Coffee Break [10/2/20]

10/2/20 Hannibal 12

It can be a struggle to get through the second half of the day.

Finland is now offering equal paid leave for both parents in a family. A whopping 7 months each or 14 months for single parents. It must be wonderful to live in a country that cares about it’s workers and the well being of their families. You can always emigrate!

“We have an aging population, and we need people to come to Finland, to work there and to raise their children and take part in making our society better,” 

But it’s too early in the week to get bogged down by negativity. Is there something your company does to make you feel appreciated?

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12 Comments

  1. I don’t know if there’s really anything specific that my company does. We have an obscene amount of time off each year (which rolls over if unused), and the benefits–generally speaking–are excellent. But, when it comes to something that the company does to try and communicate that they care about their workers…they tend to learn the wrong lessons and therefore waste a lot of resources on things that don’t actually matter. They’re still stuck in that management mode that says if you give your 10,000 workers a trinket, that will make people happy. I give them some credit for actually seeming to care (which is a lot more than I can say for a number of former employers), but they really, really need to put away the 1980’s management philosophy.

    • Yes, snacks in the break room are nice but good pay, benefits, and time off is what everybody wants. Your company sounds better than most though.

      • Oh, to be sure, my company is better than most–we even have an honest-to-God pension plan. Their main problem (besides the ’80’s management model) is that they consistently offer lower salaries than their competitors, which means the turnover is pretty high because people gotta eat now, and those benefits aren’t actually paying the rent. So, they learn the wrong lessons and assume that the main problem is that the benefits are TOO GOOD, and a few years ago made significant cuts. It obviously didn’t solve the turnover problem (clearly made it worse), so they’re looking for a new thing to blame that isn’t connected to not paying people a competitive wage.

        For my part, I’m playing the long game because after about 20 years of buckling down super hard, I’m finally in a position to be able to choose a pension later over an extra 7k/year now. But I recognize that my younger colleagues still have the luxury of looking for greener grass.

        • I stayed at a job way too long because of the benefits and I was getting paid in peanuts (though we didn’t have a pension – so fancy!). Because I’m privileged enough to not need regular medical care right now, I decided those benefits weren’t worth the hell they were putting me through.

          • …I’ve heard people talk about “fuck you money” as shorthand for the sort of money they’d need in the bank to in turn respond that way to being asked to something for their job that they found objectionable…which sounded pretty good in the main since it inevitably involved a starting assumption that my bank balance was a long way north of reality

            …but I think for me there’s always been a sliding scale of some sort because when doing the thing & keeping the job still didn’t mean being sure that all the requisite ends were meeting it felt more like the bar was reversed & the offer needed to be north of something for me not to go with the “fuck you” option?

            …not really suggesting anyone adopt that approach that doesn’t already because knowing all your bills are definitely covered is definitely worth a lot more than the dollar value of said bills…but all the same there are some things you couldn’t pay me enough to do…& probably some others you likely could but you need to make the offer register as something other than an insult in terms of how you value my time at a bare minimum

            …turns out you may not be able to buy self-respect but you definitely can sell that shit?

  3. Was just listening to a podcast called “With Friends Like These” with Ana Marie Cox (I have a lot of issues with this podcast but I’ll listen if the subject matter interests me). She interviewed Susan Neiman, a scholar on Nazi Germany. This wasn’t the focus of it, but she talked a little about the way European socialist society just UNDERSTANDS things like paid leave as a human right, even the most “pro-business” parties.

    Most of the podcast, they talked a lot about the contrasts between how Germans have “gotten over” the Holocaust vs. us and the Confederacy – it’s not as cut and dry as I expected.

    https://crooked.com/podcast/we-can-be-heroes-with-susan-neiman/

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