[eduardordm]

This is certainly a move in the right direction and I'm glad a startup is caring about its employees like that.

"What is your startup's parental leave policy?"

In my country 6 months leaves (with full payment) are mandatory for mothers. Mothers also gain job stability soon as they get pregnant and cannot be fired due to their time off. I live in a 3rd world country and it really blows my mind developed countries allows such short leaves. In my company we give the mandatory 6 month leave, we also pay medical bills if there are any and 12 month health insurance for the baby (some employees choose their own insurance plans, some don't cover pregnancy). There is an option to give only a 4 month leave, but it's very expensive and most companies don't even consider that.

I'm a father of one (and expecting the second). I think 6 months is not enough. Yes, paying salaries for employees on leave adds costs, but this is diluted in the company cost and there are tax breaks over it.

[yourapostasy]

In the US, there are chicken-and-egg challenges all over the map that obstruct the adoption of such policies in small businesses. The big challenge is the out-of-control medical costs that pressure policy decisions elsewhere in the decision matrix.

A typical natural birth procedure alone in the US, with the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) around $10K. If you go to C-section due to typical child birth complications (can happen to even the most well-prepared and assiduous couples), it triples and can easily hit $40K. If there are additional complications, it can easily hit $100K and rapidly go up from there depending upon the specific set of complications.

If your startup has fewer than 50 participants in the company group health plan, even a completely normal natural child birth in one year will cause a rate rise the next year that is higher than it normally would be. On top of that, there are the costs of supporting parental leave: none of the expense is granted favorable tax treatment at the federal level (and not at the state level in my state).

For businesses with very high revenue per employee like in the tech industry, these intersecting facts don't sink the feasibility if the business leadership makes a commitment from the outset and plans their budgeting with the commitment in mind. I'm glad that AeroFS is publicizing this, adding to the trend of similar family friendly policy stories out of other tech companies in recent years.

But for small businesses in other sectors and even more marginal tech companies, these realities on the ground are just brutal on the odds of such policies making out of "gleam in the eye" stages. From a statecraft perspective, I'd be really interested in finding out if front-loading the expenses of encouraging family formation via tax breaks and incentives to mitigate the costs that employers currently bear, would compare favorably to the back-end costs (including externalities, where most of the back-end ramifications come from, starting with costs of monetary policy decisions partly made in reaction to a greying population) of dealing with an inverted population pyramid. That opens a whole other can of worms of whether or not an inverted population pyramid is desirable or not in the first place.

[Agustus]

The reason to hire someone from the company's perspective is to address work overload. If a start-up hires a tenth employee with amazing skills to address back-end server development, there was a need for back-end server development. When three months in the employee says their wife is having a baby in a month and wants to take the full allotment of FMLA, what is the company's role in this? The employee was the best and hired to address an issue, losing them for three months in a start-up environment would be a mission critical event. The company can A) hire a temp worker to fill in, who will either be let go when the employee comes back or hired on or B) go without a back-end developer, a position that is still mission critical.

The employee is doing best in their interest, but what about the company? A large profit margin company can go out and hire another employee, tech sector is great about this. Low profit margin companies will be unable to address this.

Here we have a situation where well-to-do companies are badgering middle to low profit margin companies into a government move. The European companies are hemorrhaging jobs because of the worker benefit packages (France, Greece, Spain) to China where the wages and benefits are lower. The middle to low companies leave and the barrier to re-entry is made worse by movements like this. Yourapostasy brings up a good point about front loading government tax breaks to encourage children.

[vonmoltke]

> the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context)

On the topic of distorted costs, I nearly flipped out last night when I got the statement for my recent polysomnogram. The sticker price, if I walked in uninsured, would have been $8750. My insurance company is paying $616, and I am paying $15. I think it is abhorrent that the facility just ignores 93% of the sticker price just because I have insurance. I saw similar massive write-downs on my arm surgery. I imagine a C-section is the same.

[vidarh]

Yikes. I'm in the UK, and while we had everything covered on the NHS in the end, we inquired about the costs of an elective/scheduled C-section (which the NHS does not offer - you do get a C-section if it is medically recommended, but not if you want it just for the "convenience"), and a C-section carried out privately by one of the top surgeons in the country at one of the top hospitals would have come out well under half the number your quoted for the US.

[Chinjut]

Sounds like an argument for detangling healthcare from the employer-employee relationship, possibly through a single-payer system...

[yuncun]

Can I ask what country you are from?

[radicalbyte]

Brazil, his LinkedIn is in his profile ;)