One thing really annoying that I’ve noticed working in the white collar industry is that some people get a free pass all the time on important things, just because they have kids. For example, in a different team who often has to step away during business hours and becomes unreachable, simply because they have kids. There’s always some sort of excuse with them. Have to go pick him up from the bus stop, have to go pick him up from school because they got in trouble, dance recital during the middle of the day, always something. But when it comes to ordinary normal people who don’t have kids, it feels like there’s a lot more scrutiny. Why do you need a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day? Why do you need to go pick up a prescription at lunch time, like why can’t you work through lunch?
But also, when it comes to employment, it feels like there’s a lot of preferential treatment for people with children. Oh that person has kids / children! They need the job a lot more. They have a little girl! Clearly they need it more than the the person who has a disabled spouse, because kids are way more important than an adult dependent! We can’t fire this person, they have kids! Let’s choose someone who doesn’t have a family. Like, stuff like this. Why is there so much preferential treatment to people who have children? Is this some sort of utilitarian thing? The least number of people affected?
That sounded very American. Is this a US specific problem?
why can’t you work through lunch?
Seriously, there’s something wrong with your boss or perhaps even the whole company. If you need to get stuff done during your lunch hour, you just go ahead and do it. Why should your boss care as long as you do your job during the other hours of the week.
It seems like you might not realize, but much of White collar America works right through lunch. It’s the standard. You will work your ass off your entire life, and you will be grateful for your job, they will not be grateful for you. That’s the standard that has been set in the USA. Hell, at least once a week I’m on a call with some other team and there’s someone calling in from a doctor’s office. Had a guy say he had to step out of the doctor’s office mid visit with his doctor just to take a call and I thought that was the most absurd and ridiculous thing I have heard in a really long time. You’re literally in the chair talking to the doctor and you say hold on sorry I got to leave really quick for business. Like what the heck?
I work an office job in the US. You need to find a better job. No one here is required or even expected to skip lunch. Scheduling is often difficult, so many of my colleagues put it on their calendars as reserved time/another meeting. You can’t schedule a meeting with John at noon. It doesn’t matter if it’s because he’s in another meeting or at lunch; he’s already booked.
Yes, there are many terrible employers. If you work for one, you need to leave.
That can’t be healthy in the long run. I wonder if it makes Americans snap and go totally postal. Or maybe people just burn out and decide to jump in the nearest river.
I work in the US and this is not universally true. Though a lot of companies will make you feel that way, there are many that wouldn’t do this. My company respects my lunch hour. I know many that have the same situation.
in a different team
Maybe this all comes down to the boss of the other team not being a dick? Life and work are not separate things. A good manager knows this. If your manager is making you work through lunch , not take breaks, not go to the doctor, etc. then you have a manager problem and this has absolutely nothing to do with who does/doesn’t have children.
Also depending on where they live making them work through lunch / breaks is illegal without extra pay. Look up your local labor laws.
Fuck no, if anything you should be punished for bringing children into this world. (The kids shouldn’t be, but damned if they aren’t going to be already anyway)
What u trying to say here?
Which part tripped you up? There’s too many people. The world sucks. Mostly because there’s too many people.
Are you suggesting the people in countries with heigher birth rates should be punished for having more children?
I got the stats on that. So whats ur idea here? Stop the Africans from having children cos they are the biggest impact? Seems kinda racist to me ngl.
Calm down there hitler, I’m suggesting that ALL people should stop having children.
So u want the human speicies to die out?
Now you’re getting it.
Wow. I see an obvious way u can help that happen a little quicker.
I applaud you for doing your best to back up your arguments
Thank you random person. Your support is everything to me.
Some stupid ideas should just be kept to yourself.
I wish your parents hadn’t had children.
You’re looking at it all wrong.
You’re letting yourself get pushed around. The parents have their priorities figured out. They know work isn’t their life. You should stop trying to narc on other people and stand up for your own self.
Having kids you have absolutely unbreakable obligations. Work shit can wait. You’ll learn that eventually.
You can also get fired for it. At least in the US. A parent is less likely to get fired for taking an hour or three off here and there to deal with kids than someone is for taking the same time off to deal with other life stuff.
Why are you telling them why you’re taking off? Most employers have a set amount of vacation/sick time as part of their compensation package. You own that time. They don’t need to know why you’re using it.
Is that the fault of the parents, or shitty to inexistent worker rights?
Everything here is great until you got to the sanctimonious “you’ll learn that eventually” shit.
So you’re telling on yourself that you haven’t figured out that “work can wait”?
You’ll learn that eventually.
I’m disabled, so there’s no more work anyway. But yeah, go ahead and be condescending and incorrect.
Sorry for treating you like I do everyone else. I’ll do better.
Aren’t you delightful.
