[Crossposted on Family Scholars Blog, Alas, and TADA.]
In Slate, an American father living in Sweden discusses family leave time for fathers.
If you had asked me in, say, 2001, if I would ever take a long paternity leave, I would have answered, “Yeah, sure,” because I was a liberal guy — but then ignored my own answer because I was also an ambitious, career-driven type. Then I married a Swede, and we moved to a small town outside New York City that was close to no family or friends. Out of necessity, and my wife’s Swedish expectations, I got deeply involved in our upcoming baby’s life, though probably still no more than many American dads-to-be. We had a rough ride. My wife had bad doctors and a bad back, and we lived in a house covered with lead paint and infested with bats, rats, and bedbugs. It all began to seem overwhelming. In the end, almost more than my wife, I pushed for the move to Sweden, to the promise of parental leave, shorter work days, five weeks of vacation, and unlimited paid sick days if your kid falls ill.[…]
Over the past 15 years, the streets of Stockholm have filled up with men pushing strollers. In 1995, dads took only 6 percent of Sweden’s allotted 480 days of parental leave per child. Then the Swedish government set aside 30 leave days for fathers only. In 2002 the state doubled the “daddy only” days to 60 and later added an “equality bonus” for couples that split their leave. Now more than 80 percent of fathers take some leave, adding up to almost a quarter of all leave days. So in the middle of, say, a Monday afternoon in March, the daddies and their strollers come at you both singly and in waves, the men usually either striding fast and stone-faced or pushing the stroller nonchalantly with one hand, cellphone glued to their ear. […]
In my part of greater Stockholm, these dads are often on their way to the open preschools, especially through the dreary Swedish winter. These are municipal-run play-places, complete with cheap coffee, helpful teachers, and lots of balls and blocks. […] The dads act exactly like the moms. They talk about poop, whether their babies sleep, how tired they are, when their kid started crawling or walking or throwing a ball or whatever.
In the US, although we talk a lot about the need to attach fathers to their children, there’s not much interest in providing direct Governmental support for fatherhood. That’s probably to our detriment. It seems plausible that fathers who spend a lot of time raising their infants and toddlers will have a stronger connection to their children.
(Incidentally, about 60% of Swedish teens live in a household with two biological parents (pdf link), compared to about 50% of American teens. That 50% figure is from 1999; I suspect a more recent figure would be a little higher. I haven’t found comparable children-living-with-single-father stats for the two countries, alas.)
There are so many good things about the Swedish culture of “parental leave” (yup, even the language has changed, it’s not called maternity leave any more), it just blows my mind. For me, as a decidedly childfree woman, it meant that I could apply for jobs and not have the employers think, hm, 30-year-old single woman, she’s probably going to leave in six months to have babies, because it was just as likely to happen with my male contemporaries. Now, that’s a minor thing compared to fathers being involved in their kids’ lives, but still.
It also meant that I would hear comments like “Wow, your boss has five children, how does he manage to combine that with a senior position?” (His wife, by the way, had similar status.) It meant I would never hear comments like “I really want to have children, but I don’t know if I can do that without sacrificing my career”. The absence of fear among my female peers was really striking.
For a long time now, I’ve thought that I’d rather be Swedish than American.
So immigrate.
Robert, if you’re talking from an American viewpoint that would be “emigrate”. From a Swedish viewpoint you’d use “immigrate”. Just sayin’….
Am I right that the Swedish government imposes the following requirements on Swedish corporations:
1) 480 days of parental leave, 60 days of which are for fathers only (is this paid or unpaid?)
2) shorter work days (how much shorter?)
3) five weeks of vacation (I have this, it took me 15 years with one company to earn it)
4) unlimited paid sick days if your kid falls ill.
What would it cost to implement this in the U.S.? Do companies have to fund this totally out of their operations or do the taxpayers have to subsidize it?
(I don’t want to derail, so if this needs to be moved to an open thread, please move me!)
RonF, you seem to have a great deal of sympathy for companies and corporations, especially when it comes to taxation and requirements from the government. Why do you feel like they need protecting from this? They have more power in our own government than we could ever dream of, and I’m pretty sure that they have the resources, moreso than common workers, to change their operations and/or move to a more advantageous place of business. I realize that we in America walk a fine line between companies leaving overseas for cheap labor, but there are a lot of costs associated with that type of operation that also make it advantageous to stay here. So why the defensive position for any type of government “say-so”? Companies and corporations exist to make money, and only secondarily to make products/services. If tax dollars are our money, why isn’t the money we’re forced to spend for necessities our money as well? Why should it become the sole property of people who can then ruin our economy?
