Cute baby - now get your butt back to work

Coming off the tail end of Matt's two-week block leave from work, we're both having a difficult time getting back into the groove of a regular schedule again. However, as I was reminded in this article from last month on Slate.com, there are worse things in the world than that transition back to work from vacation. Worse things like having no vacation at all.

In talking about his new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, Steven Greenhouse highlights one of the more disconcerting facts about corporate America - that America is the only one of the industrialized nations that does not guarantee its workers any paid vacation or sick time. Worse still? In Greenhouse's own words,

According to a study of 173 nations worldwide, the United States is one of just four that does not provide paid maternity leave. The others are Swaziland, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea. That's not the usual company we keep. (In Britain, women receive 39 weeks paid maternity leave.)

This disparity seems to target two groups of workers specifically - the lower class and women. Lower class because it is those jobs that pay the least where paid time off (and decent health insurance and a retirement plan, etc) are viewed as a 'perks' well above the workers' pay grade. The disparity more obviously affects women - allowing a woman little or no paid maternity leave places an undue strain on a woman in a myriad of ways: potentially impacting a woman's health depending on the invasiveness of her birth experience, sending her back to work before she can appropriately bond with her baby on an emotional level, and - perhaps most importantly - forcing her to make the difficult decision between losing income by taking unpaid time off or going back to work and spending the entirety of her paycheck on daycare. And that's without the added insult of unpaid sick leave which for many women with young children is used more often to care for sick children than to see to their own health.

Then there's the other end of the spectrum, highlighted in a recent issue of Time magazine. Some corporate offices are now allowing women to bring their babies to work with them. I've actually read a few articles like this lately and I have to say the idea makes me want to gouge out my own eyeballs. I appreciate those businesses that are forward-thinking enough to try new solutions to the age-old childcare problem, but I can't imagine how a horde of children in the workplace is good for anyone: not for babies who simply can't be engaged and occupied effectively while Mom is trying to crank out a report on a deadline, not for Mom who must feel the strain of her dual roles all that much more keenly with a fussy baby right at her side, and not for the childless co-worker in the next cubicle who's forced to deal with all the negatives of child-rearing (the screaming, the smelly diapers, the copious bodily fluids on all available surfaces) while experiencing none of the positives.

Honestly, I have to say that the more I think about it, the more the idea of taking your baby to work seems less a benefit of positive corporate initiative and more just a cheap way to avoid manning up to the real solution - giving women paid time off to care for their children when they need it and ensuring that affordable childcare solutions are available for all.

Oh. And we childless people want paid vacation, too.