From Tapped, Dana advises pregnant workers to give written notice… of pregnancy:
That’s one of the lessons in Sue Shellenbarger‘s latest Wall Street Journal column, which reports that pregnancy bias complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rose 14 percent last year to 5,587, a 40 percent increase from a decade ago. One woman in the publishing industry was fired while she was pregnant, supposedly for poor performance, yet those issues had never come up prior to her pregnancy. She wanted legal redress, but couldn’t prove in writing that her bosses actually knew she was expecting. So consider sharing your big news over email.
Shallenbarger also writes that many American women, until they get pregnant, have no idea that they are entitled to no paid leave under current law. Indeed, a study from Harvard University last year found that of 168 nations worldwide, the United States is one of only four whose government doesn’t require employers to provide paid maternity leave. The others are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.
Yeah, it sucks. Aside from all the non-economic issues associated with granting maternity leave, I am pretty sure that economically, this is cutting off your nose to spite your face. I work for the US Government, and I got 12 weeks upaid under FMLA. So I used all of my banked sick leave and vacation time, took 1 week unpaid, and came back in 10 weeks. Now, of course, I have no leave banked. So I come in to work as long as I can still walk (feverish or not, infectious or not) to save my sick leave for when my child is too sick for daycare.
So to save taxpayers from paid maternity leave, I now (unfortunately) have to risk infecting my coworkers with my illnesses (which are many due to a new child in daycare). Most of my female coworkers do this as well. So now we all get sick in sync. Joy! I work in a male-dominated area, so these sweeps of illness through the workplace are relatively new. I’m sure this costs more in lost productivity than granting maternity leave would…
So an unexpected benefit of paid maternity leave turns out to be that because (in the UK at least) your employer has to respond in writing to your request to take it, they can’t deny that they knew you were pregnant…
Sadly, Australia doesn’t have paid maternity leave either. I’m in charge of rostering at my small workplace, and managed to work out a schedule for a pregnant co-worker that meant she became a part-time worker before taking (unpaid) leave, then came back part-time when she wanted. I was really shocked at the meanness and resentment from other co-workers about her “entitlement”, not to mention all the old ladies who scolded her for coming back to work part-time, even though her husband was happily looking after her twins.
So what are the arguments that this is a proper thing for government to establish by law, rather than leaving it to the action of the employment market?
And, yes, I’ll agree that there is properly space for government to regulate the workplace. I’m asking for the arguments as to why this belongs in that space. Not everything does.
I’m not from the US, but don’t states make law on this, and what she’s saying is there’s no federal entitlement? Don’t you have some sort of division of labour between the federal government and the state government that make that sort of comparison a bit off? It’s a bit rough to compare the US with other nations when the internal political setups are so different.
Market failure really. Pregnancy’s often unplanned – which means people don’t anticipate needing the benefit – and women have to recuperate from the birth and shouldn’t lose their jobs or be plunged into poverty by this. I think it’s fair enough they get paid leave to physically recover from the pregnancy.
I do think there’s a debate to be had on the limits. The EU mandates 14 weeks as a health and safety measure which I think is reasonable. I think longer terms are much more dubious and mandating lengths of employment as a qualifying term for greater benefits is just discriminatory.
Pregnancy’s often unplanned – which means people don’t anticipate needing the benefit
Pregnancy is often unplanned, but only very rarely unknowable. Most people who are having PIV sex are aware of the fact, no? Therefore, the market could meet this need through an insurance mechanism, and leave government as the intervener of last resort for the 0.2% (or whatever) of pregnancies that result from rape.
Australia doesn’t require all employers to offer paid maternity leave but a lot do. If you are employed by the government (local, state or federal) you will get paid maternity leave and if you work under certain awards you are entitled to paid maternity leave. Small business is not required to offer paid maternity leave however.
Those who are entitled generally get between 6 and 12 week paid leave and 12 months unpaid with the option to return part time at the end of that. Some places offer 6 months leave paid at half pay. If you are a teacher (in my state at least) you get a certain period of paid leave and then you have up to 7 years to return to your job. Yup, seven years!
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The real issue is that making new future workers is something the nation as a whole benefits from, and something society at large (read: current workers) should pay for — NOT an individual employer. That doesn’t mean the government should be paying someone what they earned, but certainly a living stipend for some number of weeks — if you’re fortunate enough to have a high paying job, good on you, you’re also fortunate enough to SAVE MONEY while planning to have children — and that goes for all parties involved in said process.
