[lotsofpulp]

I do not see why it is gross. Employees have more utility if they get an abortion and less utility if they have to spend time out for parental leave.

If society wants to promote parenting, then society should pass laws about parental leave. Individual businesses have no obligation to reduce their competitiveness in the marketplace.

[dotnet00]

Why should the legal system have to step in to coerce people to behave like decent human beings?

Plenty of other businesses remain competitive while treating their employees like fellow humans who have their own lives to live.

By your reasoning, if anyone is able to abuse their freedom to do something immoral, it isn't that person or organization's fault, it's society's fault for allowing that to happen. Then why bother with freedom at all?

[lotsofpulp]

> Why should the legal system have to step in to coerce people to behave like decent human beings?

Because the statement below is not true:

> Plenty of other businesses remain competitive while treating their employees like fellow humans who have their own lives to live.

See the widening of income/wealth gap in the US over the past few decades, the movement of manufacturing and industry to places with even fewer labor and environmental protections, even in the US. Nobody is going to pay Target $1 or $2 more if Target started treating workers considerably better, they will all go to Walmart.

> By your reasoning, if anyone is able to abuse their freedom to do something immoral, it isn't that person or organization's fault, it's society's fault for allowing that to happen. Then why bother with freedom at all?

That is not my reasoning at all. Immoral and moral is an opinion, and not offering subsidized health insurance to employees falls far short of the “universal” immoral line. If Walmart was beating it’s workers with whips or something, you might have a point.

But Walmart’s job is to get goods from manufacturer to consumer. Not providing its employees with a minimum quality of life. That falls on the government and society as a whole, simply for practical purposes. Expecting anything else is fantasy.

[alistairSH]

That's exactly why it's gross. And why nations should codify parental leave and similar policies. Failing that, it's a race to the bottom in any employment relationship where the employee doesn't have higher-than-average power.

[lotsofpulp]

My point is the “gross”-ness is attributable to voters and politicians, not businesses.

[corobo]

> I do not see why it is gross

It's the whole bit about forgetting people are people. If you want robots go R&D some robots

> Employees have more utility if they get an abortion

Yea like that

[lotsofpulp]

Everyone likes to say that, and then goes out and buys things from the vendor selling to them at the lowest price.

Societal benefits fall squarely on the government’s shoulders, and their shoulders alone. Admonishing and expecting businesses to not optimize within their boundary conditions is a waste of time.

[hulitu]

I think i read something like this on theonion.

[colpabar]

> Employees have more utility if they get an abortion

This is exactly what people find gross about it. This is like defending walmart for avoiding hiring full time employees so they don't have to provide health care because you think healthcare should be provided by the gov.

[lotsofpulp]

I am not defending Walmart. But I will not attack Walmart for playing by the rules.

> This is exactly what people find gross about it.

Calculating that an employee out on parental leave will cost you more (and hence cause you to be less competitive in the marketplace) than an employee that is working is not gross, it is simply math.

[mrguyorama]

"Don't hate the player, hate the game" is horseshit.

If the action is inhuman, I will hate you for it. Maybe those excuses help you sleep at night but if we want to pretend we aren't just especially smart monkeys then we should act like it

[lotsofpulp]

Not offering subsidized healthcare is inhuman? What quality of life at work is inhuman?

I think it is inhuman to not offer a woman 1 year of parental leave to breastfeed and raise her baby.

Should I simply not attempt to operate a business in the US, because this benefit would make my payroll costs so high in my line of business, that my customers would opt to buy from my competitors at a lower price and my business would fail.

These are practical reasons that businesses cannot take on this responsibility. Easy for white collar programmers and government workers to take the high road. But there are many who have to compete with much smaller margins and volatile cash flows.

I want to give my employees a year of parental leave. I want them to have many more vacation days. I want them to not have to depend on their employer for healthcare and be able to shop around for different jobs easily. That is why I support political efforts to do all these things, but I cannot afford to enact it at my business because my customers would go to my competition. That is a perfectly valid reason to “blame the game” and not “blame the player”.

[mrguyorama]

Yes, if you want to be humane, don't play the game. I don't know how to make that clearer. You don't get to ignore morality just because you want to make more money. Yes, your would-be competitors are playing the game and being immoral, and we should consider them lesser for it.

Pretending that companies aren't made up of individual people all making constant choices is a very very useful thing for people in companies that want to have their cake and eat it to.

If you sign off on "do bad thing so the company keeps making money" then you should quite literally be ostracized. Your competition only gets to benefit from those horrible things because people like you keep telling us it's a bad thing to expect companies to do better.

[lotsofpulp]

In the meantime, who is putting food on the table for their kids?

People’s choices are to either start a well funded business where margins are huge and you can offer plush benefits, work for a business offering high compensation, work for the government, or do nothing at all?

Immigrants should not try their hand at restaurants or gas stations or convenient stores, tradespeople should not attempt hiring apprentices unless they can give the same compensation as big firms, etc?

> Your competition only gets to benefit from those horrible things because people like you keep telling us it's a bad thing to expect companies to do better.

I have spent many words explaining that this is wrong. The competition gets to benefit because customers will buy from the seller selling at the lowest price. It has nothing to do with people like me or their comments.

Higher paid US manufacturing did not disappear because of people like me. It disappeared because customers wanted to save money and buy cheaper goods made in countries with lower manufacturing costs.