Just so you know, I am genuinely asking and not trying to put you in a defensive position. I want to understand your side of it, not that I will end up agreeing with you, but because you feel so strongly about it.
Sympathy for corporations? How about sympathy for their customers? You’re quite right – corporations exist to make money. They have to – if they don’t, they cease operations. So if government regulations and legislation costs them money they’re going to pass those costs along to their customers, at least as much as competition allows. One way or another – either through paying more for a company’s products and service, or by paying tax money that will be used to subsidize the policies or to make up the losses in corporate tax payments if their profits decline – I as a taxpayer and a consumer will pay for such policies. I’d like to know how much. My sympathy is for me and my fellow taxpayers and consumers.
Any sympathy I may have for a corporation is based on the fact that they are where employment come from. While individual companies come and go, overall it’s the private sector that generates productive jobs and wealth. We need to keep it healthy.
A great many taxes are non-discretionary. Make “x” amount of money, pay “y” amount of income tax. Buy “x” amount of goods, pay “y” amount of sales tax. Because of our distributed (i.e., Federal) model of government we can choose to move to a lower-tax municipality, county or state, but it’s very disruptive to exercise that choice and once there the entity can raise your taxes and leave you with little recourse.
OTOH, I have a lot more discretion on where I buy goods and services, even essential ones. I also have a lot of choices regarding what truly comprises a necessity. Food is a necessity. There’s lots of different stores. There’s lots of different ways I can buy food and save (or spend) money.
First: If a store gets it’s prices or quality of goods or services out of line I and my fellow consumers can put it out of business in short order by going to the store on the next block. So it’s not their sole property. I can choose who gets the money. I can’t do that with my tax money. I can’t change my government or put it out of business by deciding to withhold my money, do without government services or transfer my consumption of government services to a different government. If I stop using government services, or never even use them in the first place (e.g., schools – I put my kids in private school, or never have any), I still have to pay for them.
Second: when you give your money to the government you’re giving it to a group of people who can ruin the economy. They can do a more thorough job of that than any one corporation, and I have a lot less control over the transaction.
One more time: my money becomes the property of a corporation, or small business (who employ more people than corporations do), or individual service provider, because in my judgement they offered me a good or service for a price that I decided was worthwhile and I therefore chose to do so. My money becomes the property of the government because in the end they will send people to my house with guns to take it if I don’t surrender it.
That would be difficult. For one, I don’t know the local language…
There are lots of ways besides voluntary commerce that your money becomes the property of a corporation, actually. By the way, a “corporation” is simply a government-protected means for a business to organize itself to avoid liability; it is not a descriptor of the business’s size. I always find it hilarious when people who are anti-government praise corporations.
Perhaps, although it would be useful to discuss the details. However, in any case the proportion of your corporate expenditures that are voluntary – at least from the viewpoint of what those expenditures are and which corporation gets them – are much higher than the proportion of your taxes that are voluntary (and where you can choose what governmental entity gets them).
Technically true. But let’s face it – in normal discourse the word “corporation” doesn’t make people think of the corner car repair center where the 3 guys working there incorporated themselves. When people think “corporation”, they think “large company”. When people (including politicans) want to talk about smaller companies they talk about “small business” not “small corporations”. When they criticize “corporations” and the damage they’re doing to the American economy they’re not talking about the guy who owns the local convenience store and employs 6 people or the guy who operates a pest control service and employs his son.
While avoidance of personal liability (the business itself is still liable for what it does) is one reason to incorporate, but not the only one. Another is the numerous tax advantages and operational advantages that you obtain under the U.S. legal code, especially tax codes. And there are plenty of things that a corporate officer can do that they can be held personally liable for.
Me too. Of course, I consider myself neither anti-government (we need government, but we need as little of it at the Federal level as possible) nor praising corporations (they have their uses but are inherently neither good nor evil).
I’m still looking for the answer of what this would cost to implement in the U.S. One way or another, this is going to cost money. How much, and where does it come from?
Ron, did you watch the video? It didn’t go (as Bob said) deep into the weeds, but it certainly outlined what the bill costs and how it’s funded.My sincere apologies to Ron — I was mistaken about which post his comment appeared on. Egg is now thoroughly on my face.
How much would it cost? I can think of two easy ways to find out:
1. Find out what it costs the Swedes, and multiply that by the difference in population, adjusted for differences in GDP and cost of living. That would be boring.