Because my boss knows if he tries to make me pick between my job and my baby girl… He WILL lose. There wont be a discussion or an argument, he will lose, I might get fired but so be it.
Once people have kids they have more to lose, but running head to head with them instead of making minor concessions is the dumb move. Theres always another job and guaranteed they will start looking immediately if they dont quit outright if you pick that fight. As a supervisor at my job people with kids are also more inclined to bust arse to make sure people arent carrying their load when they do need a bit of special treatment because they still need to provide and have a solid income.
Parents just might quit over work interference in kid stuff. There a legal repercussions for not doing some kid things.
They already are. Months of parental leave, come back, make another child, get another couple of months off. If the money is it there to allow this, why can’t we get some kind of sabbatical
Depending on your state, you can! Is your parent dying of cancer and requires constant care? Did you get in a car accident that requires a multiple day hospital stay, and a wound the size of a dinner plate? You too can have a few weeks unpaid leave to recover. Thinking of maternity (or paternity) leave as a sabbatical is a joke.
I got exactly one day off for the funeral after a parent’s cancer but it’s not really comparable. Becoming a parent doesn’t exactly happen against your will. I may as well take a dog and claim I need time off to walk it.
It’s all about that work-life balance. For example, I fuck off to the bar all the time
Daydrinking isn’t a hobby, it’s a necessity
I think your complaint is similar to that of non smokers when smoke breaks were normal. What you see as preferential treatment is just how everyone should be treated.
Also, In my 20 or so years in the legitimate workforce, I have seen parents cut slack and parents get run off because the boss doesn’t like people having other priorities. In my direct experience it’s been a lot more boss dependent than anything else.In practice, kids provide more good excuses to work around unrealistic expectations, like needing fifteen minutes to pick up something. There’s a good emotional excuse in “I need to take my kid to the doctor”, much more than “the Elden Ring expansion came out”. If your boss is being unreasonable, you’ll need something good to dissuade them. Unfortunately for everyone involved, kid stuff just happens a lot less predictably and a lot more during office hours than (your own) adult stuff. Kids get sick more, do more dangerous things, are more vulnerable, and have weirder schedules than adults. They also can’t really get around by themselves up until a certain age, and at certain age ranges they probably shouldn’t be going to doctor’s appointments without adults either, even if they can get there by bike or by public transport themselves.
As for kid stuff happening during the day: that’s just how kid stuff works a lot of the time, unfortunately. Doctors and schools are open for only so many hours a day. It’s not like parents get that time off, they need to do chores they’d rather not be doing when they’re away from work. However, if you need to see a doctor or pick up medicine, you shouldn’t be restricted to super uncomfortable times because you’re not a child.
I don’t see why a kid would be more important than a disabled spouse, or any spouse for that matter. If there’s a family concern where you need to be present, kids shouldn’t get preferential treatment. When it comes to things like being available in your free time or being put forward as a backup, your time should be as valuable as anyone’s time. However, something to consider is that in some occasions parents will negotiate their contracts to be exempted from certain things, often at a cut in pay or with something else to make up for it; in those cases your time is legally worth less than theirs, but that’s down to contract negotiation.
As for being fired and other stuff where dependents may suffer, I think that’s only logical. It often doesn’t matter which team member gets fired for economic reasons, so a compassionate boss should probably fire causing the least amount of suffering. Someone’s going to feel the pain, but unless there’s a good reason to fire someone else, a single person having their life upset by getting fired will be preferential to a family of four having their life upset.
Sounds to me like your company sucks and you’re taking out your frustration on people with kids. You are being absolutely unfair.
Up until the last few years I’d hear the same argument about smokers taking breaks. Think the solution is to just keep heading ceos till things improve.
Smokers are actively detrimental to their health, though, while families benefit society
Pretty much agree with the last statement.
Disagree with the first statement. Given that the survival of our species is one reliant on us not only having children but also raising them in a way that improves our world and doesn’t make it worse.
The later of course is the Crux of the problem. A society that doesn’t encourage parents to be good parents and just shits on them instead is not a society that wants to survive.
Reproductive labour is the largest segment of labour and entirely necessary to the continuation of society yet is entirely unpaid. Why is that and why do you think that someone contributing to that segment of the labour economy should be treated the exact same as someone not doing that unpaid labour? You say it is entirely their choice yet you benefit from that labour without contributing to it. That is your choice
Earth is overpopulated.
There’s an argument to be made that the “reproductive labour” is as good for humankind as “extracting oil to keep polluting the atmosphere”.
Also, most if not all people have kids for selfish reasons, not for society not for others, only for themselves, so cut the bullshit here.
“Earth is overpopulated” is a toxic and wildly incorrect classist conspiracy theory. I am not even going to humour it.
It’s a fact. There’s nothing more contaminating that a human being.
We contaminate, we take a LOT of resources. There’s not enough for so many people.
