DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... Un-paid Leave for new Mothers

And I would add to your add... kids don't fix a bad relationship, they make it worse. I've seen, we've probably all seen, couples that were having pretty serious trouble in their relationship who decided that having a child would be a way to bond and "fix" their relationship... I've never seen it work that way, usually it just makes it worse.

You make it sound like every family who has hard times is irresponsible financially. So if a guy gets laid off from work when the wife is 9 months pregnant he's now irresponsible? Same with the family who just had a kid but now has a brain tumor diagnosed on the mother, so the medical bills are adding up. Why are you being so narrow minded to think your situation fits all? Plenty of people have hard times that aren't just a bunch of single mothers trying to collect a welfare check.



Just countries? It's obvious you don't care about your fellow man or woman who lives next door. Because after all if they don't have a life as good or better than you have it, they are irresponsible.

Did you ever consider that what he may actually be saying is that who aren't of means shouldn't have children at all? That if you can't "afford" health care, child care, college and medical leave when you give birth, that you're not qualified to have children?

I believe when you get to the bottom line of what very few are saying, that's the crux of the message.

No because it has no bearing on what maternity leave entails. maternity leave has no bearing on whether one can afford a child. We are just asking the question as to whether we should afford new mothers the opportunity to bond with their child after being born, or if we should expect them to make sure they drop a human being from their innards on their lunch break.

That happened to me. I had very little in savings, so I became a guy with a college degree and a masters degree working in a stockroom at a Timberland Store in Washington DC for $8/hour for 6 months while I found another job. We incurred some debt on top of what we already had but we made it through eating a lot of cheap food and having no fun... it's a sacrifice.


Or what if aliens come down and... Ok, I get that your example could happen, but let's deal with the norm, the average, that is not the average. We can deal with hypothetical special cases all day long and that's what derails decent conversations about how to fix the bigger problem, which is just people who can't afford to have kids and have no real long term plan for supporting kids... having kids.


I care, first and foremost, about kids, I care greatly about kids.. that's why I strongly believe that people who have no plan to support kids, don't have kids. Look, I love puppies too and the US has pretty much accepted that the best way to not have an excess of puppies is to spay and neuter adult dogs... not to have them keep popping out puppies that nobody wants to take care of.. now before you get your schnitzel in a bunch, I'm NOT advocating some forced sterilization plan for people... just stating for dogs, we don't blame people for not paying to support thousands of unwanted dogs, we don't blame the government for not providing enough dog support, we blame the dog owners, the adults who have some control over the situation.....

So, I'm saying that the PROBLEM starts with the people having the kids. The problem is not the kids themselves, they have no say in it, hardworking taxpayers who ARE supporting their families are not the problem for not wanting to pay to support somebody else's kids, the government is not the source of the problem for not providing enough support... the parents who are popping out kids they can't support are the SOURCE of the problem

Absolutely. You had a bad thing happened to you and you worked to salvage it. Why would WSU_Willie consider your situation to be irresponsible on your part is beyond me. Losing your job to layoffs is never the employees fault because employers DONT TELL YOU WHEN YOU ARE GETTING LET GO. It's a bit of a double standard, give them 2 weeks notice while they tell you you lost your job on a Friday.

As someone who has been laid off twice in the last two years; it makes me shake my head at those who just assume that losing your job is your own fault. Anyone who feels that way can jump off a bridge for all I care.



But that's not the conversation here! Maternity leave does nothing for people who can't afford kids in general. If a single mom has a kid and is on welfare and working for minimum wage, paid maternity leave at her current rate isn't going to make her kids more affordable. And if the mother has NO job, then no maternity leave is granted because there's nothing for her to leave. But where maternity leave helps is in 2 key ways:

- Allow every woman the opportunity to deliver a child without fear of being fired for doing it.
- Allow every woman the opportunity to continue their career after having children.

Those who feel maternity leave would lead to welfare babies both miss the point and fail to realize that lack of maternity leave does more to continue the status quo by working against women.