2. Back of the envelope bullshit. It won’t be right, but it may be illuminating.
In 2008, there were 4,274,000 babies born in the US. Since this is my example, all of these babies thrive and survive. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/us/07births.html)
Sweden allocates 480 days of paid leave per child. That’s just over 2 billion days of leave. I’m rounding down, because “2B” is easier to write than “2051520000”.
Oversimplification: mommies and daddies make around the median income. This is probably wrong; mommies and daddies probably make a little less because mommies and daddies tend to be younger. But whatever, I’ve already used the NYT as a source so this is hopelessly amateurish. ;) Median personal income in the US in 2005 for adults: $25,000 or so. (Source: http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032006/perinc/new02_001.htm)
That works out, conveniently, to almost exactly $100 per working day.
So the rough annual cost of providing Sweden-style paid leave to American parents would be approximately 2 billion * $100 = $200 billion.
As for who would pay for it, that’s actually much easier. As with every expense imposed on businesses, their customers would pay for it. The sum total price of the goods and services offered for sale in the US would increase by about $200 billion, spread out among the customers for all of those goods and services. Your exact personal share would of course vary wildly depending on your consumption pattern. Even-steven split, it would come to about $650-700 per American per year.
That wouldn’t be a cash levy, of course, but rather a combination of higher prices and, to some extent, fewer goods and services. (Bob didn’t come to the factory to make your iPod. He was on parental leave. So you get a Zune.)
Caveat: I don’t know all that much about Sweden’s system. Possibly the leave is paid at a lesser rate, or only partially, or to a standardized amount rather than depending on the parental income. Just don’t know. So take the number above with a big grain of salt. The part about who will pay for it is dead on though.
Wow. Not bad.
Can we now generate a comparable analysis of the benefits? (“Bob didn’t make it into the factory to day to make your iPod; and he won’t be in tomorrow, either. He was gunned down by a kid who was raised without adequate parental involvement. So he gets a funeral; you get a Zune.”)
Two sets of people collecting the benefits.
One, all of society. Everybody benefits from well-raised children, well-raised children have lots of parental involvement, that starts at birth, blah blah blah. Whatever that value is, everybody gets it.
Two, the parents. They get 480 days of time to do what, for many people, is already a very positive utility function – raise a baby. I will simplify and assume that everyone who takes the leave is doubly happy, one because they’re getting paid and two because they’re raising their own baby. I raised my own baby. It was pretty awesome.
Basically the whole thing amounts to a big transfer of wealth to an identifiable group, parents, at the generalized expense of the society. In addition there would be a subsidiary effect, difficult to measure, but positive for society as a whole. In principle, I would find this transfer quite acceptable. Parents ought to be valorized. They ought to get good stuff from non-parents. I didn’t mind paying school taxes when I was single (very much), I’m grateful to have school taxes being paid now that I have kids in school, and I’ll be grumpily willing to go on paying the school taxes once my kids are out. It just makes sense to push some resources to the people making the next generation.
But.
I have serious concerns about the pernicious unintended consequences of such a policy as applied by a government, specifically ours, in an advanced industrial society, specifically ours again. I won’t iterate them extensively here; moral hazard and such have been hashed out many times.
I particularly find objectionable the “equality” provision in the Swedish concept. Giving parents more time off if they divide it in a way the government’s social engineers find superior is…icky. If you want to enforce equality, enforce it with an honest dictate: each parent gets 240 days, and if you don’t use your 240 days, too damn bad. That would at least be fair.
If you want to enforce equality, enforce it with an honest dictate: each parent gets 240 days, and if you don’t use your 240 days, too damn bad. That would at least be fair.
But it wouldn’t be if you started with a society that assumes only one sex will be using this leave. There would be more pressure on male employees not to take leave. It might shift society a little, but not to the extent that the swedish system has – creating an assumption of equality in care is hard.
Maybe there’s a reason for that.
Regardless of THAT derail, however, so what? Lots of things are hard. Just because something is hard doesn’t justify using icky tactics. Particularly when that justification can so easily be turned around.
If it’s OK for the government to socially engineer in one direction, you’ll never be able to get buy-in to the notion that it’s not OK to engineer in other directions.
What does it cost?
Per http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/nov/16/sweden-tax-burden-welfare Swedes pay 48% of their GDP in tax (compared to 36% for the UK; I do not have a US figure), I think this system is probably funded at least partially from taxes as well as partially from the companies. Swedes are also on average happy, so I guess they think their taxes are being well spent on things that they enjoy having.
