The UK paper The Guardian recently ran a piece about a trend among US-companies to allow new parents to bring their babies (up to crawling age) in to the office with them. The thought appears to be that it's cheaper than maternity leave. The article is delightfully toungue-in-cheek, with this lede setting the tone:
The United States and Australia are the only two countries in the industrialised world that don't have paid statutory maternity leave (there are exceptions in some US states). At least in Australia, though, your job is protected for a year; in America, even the leave protection only lasts for 12 weeks. It's an astonishingly backward state of affairs, like discovering that France doesn't have a postal service. A Harvard Study of 168 countries, measuring how different governments meet the needs of working families, found the US to be in the bottom five. But rather than do anything so tedious as campaign for reasonable terms, American lobbyists have instead thought more laterally, with a softly, softly, looky-after-baby approach: bring your baby to work with you. Until it can crawl, it can think of your workplace as liberty hall.
The contributing reporters bring their children to work with them and document their utter failure to accomplish anything they're being paid to do. And it understandable that it would be difficult to engage fully in a task while also being primarily responsible for the every need of a needy little being. But these are the darkly comical situations we find ourselves in here in a country that has an singularly bass-ackwards approach to parenthood and parental leave.
1 comments:
In Australia we have the 'baby bonus' (a one-off lump sum payment paid after the birth/adoption of your child) instead of compulsory paid maternity leave. It would work out to be the equivalent of about 10 weeks average pay. It is paid to all families, regardless of employment status or income (but that is being revised soon to cut out high income earners). It's not a huge amount, but it's a start. So I guess that just leaves the US as the only industrialised country not supporting new parents.
The idea that a new mum or dad can just stick the new baby under the desk whilst they continue to work is appalling.
What kind of society values economic productivity and money so much that they are happy to put it ahead of children's welfare?
http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/payments/pay_how_maty.htm
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