I can't speak for Willie, but I don't think he would put my situation under the irresponsible group. I don't think he would put anybody who managed to work through it in the irresponsible group. I think the people he would put in the irresponsible group are the ones who KNEW their situation was dire and decided to have a child anyway OR that weren't willing to make the sacrifices it takes to work through it... but he can contradict that if I'm mistaken.


I think most people realize that sometimes a person loses a job for reasons outside of their own control. I also know that there are people who are too proud to go work in a stockroom or a fast food joint, people who are too proud or feel like they shouldn't have to work 2 or 3 lesser-paying jobs if that's what it takes, people who just find it very easy to fall back on government assistance to get them through...


Excellent, let's get back to maternity leave because most of what I've posted had nothing to do with that...

Ok, I'll start with an honest admission, I didn't know that the US had no mandated maternity leave.. I was totally unaware of that. Why? Because I've spend the last 25 years working for professional companies and every one of them had some level of paid maternity/paternity leave. I think the shortest was 12 weeks, the longest was 20 something weeks of paid (80% of your pay) maternity leave and it was handled through the short-term disability policy.. paternity leave was usually in the 2-3 week range if I recall... so this whole thing is news to me.

Hope this doesn't shock you too bad, but I would argue in favor of maternity leave and I'd set the bar at at least 3 months.. that's the shortest amount of time, I'd make it longer if I could. Those first few months are critical in the bonding of a mother with a child and it should not be interrupted.

I will admit that my view of things like this are a bit jaded because I have always worked for professional organizations.. we spend a LOT to train a person and that investment is lost if you just let them go when they have a baby... so I'm going to have to think about how to make this work for the average minimum wage worker where you can train another person to do their job in about 2 days...

I'm a big proponent of personal responsibility and accountability so I agree with a lot of what Willie said about those things and I do think the parents need to be prepared to do what is necessary to overcome as many obstacles as they possibly can... that said I'm also a proponent of corporate responsibility and I think that companies need to see their employees as people and not just profit centers.... So just a person should be preparing to provide for themselves, companies should be prepared to do what they can to help their people too...

So absolutely, 3 months is the minimum amount of time a mother should be able to be to away from her job, with most of her pay, and the promise of her job back, when she has a baby...

No DC it doesn't shock me that you'd feel that way ;P Caring for your workers makes for good fiscal sense for a company. As you know it takes years to ramp up new workers and so encouraging your workforce to leave in order to take care of a newborn baby for a little while is not cost-effective in the long term. That's why some companies have extensive maternity/paternity leave policy.

And those companies have those policies because they CHOOSE to do so...having the government FORCE companies to do so is waaaaaaay outside the scope of what our government should do.

It's less about force and more about ensuring balance. If paid maternity leave is funded via a tax, then every woman can benefit and the companies that provided the service no longer need to foot 100% of the bill. Small companies of 10 people or less would be hard to foot the bill of maternity leave otherwise.

Right now you only get maternity leave if you're in a job lucky enough to do so. I have worked as a software engineer for over 10 years in companies ranging from 9 people to 8000 people. Not a single one offered paid maternity leave. Every single woman I knew who got pregnant quit and got jobs elsewhere after not working for 1-3 months. Why would they? There is no incentive.

Where did I say that? If a family is already experiencing hard times and goes and gets pregnant then they are irresponsible citizens. If they KNOW they don't get PAID leave - and that is important to them - then they need to PLAN FOR THAT. Such is THEIR responsibility.



Where did I say that? My sister was one who thought she could "fix" her crappy relationship with her crappy HUSBAND by getting pregnant. He left three months into the pregnancy and has seen his now-30-year old son about a handful of times in his entire life. She was on welfare until she got a collge degree and got a JOB. I'll let you figure out who his father figure is then and today...I was 18 when he was born. To this day she has ONE child...ONE.





Where did I say that? I don't care about my fellow man? You know this from a message board? You have no idea what you are talking about...you don't know me. You are simply astounded that a person could expect that others be held accountable for their actions - purposeful or otherwise.