Is completely irresponsible advocate for a everlasting increase of the population. It’s just calling for human suffering and nature destruction.
I’m not going to defend the destruction of humanskind and Earth just for some people’s whims and lack of responsibility.
And surely I’ll never defend to give privileges to those who decide to keep overpopulating our planet. Specially because, as I said, they only do it for selfish reasons, because their whims.
For the sake of challenging my own views I’d love to hear an explanation of this? It does seem rather overpopulated, and I can’t see where class enters into it?
I don’t have a lot of energy so please excuse the dot points
- Overpopulation is a myth that goes back centuries and has been used to fuel racism and genocide.
- We currently produce enough food and water and have enough shelter to sustain the whole human population.
- 1% of the worlds population is responsible for 15% of the worlds carbon emissions and nearly 25% of growth in emissions since 1990. The number of people is not the cause of the climate catastrophe, it is the people on top.
- The majority of all crops grown is used to feed livestock instead of people. We don’t need this much meat to survive.
- It is capitalism and the 1% that is the cause of all of this and not the majority of people. It is not the number of people that is the issue but the system and the people on top. Daniskarmas points about how much resources we require and how much we pollute are just false when you look at the cause of those issues and how much disparity there is between the majority of people and the top 1%. We currently produce enough food to feed 10 billion people and could easily produce enough to sustain the same amount with far less emissions, water, and land use if we didn’t produce so much meat. To summarise, it is not overpopulation that causes climate change, death by starvation and thirst or pollution but the capitalist system that prioritises profits over the planet and life
Ty for the answer 🙌
I don’t have kids myself, but I understand that it’s the employers fault they don’t extend the same privileges to me, not the parents fault for receiving the privilege.
Exactly. This whole argument is just allowing corporate greed and manufactured resource scarcity to win.
Working class trying to remove rights and privileges from the working class because the ruling class creates a situation that encourages it.
Yes and no. Everyone deserves the same benefits here. The issue isn’t why someone with kids gets a free pass, but why you don’t get the same offering. Why should someone have to work harder because they’re infertile, gay, or otherwise unable to reproduce?
But that’s on the capitalist, not on the worker. They should hire some more people to cover for whoever has emergencies.
I have a kid now and I understand the frustration of who didn’t have kids. The problem is that the frustration is to the wrong person.
I think in general people should be understanding of each others’ situations and make things easier on them where possible.
Speaking as a parent, I can pretty much guarantee that you are living a less stressful life than your coworkers with kids. Not sure it means much but hey
I can pretty much guarantee that you have no fucking clue what any other person is dealing with.
you scold people like this irl too?
First part: 100% agree. The problem is that the empathy and compassion isn’t directed at everybody, not that parents get something extra. Everyone should get that extra empathy, and as long as you get your work done, who cares what responsibilities you have at home?
Second part: Hard disagree. There’s simply no way you can know what’s really going on in your coworkers’ lives. People also experience stress very differently, it’s quite relative. I think it’s universal statements like this that are part of the issue. Everybody deserves empathy, compassion, and the flexibility to live a full life while having a job. Parents don’t deserve that more than non-parents.
I don’t have kids, but I have more than one serious health condition which requires tons of medications, treatment time, and doctor’s appointments. My life is usually more stressful than those of my friends and family with kids. Also, their stress is at least moderately predictable and brings them joy in addition to the stress.
Second paragraph is an easy one on my bingo card. Parents are so predictable always thinking they are more tired or more stressed than any non-parent. It doesn’t work like that.
Parents do have a lot of reasons to be tired or stressed but it is self elected. Non-parents (and Parents!) Can also have self elected things that are stressful or tiring. Worse even is when someone has a non- elected thing that is stressful or tiring-- parent or not.
Being a parent is just a low level way to group people, but it doesn’t mean anything other than they just decided to procreate. I certainly have empathy when my coworkers are telling me about how they are tired because of a kid. But empathy should go both ways. Listening to conversations thinking that you have the trump card on stress is a shitty way to approach conversations.
Obviously I’m aware that people face all kinds of challenges and stressors, it’s the entire fucking point of my first paragraph. I wasn’t trying to start a “who’s more stressed” contest here, it was a throwaway half-joke attempt to make OP feel better.
Seriously, internet, can you chill? Do I have to speak with absolute precision and clarity at all times?
I’ve worked at a lot of different places and in my experience it varies a lot.
Some bosses cut everybody slack. Some bosses are jerks and cut nobody any slack. I would say most of them play favorites with their employees (some are blatant about it, some are more subtle). Some bosses cut the workers with kids more slack. Some bosses cut the workers with kids less slack.
Anecdotal evidence is like that. It’s emotionally compelling, but doesn’t really tell us what’s going on in the bigger picture.
If you are treated badly, don’t get mad at people who are treated a bit less badly.