And I tend to agree with Robert — we know what causes pregnancy. Other than things where the nation clearly benefits (and with an aging workforce, we benefit from having future workers), people should be expected to plan for their future, not expect someone else to wipe their nose.
Paid maternity leave and accessible childcare is good for women and good for society – but unless parental leave is open to both parents, it’s not much use for women who’d rather be the breadwinner than the one at home with the baby. Women like me. Why give legal support to constrictive gender roles, rather than letting either half of a couple take time off, and letting couples make the call for themselves?
Because it is in society’s best interest to have mothers and babies healthy, well-recovered and bonded. It is also in society’s best interest that very young children be well-cared for. Having six to 12 weeks leave with no pay and then having to go back to work and pay the high cost of infant childcare puts a lot of women in a real bind. If childcare cancels out your check and you are already 12 weeks in the hole, there is not much incentive to go back to work. At least until the child is older and daycare costs go down and/or the kid is in school.
I’m fine with required assistance going to the father, stipended for the daycare provider, or to the mother. But we need people to have children, and we need children to be well-cared for by healthy adults.
I hate this implication that women who stay home with their kids are fortunate that their husbands make enough money for them to do so. That is not the case in many circumstances. Women stay home with the kid because child care costs as much or more than the salary she would make. Factor in gas and wardrobe and lunch out etc. And it is a financial burden for women to work in certain instances. So families are not “so rich the mother can stay home” they are so poor the mother has to stay home. And they adjust their standard of living accordingly.
Many countries offer an optional child care stipend for the first year. And this gets many more mothers (and fathers) back to work sooner while helping to ensure that the kids are safe and taken care of, than any unpaid maternity leave will ever manage to do.
Not sure how it works in other countries, but in Canada (or at least in Ontario), the leave is a part of your employment insurance benefits that every worker pays into as part of every paycheque (ie- its part of our taxes). Very few employers add to this … for materinity/parental leave in Ontario it is a % of what you normally make, and it caps out at a fairly low $ per week (less than $300 a week, if I recall correctly). So it’s a paid leave, but it is typically very a substancial reduction from what you used to take home. And yes, it’s taxable income. A few employers (typically union shops) will add to what the government gives you to make up some of that difference.
While part of this leave is for moms only, the lions share of it can be taken by either parent.
The EI benefit is also paid out to persons who loose their jobs unexpectedly, to provide a buffer until they are working again or while they retrain (it’s good for a number of weeks as well)
None, as long as we don’t get the usual OMG TEH BIRTH RATEZ!!!! whining when women make the resulting rational economic decision to have fewer children, no children, or to screw their employers by lying about and/or concealing their family decisions, rather than working with their employers to minimize disruptions.
Shellenbarger’s article isn’t about family leave specifically, but about claims of pregnancy-based discrimination. She does bring up a point that isn’t just applicable to pregnancy, though; a lot of people with valid claims drop it because it’s simply not worth the fight.
And those of you that are trotting out the old “if you have sex, then you should know that pregnancy is a risk!” I say for crissakes, get a grip!
I am sitting here, in my early 30’s, with an unplanned pregnancy. I was using birthcontrol properly AND was told that I was borderline infertile. I’m delighted, now that the shock has worn off, but I am a living, breathing, gestating example of “accidents happen”. And I’m a grown woman with a stable relationship and two (planned) children. Not a wet-behind-the-ears girl with an unstable relationship and a minimum wage job. Not that I’m suggesting that who the accident happens to in any way affects how much they should be “punished”.
Are you suggesting that I should abstain from sex until menopause because “well, you should know better!”? Are you suggesting that every time I have sex, I should risk poverty, because it may not be within my edcuational or functional limits to have a job that pays well enough to support one more mouth to feed? The children that I bear, that I educate, that I support, will grow into workers in 20 years who will be paying into your pension, your medical care and your social assistance.
“Because it is in society’s best interest to have mothers and babies healthy, well-recovered and bonded.”
I certainly recognize the need to have mothers fully recuperated from childbirth, having had several children myself.