And yes, in Sweden things can be very expensive (I’ve not been but my parents have visited recently), in part because of a hefty sales tax. But this apparently isn’t making all the Swedes desperately unhappy.
28.2% of US GDP goes for taxes. We are much less taxed than the Swedes.
I was not aware of this. Programs like that would do wonders for closing gender gaps. Many places have large chunks (or the entirety) of maternity leave that is transferable to the father, but as long as the woman has the *option* of taking all the leave, realistically most men will never really have the choice even if they want it. Their employers, friends, and possibly even spouses will not really support their decision to take paternity leave. PHMT.
I talked about it to my dad once, saying I wish I could take leave with my kids. His opinion: “Your job would barely be waiting for you when you got back. Sure, it’d still be there, but you’d never see another raise or promotion again.”
So places that offer father-only leave may seem more strict and unfair, but really are doing far more for the women of their country than the “divvy up your leave as you two see fit” that is the current fashion trend.
/Every time I go out solo with my kids, I get women complaining about their spouses to me, and guys giving me dirty looks.
One of the principles the US government was founded on is equality – legal equality. Social engineering in pursuit of equality between mothers and fathers is actually in keeping with this concept, see?
Also, in states where same sex marriages/adoptions/etc. are legal, I would hope that both same sex parents would enjoy the same benefits as their straight counterparts.
Said the childfree feminist.
Sweden has a lot of services, and a very high personal tax rate. For the Wikipedia version, see this chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Income_Taxes_By_Country.svg
Sweden has (as per that chart) a lower corporate tax rate. I’m not sure whether or not that takes into account the realities of US corporate taxation in which a lot of things are moved offshore.
Sweden also has a very high VAT, which is a type of tax related to (but different from) a sales tax.
How is sexism not, in itself, a form of social engineering? Challenging sexism by encouraging men to take paternity leave undoes social engineering.
If you really want to level the playing field, you’d make paternal leave mandatory, forcing fathers to suffer the same career disruption that mothers are expected to endure.
The US has political equality as a foundational principle (well, a foundational ideal I guess), yes. That does not mean that every attempt to bring about equality is consonant with the values of the US. You can make everyone politically equal by running the government by lottery, too, but that would be grossly repellent to the founders.
An equality based on equality of rules is totally acceptable to the founding principles. An equality based on forced allocation, much less so. The Founders, Doug, would point out that the government doesn’t have the power to force people to take any kind of leave or vacation.
Thene, sexism as implemented by people might be a form of social engineering, and if those people are *in the government* I will stand with you to oppose them. Sexist social engineers saying “women shouldn’t be in university, let’s make Pell Grants only for men”, I’m on your team.
I’m all for men being more involved with their kids. I raised my baby. I don’t think the government has any business in trying to CONVINCE me of that, however, nor should it be offering me bribes to behave that way.
Formal legal equality may not move the ball down the field as fast as progressives would like, but it has advantages over a more aggressive approach.
@Robert – I agree that forced leave would be unamerican. However, giving each parent 3 months of paid leave that they could take or leave (but not transfer to the other partner) would seem to be in line with the country’s values.
And many, many taxes are levied to encourage or discourage behaviour. Taxes on liquor and tobacco products are the most obvious ones. These are long-standing policies.
@ SiF … Except for the paid part, that’s basically what we have now. Mothers and fathers can each take up to 12 weeks. Or not. But neither can transfer their leave to the other.
Now, the paid part is a pretty big part of that equation for a lot of families. With our first, it meant I went back to work at 2 months because my husband was in grad school and we couldn’t afford to be completely without income. With our second, it meant my husband only took two weeks because, given that he now makes almost twice what I do, we are heavily dependent on his income.
But setting the particulars of our bank book aside, he would be very unlikely to take a full 12 weeks, even though he’d love to, because of fear about how it would appear to his employer, especially as the last person hired in his department in a very uncertain economic climate. Women have the “advantage” of 1) the physical recovery from childbirth (this time around, I got 6 weeks at 70 percent as short-term disability) and 2) being perceived as indispensable to a young baby (which, if you’re breastfeeding, is not totally incorrect).
(And regarding that first item, I have heard of a few women who got a hard time about taking 12 weeks leave with an adopted child – with no childbirth to recover from, the full leave was seen as less necessary by the boss.)
The whole point of the Swedish example is that making the leave available was not enough on its own.