RE: Hiring Discrimination

["Jonathan West" <jwest -at- mvps -dot- org>]

> I have five children. *That's* time out of the office too, for one thing
> and another. And I'd have to be blind not to realize that that has some
> impact on my team. My office mate can't announce that he's taking a few
> hours to go out on his boat, but "school play" is my free pass to a
> morning off work. It's *not* fair. And certain types of managers,
> certain types of teams, can't absorb that.

This is probably getting off-topic for techwriting, but it occurs to me that
if mothers and fathers both has the same legal entitlments to leave on the
arrival of a baby, the incentive to discriminate against younger women would
disappear. Moves in this direction are getting made in a number of European
countries.

Also, I understand that workers in the US normally have a much lower annual
leave entitlement than in most other western countries. Raising that would
make it much less of a problem for people to take an accosional half-day
from their leave entitlement for school plays & suchlike. Would you accept a
4% reduction in your pay packet in exchange for another 2 weeks of paid
leave? If so, it would be roughly neutral financially for the employer,
though it might need to be a bit more than 4% to account for the fact that
the employer wouldn't get a 4% reduction on health insurace premiums for
you.

Finally, I think that there is a case for employers to encourage a better
work-life balance on the part of their employees. I suspect that an
enlightened attitude to this would probably result in better productivity
overall. However, we all know that such companies are about as rare as hens'
teeth!

Regards
Jonathan West

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