But I wonder why it is more in society’s best interest to have *mothers* and babies bonded, not fathers and babies. My husband was / is equally as good of a caregiver as I. What’s special about the mother/baby bond that society needs to facilitate it that isn’t equally special about a father/baby bond? The more we keep it on mothers-only, the more we can let fathers off the hook and the more we can engage in mommy-blaming for all of society’s ills.
Wookie –
No, I am not suggesting any of the things that you list.
I am suggesting that as someone who was having PIV sex, you were aware of the possibility of pregnancy. And that accordingly, if a pregnancy were going to be a hardship for you and your family, it would not have been impossible for you to insure against that hardship, if the insurance industry offered a product tailored to that need.
Now, as far as I know, they don’t have a product like that, because the US insurance industry is primitive and stunted, in part because so many bad outcomes are “insured” against by government. So this is not a practical, real-world critique of you for your poor planning; you couldn’t do in practice what you could do in theory. (Well, you maybe could find an underwriter to create such a policy as a one-off, but it would be hugely expensive and not what we’re talking about when we say that insurance could be obtained.)
The question isn’t, is wookie prudent or not in her family planning activities, it’s “can the market provide for this potential need or does the government have to do it”. The market could provide for it, if the government weren’t in the way and if the social values of Americans were more orientated to self-reliance for social needs, because this is an area of risk where the people bearing the risk mostly know that they are doing so. Governments are good insurers of last resort, particularly in areas of life where people don’t have the ability to rationally plan for their own risk. Pregnancy isn’t such an area; most potentially pregnant people know of their “risk”. So it doesn’t have to be a government program to have “family leave”; we could reproduce the social benefits of that government program with market action. That’s all we’re saying.
And, congratulations on the (incoming) addition to your family. Mazel tov!
Robert, surely a problem with that is that insurers generally don’t like policies that pay out on voluntary behaviour, and, although there are accidental pregnancies, there are also voluntary ones. Because in practice not everyone who might potentially benefit from insurance gets insurance – they weigh the risks/benefits against other costs – the pregnancy insurance market would be all awry. When you buy insurance, you and the insurers come to an agreement based on a consensus as to your risk. With pregnancy insurance, you will know much, much more about the risk than the insurer, because you know whether you are planning to get pregnant as soon as the policy can be cashed in or whether you aren’t. A sensible insurer has no way to respond to this information imbalance than to raise premiums to take into account all possibilities. Because the insurance itself will be providing an incentive to get pregnant, I’m not sure that there would even be a stable economic outcome, but if there were one, it would have pretty stratospheric premiums and be only very slightly better than putting the money in a sock ‘just in case’. Insurance is just betting. If I said ‘I bet you I don’t just go and play ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano’, you would be an idiot to take the bet.
The same thing is supposed to contribute to market failure in the private health-insurance market – healthy people are less likely to get health insurance than sick people, and the customer probably knows more about how healthy they are than the insurer. It’s why non-voluntary health insurance premiums are lower; insurance itself doesn’t redistribute risk very well when low-risk people opt out, and especially when the low-risk people who remain in have no way of signalling that they are low-risk, and are therefore slowly forced out in terms of economic rationality. But the effect is clearly much, much more marked in the case of ‘pregnancy insurance’, and that’s why there isn’t any at the moment; it’s not that the goverment is turning everyone into feckless namby-pambies, it’s that no sensible insurer would touch ‘pregnancy insurance’ with a barge pole.
Acheman,
As I said in my entry that you quoted, I have no problem with leave benefits going to the father. Or, to either parent to pay for a third party caregiver.
Initially, though, because in most cases the mother physically gives birth to the kid, and may breastfeed, a priority would be for maternity leave for the mother as she is bearing the physical burden and has the most physical need to recover. Beyond that, of course fathers have just as much right to paternity leave as the mother. And just as much need to bond with their child.
Best case, paid leave and/or caregiving stipend would be supplied to the family to decide how it would be best used in their particular situation.
Acheman –
You’re right, it would be expensive because of the voluntary nature of the action. Companies could route around that with waiting periods for benefits, or with high premiums, or with required enrollment periods AFTER you collect your benefit. It seems that the high premiums reflect high costs, though. It’s expensive to pay people not to work, and to pay companies to hold jobs open.
If we decide democratically that there are social benefits to encouraging parenthood and that we all want to share the pain of the costs, we could vote subsidies or vouchers for the coverage.