I want people to be accountable for their actions and decisions. I've raised my children and nephew to understand how important that is. I care about all people who care about others and show a desire to help themselves. I've seen in my lifetime that giving people free stuff all the time doesn't 'help' them...everyone eventually has to figure "it" out for themselves...no one can do that for them...especially the government.

Insuring balance? What is THAT? If I have to pay a tax for others to stay home with their children, what say do I have in their balance? It's not my responsibility to raise the children of others.



If maternity leave is important to you...then plan for it and don't work somewhere where it's not offered. Why should anyone else be FORCED to pay for the maternity leave of another? Your acquaintances did EXACTLY what they needed to do...good for them.

I love this idea that life is supposed to be fair and equal regardless of the decisions you make.

Sex is a choice. Having children is a choice.

You are responsible for the choices you make. I am not responsible and neither is your employer. Sure it's nice if you have a job that has maternity leave. That's called a benefit NOT an entitlement.

Want that better job? Then graduate college and work your butt off to get it and keep it. When your ready for it go raise a family after getting married.

If you want to drop out of college or never even go. If you want to get drunk or high all the time and have an oopsie ... then the results of your choices are that you and your kids are going to have a hard, miserable life.

Either way it's all on you. Nobody else. It's not my job to pay for your mistakes and poor decisions. If you want a better life then make better decisions.

Yes, I understand that sometimes we lose our jobs and it's beyond our control. That's life and it happens. We have unemployment ins and we have welfare to help you recover.

I don't know what it is you think I make but I am self employed and disabled. My wife doesn't work and I make less than 20k a year. We manage our money and make good decisions. We don't drink, smoke, do drugs, or gamble. We don't own the latest and greatest anything but we are well fed, clothed, a roof over our head, and 2 working vehicles.

I have 2 kids that were both planned. We had them both back before my accident and I was making good money. We have it good because while we had it good I put everything into paying my house off instead of living it up. We made the choice to live our lives for the sake of our children's future.

Life doesn't have to be that hard if you choose to make good decisions with what you have and plan for the future. If your too lazy or can't be bothered to do what is needed then suffer for it because I don't care. People who screw up their own lives deserve to suffer for their mistakes. Hopefully the kids will learn from their parents mistakes like I learned from mine.

If you don't like your life then start making better choices. It's really that simple. If you can't handle the sacrifices it takes to be a parent then keep your friggin pants on.

Fair enough, my apologies. I read your post as saying anyone who had income difficulties needed to re-evaluate their life choices and I was befuddled by the broad strokes.



You make it sound like jobs grow on trees and I can just pick the ones that offer the benefits that suit me. For many people they take the job that they can get and be happy for it. If it has maternity leave that's great! If not then they have to work around it, and the statistics are terrible.

Women are less healthy returning to work shortly after kids are born. Mother's are depressed more often going back to work so soon. And babies whose mothers had less than 12 weeks maternity leave showed lower cognitive test scores and higher rates of behavioral problems. Protected time off work also lowers the abortion rate. Heck welfare moms probably end up with smarter kids just by being at home with them...

Businesses also aren't expected to pay the burden. In the states that provide paid maternity leave, they are funded by employee contributions via disability insurance. The businesses reported positive, or at worst neutral effects to the paid leave being provided as to impacting their business. Half of the states are bringing in legislation right now to talk about paid leave, and it's a rare case of bipartisan support. Over half of republicans and almost 3/4 of Christians believe that businesses should be required to provide paid family and medical leave for every worker who needs it. Democrats are even higher than that.

So the Pros and Cons to Maternity Leave being paid for is:

Pros:

- Healthier Post-Partum Mothers
- Healthier Babies
- More socially adept Babies
- Better Post-Partum Job Protection
- Ability to hire the best person for the job*
- Fewer Abortions because Mother knows she wont be able to take time off work

Cons:

- Slight increase in disability employment tax

* People always bring up how this hurts business, but here is a corrolary: If I am a small business owner right now, there is no way I'd hire a pregnant woman. Even if she is the best person for the job. It's discriminatory but neccesary. She's gone within 6 months and I'd not be able to afford to keep her salary on the books while I hired a contractor to fill her role for 3 months. But If the state was able to help my business out, I'd be able to hire the best person for the job, and keep her after the baby is born.

