It seems that there is somewhat of an arms race in employee benefits right now. All sorts of companies are competing to offer hybrid weeks, 4 day workweeks, parental leave, extra vacation, full remote, etc. The cynic in me believes this is primarily an attempt to keep employees <i>just happy enough</i> to avoid certain outcomes, but hey, I'm not complaining.
I work for a company that offers 4 months of parental leave and generous PTO, and time-off for people dealing with COVID in their family. I am thankful for that.<p>I am also acutely aware that I am a small slice of a pretty privileged group (highly paid knowledge workers) and that these benefits are not available to the average American.<p>I wish this was something that the American government would pay for (instead of spending billions on weaponry and corporate tax giveaways).<p>We are an incredibly unequal society with little to no safety net for anyone other than the wealthy, and it is a damn shame given how rich we are.<p>So kudos to Google, and kudos to other companies that are following suit (I think Spotify was the first company to have 6 months of parental leave) but I wish this would become federal policy.
It's funny how we pretend we want "equal pay for equal work" and compensation to be tied only to merit and productivity, but in practice do the opposite. While the visible salary number might be the same, the benefits structure of contemporary American corporations means that employees with children have a total compensation at a drastically higher hourly wage than their childless peers.<p>To be perfectly clear before I'm attacked and downvoted- I'm not arguing against society benefiting from people having children or wanting parents to be stable and supported or anything of that nature.<p>But there is a huge double-standard here about what a job is and how compensation works. Am I being paid for the value I'm creating with my labor or am I receiving an ongoing entitlement for having passed an interview? Why is a VP paid $500,000 for taking care of their child for 6 months but an entry level employee is paid $50,000 for taking care of theirs?<p>Would it be more fair, inclusive and equitable to allow employees to choose between compensation structures that either paid higher hourly wages without the benefits of paid time off or lower hourly wages with paid leave, such that all employees ultimately received equal pay for the labor they provided?
I wonder what the company culture is like. There are many reports from the tech industry of people not taking advantage of paid leave policies because they fear that it would negatively impact their career.
Aside from that, treating parents unequally seems like a questionable choice.
I hate society. So some people get to take 6 months off doing absolutely nothing for the company and still get paid whereas their colleagues are probably getting written up for being 5 mins late back from lunch or taking too many toilet breaks. So fair. Why can't I get paid to work on a personal project for 6 months?