The problem is that even if you have a waiting period, that just incentivises waiting to try to get pregnant until after the waiting period is over. And if you have to go on paying premiums even after you’ve claimed, in order to make it up to the insurers, as you’ve suggested, then I fail to see the advantage over a loan. The point is that the insurance model itself is broken for pregnancy, because insurance is a bet you make against the insurer, and pregnancy is a case where you know much, much more about the outcome than the insurer.
The problem with high premiums is that they don’t work for people who aren’t trying to get pregnant, but want to safeguard against the possibility that they might. The risk/benefit isn’t going to work for those people, because they know that they aren’t intending to get pregnant. Let’s say I wanted to get pregnancy insurance, although I’m a lesbian who’s never wanted to sleep with a guy. All the same, I know that sometimes homosexuals do have completely unforeseen heterosexual one night stands, and sometimes those lead to pregnancy, and if that happened and I had no statutory maternity leave provision available I would be in an awful situation. This is important to remember: the question isn’t ‘Am I having PIV sex’ or ‘Do I expect to have PIV sex’, it’s ‘Is there a nonzero chance that I will have PIV sex’, for which the answer is ‘yes’ for almost everyone.
I’m going to be living with a male friend this summer. Supposing this summer I go to an insurance company and ask for cover. *I* know that I’m someone with an infinitesimal likelihood of pregnancy in the next few years; they see a woman in her mid-twenties living with a guy in his mid-twenties. They’re not married, but who is these days? They conclude that since I’m getting the insurance, I’m probably planning to have a baby with him as soon as the waiting period is up. Although this isn’t true, there’s no way for me to prove that. I’m faced with a very hefty premium that I will almost certainly never cash out. The bet makes no sense for me. A lesser premium wouldn’t make sense for the insurance, because based on the information they have I’m pretty likely to get pregnant. And part of the information they have is that I want the insurance in the first place.
What having an insurance-based system insures is that the only people prepared for pregnancies are people who’ve planned those pregnancies, because they are the only people for whom it’ll make sense to pay the premiums. Basically, the insurance becomes more like a savings scheme. You incentivise people being responsible, planning their lives, not having children until they’re extremely financially secure and can guarantee being so for a considerable time into the future, because they’ll have those premiums to keep up on. You disincentivise unplanned pregnancies (unless it’s through rape), by making them extremely financially punishing. This will slightly incentivise more careful use of birth control (but in general people who don’t want a child are probably using birth control pretty carefully anyway, or at least as carefully as they think they need to) and it will strongly incentivise abortion; when faced with a choice between raising a child in severe economic straits and abortion, many women will choose the later, quite possibly with considerable reluctance. I do not think that is what you would have intended; but it’s the likely result of the kind of scheme you’re proposing. You don’t have to believe that markets are crappy to believe that there exist straightforward market failures; quite the reverse, in fact. I always feel like I’m being a bit disingenuous in pointing out market failures, because I think that markets are in general a crappy way to regulate things, and distinguishing market failures from market successes strongly implies an endorsement of market successes. But I can do ‘as if’ reasoning as well as anyone, and if you grant that insurance markets are a good way of protecting people from some kinds of chance event, they are still a bad way of guaranteeing financial security for couples who have children. The information inequality is insurmountable; there is no other way to have it so that people can carry both planned and unplanned pregnancies to term without crippling economic punishment than to have everyone – high risk, low risk, no risk – contribute equally. And the only way to have that happen in the existing system is through state action.
Acheman –
Well, you make good points. I’m not a huge fan of the insurance model. Although, I think you could probably generalize many of your points towards healthcare in general – which would seem to argue for a loan/welfare model of care provision (for the able but not wealthy and the poor, respectively).
Acheman,
That was an excellent obliteration of Robert’s point. Could I beg you to use paragraph breaks?
I didn’t know you worked for the insurance industry.
All right, then don’t subsidize it. Pay for your own god damn babies.
Dial it back a couple of clicks, please.
All right, then don’t subsidize it. Pay for your own darn babies.
Wow Robert, that’s mighty nice of you to walk back to juuuuuust this side of the line. Hope it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience.
