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by jimmyswimmy
2117 days ago
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I'm a working parent but I understand the frustration. People see from their own point of view. What non parents see is that I am no longer pulling the same weight I pulled last year. Someone has to pick up the slack or the schedule has to slip. Both of these are frustrating to the hard driving employee who is bound to notice that I'm not doing as much as I used to. I don't have a great solution. This is hard on everyone but in completely different ways. I'd be happy to compensate for my lower output with a pay cut to be given to those who are pulling the load for me. It would take away some guilt at not putting out what I'm used to. But I would need that pay cut to come with an understanding that it's an exchange for less responsibility. |
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However, it still demonstrates an unsurprising failure to properly empathize with childfree people.
Implicit in this solution is the assumption that childfree people need to justify their value for equal access to personal time off to people with entirely different (and more orthodox) personal values.
The best solution would be to give everyone the option to take extra time off with partial pay redistributed to active team members.
Childfree people aren't a hegemony with the same values and problem as people with children. They have more diverse values, or lack of values, and more diverse problems intensified by a pandemic which shouldn't need to be justified to coworkers with different personal priorities.
Have you considered, for example, the daily impact of a pandemic on people who derived meaning in life from time with friends and activities they can no longer see and enjoy? You might not think these are important as children (and if those people had children they might agree). But the fact is that they don't have children and these are the most meaningful things in their life. For them, their children may as well have died in the pandemic.
You won't hear them express this because it's terribly unorthodox. But it's true. Equal access to equal benefits matters.