Pretty sure if you hired a pregnant woman she would not qualify for maternity leave per government standards. You have to work for 12mo, accumulate X amount of hours to get the time off. You also have to be a buisiness employing 50 people or more (some states have written regulations to reduce it to 25).

Every woman meeting the above criteria can take the 12 weeks off and by law cannot be fired. Where you lose me is saying the company needs to give a 12 week paid time off. If they want to great, if they don't then that's their buisiness.

I know many women at my work that pay for supplemental insurance (kind of like Aflac) that will cover their pay if they have a baby. Those insurances are available to anyone at any company. And if you are going to argue that some can't afford it then I will counter that they won't be able to afford another mouth to feed whether they get paid time off or not.

One catch is insurance companies have seen the Hobby Lobby get away with not insuring birth control.

I agree that it's not good to simply force companies or government to support pregnant women, but it's equally not good to simply force them to fend for themselves.

It seems most people agree, to some degree, that our society is experiencing problems.

Simple fixes wont work and, also to some degree, most people agree that caring for children is essential to our future.

Cutting off mothers who are increasingly being denied, what has been a right, to legally terminate their pregnancies, while also denying them birth control or pre-natal care seems to be a reckless strategy and seems based on punishment and subjugation.

That's my opinion of course and I don't expect it to change deeply felt beliefs others.

i'm just having a really hard time understand people on this board.

we got a bunch of people who claim to be religious, and strong morals and blah blah blah.

but then it comes to mothers, and they side with business and talk about moms and other people like a bunch of drones.

seriously, you guys talk about business like you'd support child labor in this country if you could.

but i forgot, this is a conservative-dominant board.

nothing you guys do make sense.

I thought Liberals say that Christian religion and morals have no place in government laws because not all citizens are Christians...?

they don't

morals have nothing to do with rights.

good try though.

i have no right to tell my wife what to wear. however, if she has strong morals, she knows what she should and should not wear in public. that also has nothing to do with christianity, by the way.

but the reality is that a lot of business and now our politics is dominated by religious views.

I'm i'm asking for is that if you're gonna claim to be christian, then BE christian.

we got too many pretenders, or part-timers, who want to use their religion as a crutch whenever they deem needed.

bogus.

Wow this thread is really all over the place, but in general I think most people would agree with one part.

A expecting mother should have a job guarantee after giving birth, and some sort of maternity leave. (The specifics of how long can be argued all day)

Second, PAID maternity leave is an issue. If it is handle through some sort of fund, then OK, we can look at that, but we have to figure out who is going to create and fill that fund, and at what cost. It essentially will be a new tax either on the people or the companies(Which ends up being on the people in the form of higher prices, again queue up the "higher wages, more benefits, but I want to buy inexpensive stuff" debates).

You have to be kidding me...get away with NOT providing something? Insuring birth control? What's next? Making the companies hire a nanny to insure that the free birth control is actually being USED?



Who got themselves pregnant and how? Did the company impregnate the woman or require her to get pregnant as part of her job?



Most people see the problem as our society being one where no one is accountable for their actions and one where all things should be free and easy...regardless of effort or decision-making.



Denying birth control? Where in this country is that occurring? Punishment and subjugation? That is a GIANT leap there...how about responsibility and accountability?

can't we just look at other economic powers and how they handle paid maternity leave?

they seem to be doing just fine with it.

We can look at anything to see how it works, but because it looks fine on the surface doesn't mean it is underneath. So wouldn't just say "So and So does this" and do it without looking at the nuances, and how it would translate to our system.

i mean of course it's not that simple. i was just throwing that out there.

You brought up Religion and Morals not me. And a woman has a RIGHT to have a child, she has a RIGHT to take 12 weeks off*, she does NOT have a right to have her employer pay for those 12 weeks.