Robert, getting huffy when caught in an inconsistency isn’t exactly a persuasive argument technique, at least outside of the Robert household. “Subsidies are bad to individuals but fine to private industry”–WTF? When did you become the adviser to the Fed?
It’s fine to tell people to pay for their own damn babies, as long as you don’t mind when people then react by not having babies, or having fewer. I was under the impression that BE UNFRUITFUL AND DON’T MULTIPLY! was not a rallying cry of the Right, but perhaps I am out of touch.
There is no functional difference between a subsidy to an individual and a subsidy to an industry. Subsidies, as a general principle, are bad.
There is an apparent feeling among this blog’s readers and authors that parents should get some kind of assistance. I wrote to that feeling, suggesting that there are ways for that assistance to be provided without a government mandate of behavior, but rather through private effort. That private effort requires money – money that the government mandate system basically extracts from everyone by requiring inefficiencies in hiring and staffing – and so I suggested that if there is a general feeling that society should assist the specific group called ‘parents’, then the way to do that consistent with private effort is to subsidize the insurance offering (or whatever mechanism).
You’ve responded to that with snippiness, first in asking if I was working for the insurance industry, and now by asking when I started advising the Fed. If you don’t want to address the MEGO of this whole subject, then don’t, but don’t be snippily cute with me and then act shocked when I’m irritated with your foolishness.
I am all for “be fruitful and multiply”. There’s nothing wrong with a natalist policy and I generally think we should pursue those policies. Doing so in ways that are consistent with the values we want for our government is not always easy or straightforward. Generally speaking, private effort is the way to get it done, and in the areas where we really do want to explicitly create a society-wide encouragement to do something, then an explicit subsidy is both transparent and politically debatable.
But Robert, the private insurance industry has left us in a situation in which hundreds of thousands of Americans have no medical care, and in which Americans as a whole spend way more on medical care than other first worlders, in exchange for medical care that is (at best) only slightly better than what we’d find elsewhere. I don’t see any reason to share your faith in the effectiveness of private insurance companies for doing anything but enriching private insurance companies.
I don’t see any evidence that “generally speaking, private effort is the way to get it done.” There are things that the market is good at (distribution of nuts and bolts, for instance, congestion pricing) and things it sucks at (providing medical care for everyone, providing a stable economy, providing equitable access to good jobs). That conservatives are so convinced that the market is the way to go 99% of the time is a major reason our economy’s going down the toilet.
Robert, save the “see here young lady” routine for your own household, please. I wasn’t being cute in any fashion (I rarely am); I was expressing disdain for your position that subsidies are bad, but maybe we can make some teensy allowance for them as long as they’re going to enormous profit-making private entities, aka insurance companies. If you don’t agree with subsidies then don’t propose them.
It’s absurd to think that the private sector has the slightest interest in a “natalist effort”. Why should it? In the long term, of course we all want more consumers buying our stuff, but that gets stacked up against (at least the perception of) lost productivity from workers who divert their attention to family matters. If natalist policies are an advantage to private companies, why aren’t they all doing it?
Robert,
It was already explained to you why paid parental leave insurance is a non-viable idea (you can’t insure something that is predominantly a matter of choice for the buyer, as the buyer will reliably game the system and buy insurance only when they are going to use it), and proposing a subsidy for such insurance is completely irrelevant. Making the insurance mandatory would solve the problem, if for some reason we were going to go through private insurance companies.
If the government were going to subsidize paid leave, it would make far more sense to directly subsidize paid leave, either directly subsidizing the employer, or directly subsidizing the employee. For instance, parental leave could be treated as eligible for unemployment insurance, which is funded through a mixture of employer, employee, and state money, and which serves the insurance-like function of spreading the one time costs over a long period of time.
Your superior tone with mythago is simply embarrassing. Do stop making an ass of yourself.
a situation in which hundreds of thousands of Americans have no medical care
Are you seriously advancing this as a point, or just being free and easy with your language?
What level of economic stability are you looking for? Mixed market (no one uses pure capitalism) has done pretty well for the west over the last 80 years. The business cycle’s still there, but it’s not that big a deal.
Also, what do you mean by equitable?…sorry longer comment delayed by baby waking up.
You can if the premiums are high enough, no?
Joe —
I’m a big fan of mixed market economies. However, I think the scaling back of regulation over the last ten years has obviously led to bad consequences for the US economy; although we’re obviously not completely deregulated, we’re too near the “unregulated market” side of the spectrum.
