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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (112078)	5/23/2000 4:46:00 PM
From: Amy J	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570976

OT Re: "context of Family Medical Leave The debate at the time was not whether the companies should provide adequate parental leave, for which the answer was unanimous yes" I rather doubt you read my post where it states, the President of the USA at that particular time did not believe in parental leave because he felt women should be at home. Like I said, I heard what he said and I'll never forget it as long as I live. RE: "As far as the woman going to work 2 weeks after c-section, I find it crazy that she did go to work" I do too, which is exactly why there needed to be a law to give women an option. RE: "even crazier that she would want to go back to work for company that had such a nonsensical policy" Yes, it is crazy that this country allowed companies to operate in this mode, particularly during the recession of high unemployment rates when companies like this one got away with near murder. Today's 30-year low unemployment rates have certainly improved the behavior of some (not all) companies. RE: "Going back to work for this company by your friend was a way of providing positive feedback to the company. If on the other hand the company lost all the female employees of the childbearing age to companies that accommodate working parents better, maybe the company would change their policy on their own." Conceptually your point is very valid, but it is missing a critical implementational piece, which is, people need to eat and not everyone has your or my level of skillsets which would make finding a job easy. RE: "Maybe your friend enjoyed receiving higher take home pay" I doubt that. Her pay was min wage. She was the sole earner in the household. RE: "because the company did not provide this benefit and the company could afford to pass the savings to their employees." It's been my observation that companies which operate in this manner, tend to do so consistently in their overall thinking - I would not be surprised if the savings went to the owners or the top circle of management, rather than to the employees. RE: "Maybe this particular company finds that women of childbearing age are less valuable than other employees" I'm not sure what country you live in, but in the USA it is against the law for a company to assume that women in childbearing years are less valuable than other employees. Btw, I've managed women who have children and women who don't have children, and I can think of many cases where the women with a child was more productive than her colleagues namely because she had a more focused working style which created more impact. One can never prejudge a person's productivity level by these types of external factors - and in the USA it is fortunately against the law to do so. RE: "Maybe the company is forced by the federal law to overpay a woman of childbearing age (based on the economics of the situation)" It appears these types of companies take advantage of a person's vulnerabilities to the point where laws have to be get created in order to protect the public. RE: "the 1st women chose to undergo the financial sacrifice and stay home with her child in order to provide better care" You incorrectly assumed she had the option to earn more by her going to work - this is not an option for a sole earner. You also incorrectly assumed that the woman (not the man) should be the one to stay home in the case of providing care. That's an extremely old-fashioned and outdated assumption. RE: "Now some federal law is going to make this sacrifice even tougher, because they have to subsidize other people who chose more money rather than better care for their kids." Your assumption incorrectly she was in need of more than one household salary. RE: "Did you account for the death of this 2nd family in the cost of providing the benefit of the 1st family? I don't think so." I concur with intangible costs and am a firm believer in offering a compensation package which allows the employee to choose their plans accordingly - i.e. an employee earns X for the work they do (regardless of whether or not they have a family or not) and X may be distributed into benefits (or it may not). If X is distributed into benefits, then the salary decreases by X-costofbenefit. I believe one problem is that most companies today aren't as innovative in their thinking, nor in their compensation plans. At our company, we have some pretty creative policies that is attracting top talent like wildfire (yet, doesn't cost the company any more money than the gorilla companies). Startups have an advantage in that their compensation plans can be more innovative. RE: "0.0004 % of some amount X, that is paid by someone else anyway, some impersonal 3rd party" I am one of the co-founders of our company, so it did not come out of an impersonal 3rd party. Let's use a hypothetical payroll amount of say $10MM in payroll. This translates into, .0004 * $10MM = only $4000 cost for company/year. A business owner would glady pay $4000 per year for every $10MM in payroll so they know their employees have adequate health care cover, which also means their employees' productivity would not be negatively impacted. RE: "The fact that this cost is going to affect real people in real way is never presented." I just presented the real facts of how it negatively impacts real people. RE: "you will never hear of the dead young family (the 2nd family in my example) who paid with their lives to provide this benefit" I concur with you that companies need to be more creative in their compensation plans by not making one family pay the benefits for another family. I see your point, and on this we definitely agree. The newer companies seem to feel this way too, so I suspect over time this will eventually change. RE: "Maybe the cost of providing some benefit will force people to eat less expensive, less nutritious, sugar laden food, that will cause increased cases of diabetes." I believe this is a weak argument for not covering employees with diabetes. RE: "my view of this industry is close to what Scumbria said in his reply to you." I concur that preventive medicine is something this country is weaker on. Maybe because the carrier doesn't have to be responsible for the life-time of the patient, they are not financially motivated to create a policy which creates the overall lowest lifetime cost. Amy J

To: Joe NYC who wrote (112078)	5/23/2000 5:14:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1570976

Joe, I partly disagree with you and also partly disagree with Amy J. There needs to be a level of benefits the cost of which is paid by all employees that allows women to take leave for child bearing and recuperation. The paid portion needs to be a small number of weeks paid by the company and a larger portion paid by the Governmental plan for this purpose that spreads this cost over the entire workforce. This avoids crippling the copany if they lose too much wages to chilbearing women on leave if you set it at one year. Probably 2 weeks above the vacation amount is reasonable and then the Government plan kicks in for perhaps 6 months and a reduced rate similar to unemployment insurance(tax free) The USA has to avoid the situation that exists in Europe with benefits costing more than wages since they have huge mandated holiday periods and child bearing leaves etc. ALl brought in by socialists who think that more holidays = more jobs, when it really means fewer jobs as your country gets less efficient. We must also avoid the Mexican situation where worker control by starvation is practiced. Above all remember that if you give away money for free to a certain group...whatever that group is...it will grow by recruitment from other groups. A case in point is the welfare group grows by recruitment from the wirking group whenever you pay more money than they can get at a low end job. the answer is to cut the welfare so the working group recruits from the welfare group. This has worked very well. Cut welfare to zero for any news kids and all of a sudden the welfare baby factories stop since they will get no more money. People are like pigeons. stand on a corner and feed pigeons and in a year you will have huge flocks. Stop and some will starve and the rest will work for a living. Welfare actually hurts and disempowers people...it makes them incapable of fending for themselves. I am glad they reduced it. In the same way excess benefits do the same. You get women who will have kid after kid after kid if you gave aful year at full wages. that is time enough to have the next one the day after you get back. No, you say?ook at Europe and wonder why the Euro is tanking. Bill