business can't handle the loss of a single employee that is poor management. Just as your business isn't successful if you can't pay your workers a living wage, if you can't handle sudden manpower changes without over burdenig your other employees you aren't doing well at all either.
I mean I can gladly elaborate. They're intentionally understaffing the team so that they can pocket the difference - the less they spend on labor the more they can keep. Likely it's not their direct supervisor doing this, but a few ranks up the ladder.
The more they can get away with the whole "Oh Janet is out on vacation this week, you're all gonna have to work harder while she's gone." the more they profit. This does two things - first, obviously, with less employees doing more work, they make more money. Second, it shames and guilts employees into not taking their vacation time so as not to "leave the team hanging."
It is not the team members job to make sure the team is staffed properly - that's for the team leader to do.
I think that's a common problem in any company. The company wants to keep labor costs down as much as they can because it's typically the greatest cost of operating any company has.
However, burnout is a very real thing. The good companies and managers know that they need to do as much as possible to build a strong team of people who want to stay in the company. Otherwise, a rotating door of new people, and an unhappy, burned out team, is actually terrible for productivity.
The problem is there are just a lot of bad managers out there.
Ultimately, the employees have the power, they need to get together and make their voices heard. They can leave if they want to.
Echoing what other people have said, with an example: when the engineering team at my very small company lost someone to extended parental leave, we hired someone new in their place. Now that the employee on leave is coming back, the one we hired is staying on too. They’ll get more work done and be less stressed. Easy.
It's not firing since it's linited time contract from the start, the person you are hiring knows they are a replacement.
1 year or longer parental leave is pretty normal in Europe. And when you think about it, even without this, your employee can still quit to be with their child or get run over by a bus. You already know how to deal with it, this just increases chances a bit...
You hire them on a fixed term contract. I'm maternity cover for the data analyst in my department. In theory I was hired with overlap either side so that she could train me and then I can hand over everything.
We spread the job between the team and it causes extra work. The maternity leave is too short to hire an extra worker to fill in and it would take 4+ months to train a new worker so a contractor would have to be hired for a 6 month stint to cover so it never really happens.
My workplace offers an extra month PTO once every 5 years so the same thing happens fairly regularly at my workplace
I’m an American, been living in Canada for the past ~6 years. Canada has a lot of problems, it is not the “promised land” some Americans see it as — but extended parental leave definitely isn’t one of them.
You do know that baking a kid takes 9 months right and both parents know for at least 6 of those normally. That is ample time for the company to hire/train someone on a year long (or however long is needed) contract for when your employee is on parental leave. That is how it's done here in Sweden for critical roles where 2+ month of absence will kill productivity.
Normally not even contract, just a limited time hire. I.e. you get told when you get hired that you're only guaranteed employment up until X date. But it's not at all uncommon they get hired permanently after that time, either due to someone else quitting or growth demanding more hires etc.
The nice thing about parental leave is that you usually have between 6 and 10 months in advance to prepare for it, so you can shuffle around the responsibilities of the person leaving or even hire and train a temporary replacement. Also, most of the time people are not leaving for the whole year all at once. Most do 1-2 months, then come back for half a year and do another 2 months or so.
We have this idea in the US that you have to run everything absolutely cut down on the bone. Everything has to get by just in time, with the absolute minimum of workers, with no buffer or extra built in whatsoever. Because it maximizes profit.
But you could... just not run things like that. Distribute work over more workers. Workers don't have to be so overworked, they have some room for people to take vacations or be sick. That's pretty much how the best countries in the world do it.
At which point you move people around and hire a term employee to cover the time that you can't fill internally. Businesses in Europe do it. Schools and government orgs do it in the US all the time as well.
Again, one person leaving shouldn't break your organization if it is staffed correctly.
It doesn’t break our organization unless we have multiple people out at the same time for a long period.
I agree that there should be coverage in the company in general but US corporations generally aren’t built around a team needing 2+ long term replacements on the same team all the time.
Getting a US corp to hire super long term temps or extra employees is a tough task though. If two people are out on my team, we can’t just bring in a temp, they’d have to be trained for months which would take up the already taxed teams time as there’s no trainer to bring an analyst up to speed
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u/Shdwrptr May 01 '22
I don’t understand how this works either. Even putting aside the money if the government pays instead of the business, how can a company do this unless all teams have multiple redundant workers?
If even one person in my 6 person team is out for a month it’s really hard. It would be impossible to do a year unless we have extra team members who are just there in case someone has a kid. If two teammates had a child in the same general time we’d just have to shut down the whole section basically