By equitable, I meant without discrimination based on unjust prejudices, and with accommodation for the non-market needs of our society (such as taking care of families).
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the government should fund it.
Right now, the benefits of having people work and have kids accrue to society at large; they also obviously accrue to the individuals who benefit from selective work assistance programs. But as a society/country/government, we WANT people to 1) work, 2) have kids, and 3) retain the benefits of their education and experience “even though” they do #2.
But the costs of such programs are borne disproportionately by employers. Workers are, generally speaking, reasonably fungible: there’s no advantage to ME that Joe is happily taking care of his 2 month old on my dime, if I could hire childless John who will do the same work. It is entirely predictable that if you put a disproportionate cost on people, they constantly attempt to define the boundary of the law, and/or break it entirely. people don’t like paying for things that don’t benefit them.
The government makes more sense. Everyone benefits, so everyone pays.
FCH:
Sailorman:
I am not sure I buy that simply having kids is an enormous enough benefit to society that we should subsidize it. It might be, but its more complicated than that. But if that really is THE argument, then it seems like we should consider some big picture cold hard economic facts. Generally, economically, society benefits with “workers” who pay more in taxes then they use in public benefits.
For instance, even if you discount all the other public benefits that taxes provide, if you have just one child in a public school and it takes $8K per child per year, then you need to be paying that much in taxes just to be self sufficient. Otherwise you are an economic drain on society, though your child may or may not end up being a benefit.
Another thing to consider is that more workers drive down wages, which reduces the taxes paid by those workers and increases the likelihood they will be an economic drain rather than a benefit. OTOH more cheap workers means lower priced goods and that does benefit other areas of society. So its debatable whether or not simply having more children is a huge public benefit. Though people will continue to have children whether or not it is subsidized, as the rule goes you get more of what you subsidize.
Maybe a better reason to do it is less rational and more emotional: It’s compassionate to financially help families through a transitional hardship. I might be able to get behind that if the benefit was means tested and it was administered by the current welfare apparatus.
The economy isn’t limited to taxes and public benefits.
In my post surgical percocet haze i may be missing something. So if I seem to be 100% clueluess just try explaining again, willya?
sure. I love facts. facts is tasty.
Assuming you mean what i think you mean, sure.
I really don’t get your example here. We’re talking generalities, you’re talking about a specific example child. SOCIETY needs to be self sufficient; society can easily (and does) include individuals who are, on their own, not self sufficient.
In fact, providing for those who are (temporarily or permanently) less than self sufficient is sort of the point of society in the first place. that’s why we tend, generally speaking, not to let our 2 year old children starve because they can’t hunt, farm, or pay anyone.
‘Sure, though it’s a bit more cplicated than that.
Are you familiar with what is referred to as “stagnation”?
True.
I prefer not to hang my hat on emotions, if facts will work.
As far as i can tell, your post basically boils down to “I don’t believe there is enough evidence that we need to have more children and/or more working parents.” Is that a correct summary?
Sailorman:
Yes, but the question is is it a benefit to society when you increase the number of those not self sufficient? (ie, to have more poorer people) My simplified example was just to clarify what I meant a tax payer being self sufficient. Paying enough taxes to cover the cost of the benefits you use.
No, its that I don’t know that increasing the rate of having children is enough of an economic benefit alone to justify subsidizing it.
Robert: They are mocking you because you proposed to eschew subsidies by using a private insurance system which would be dependent on…subsidies. Your proposed solution doesn’t do what you designed it to do.
Everyone else: I don’t see any societal benefit to encouraging people to make babies. Sure, we need workers, but people will make them whether we help or no. We need carbon dioxide, too, but I see no need to create a special fund to encourage its creation.
However, I do see an enormous societal cost to letting people create poorly socialized, poorly parented kids. Making sure that parents have the resources to be able to spend time parenting seems the cheapest (and kindest) way of averting those costs.
For what it’s worth, the moral hazard and adverse selection problems involved in pregnancy insurance would make it a non-starter as something to insure against. It’s even worse than that, since a great many potential buyers are actively looking to get pregnant.
And your argument is “children don’t generate tax income”?
Sailorman, you’re a lot funnier on Percocet, but I wish you a speedy recovery.