That is where we differ.

And you're just as hypocritical when you argue against someones' religion and then try to use that for your arguments.

*As long as she meets the qualifying standards of company size and time worked.

how is that hypocritical?

i have ZERO control over that. none. so i have to base my arguments off of reality.

just because i THINK something needs to be changed doesn't mean it will.

I doubt you and I will ever agree.

Yes, i believe there are reasonable limits. Being paid for months for strictly personal matters is not one of them. Granted if you work for a company that carries vacation over by year and you accumlate that much, thats one thing, being given blanket paid leave is a whole different matter entirely.

How is paid leave a moral issue? Equating this to child labor is rediculous.

but it got the thread to page 11.

so mission accomplished (Bush voice)

I agree with you... but do you know the #1 leading cause of big government? It's people making bad choices.

Whether that bad choice is a kid not finishing high school so he/she has a hard time getting a job and getting pregnant at a young age... or whether that bad choice is the CEO of Wal-mart making $35 million a year while skimping on pay and benefits for his employees... bad choices. The sin of greed is no better or worse than the sin of laziness... and both should be treated the same..

The Bible disagrees.

uh oh, we're about to see who's a part-timer and pretender, and who isn't.

/popcorn.

You want to be a 1%'er, why don't you put up the money to provide these women paid maternity leave?

Of course things must be considered from a variety of angles with multiple options considered, pros and cons, long term effects and blahblahblah... these things should not be changed willy nilly...

However, this notion that this is America, we're the best, we don't need to learn anything from anybody, screw Europe... that attitude needs to change.

There are a lot of great things other countries are doing with education and healthcare and social welfare... we don't need to copy everything they do, but being unwilling to even consider them is totally misguided in my opinion.

if i owned a business, i absolutely would.


now what? bet that didn't go how you envisioned it in your head, huh?

The maternity leave per FMLA is so laughable that I wouldn't use any of it for a bearing. But you bring up a valid point that in many cases the woman is to work at a place for at least a year.

Even so, no way would I hire a woman unless she was well out of that childbearing window. I don't feel that is right but myself and many other people who hire employees sometimes have to make those decisions. This is a restriction not just on the employee but the employer as well. If the woman is the best one for the job but I"m making hiring decisions based on her wanting or not wanting to start a family, It is difficult to hire the best people.



The criteria is not easy to reach. You must be salary, so hourly workers do not qualify for this. You must be an employee, so this does not apply to contractors either. And it's unpaid, so many two income families take much less than the 12 weeks just to make sure they can keep the income stream flowing. But the downsides are real as I posted above.



You can only get that kind of insurance before conception. While Obamacare doesn't restrict pregnancy anymore as a pre-existing condition, it still applies for supplemental maternity insurance. These plans also provide 8 weeks or less of coverage, whereas most state legislation is looking at 12 weeks.

I'd say it has alot of moral issues pegged to it. Contrary to what some may feel; I don't like increased government taxation or services unless there is a clear victory to do so. Government will always have it's flaws and ... overhead. Yet how else would we maintain roads, prisons, bridges, court systems, etc. Some things are hard to privatize. I bring this up because paid maternity leave has so many benefits versus cons that it's a slam dunk. Most Christians side with this because paid maternity leave will reduce abortion rates. I can understand Swish's frustration though at how some Christians choose to side on this issue.

Increasingly we've had a sect of Calvanist Christians as I like to call them. The Joel Osteen megachurch types. The belief that if you follow Christ that you will be rewarded on earth, and if things aren't going your way it's because you haven't been close enough to Christ. While this goes a full 180 from what the Bible teaches, it's a good way for some Christians to feel that helping out others goes against the wishes of God. So you'd have mental gymnastics where someone who proclaims their belief in God would say that we should provide no abortion *and* no maternity support, and that if the woman just lived her life better God would have treated her better.

FMLA does apply to hourly employees.

You're right, but there are hourly limits to qualify. Additionally if the company you work for has fewer than 50 employees, you're out of luck also.