US is near the bottom in family-friendly employment policies

In the "sadly not a surprise" category, a new study from researchers at Harvard and McGill Universities shows that "The United States lags far behind virtually all wealthy countries with regard to family-oriented workplace policies such as maternity leave, paid sick days and support for breast-feeding...The study, officially being issued Thursday, says workplace policies for families in the United States are weaker than those of all high-income countries and many middle- and low-income countries."

The most damning information, according to the article, is that the US is alone with just four other countries - Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea - who do not provide some guarantee of paid maternity leave. On the surface, this does not appear to be esteemed company. 173 total countries were in the study.

The strong points for the US were in the areas of equal access to employment, and in compensation. The sad state of this country is that dollars are able (and expected) to appease any injustice imposed upon people. That's a conclusion that you could draw in theory, anyway. In reality, those who are not offered maternity leave are more likely to be people working at the low end of the pay scale.

This is yet another example of how corporate America is allowed to run rampant with little governmental control. All corporations have to do is say, "it will cost too much money if we are mandated to provide maternity leave" and the government cowtows to them. God forbid we jeopardize the bottom line by being decent to people. We want mothers to be back at work so we can continue poisoning their children with polluted discharges into the air and water while nobody is looking.

Is it not true that unpaid maternity leave costs too much for most families to handle? Why are corporate bank accounts more important than personal ones? Furthermore, don't corporations suffer from lost productivity and poor morale from workers who are forced back on the job when they should be attending to their children, or from women who were forced to take unpaid leave in order to care for and bond with their newborn? What about not providing paid sick time? Sick workers will go to work rather than miss a day's pay, perhaps to their own detriment as well as their co-workers, and more productivity losses ensue. It's not easy to quantify the cost of lost productivity, but it is a real one that does affect a company's bottom line.

To be fair, most companies do provide for paid maternity leave and sick time, though they are not forced to do so. Allowances for breastfeeding breaks and paternity leave, however, are much less common. And many companies are happy to have employees work 60-hour weeks with no legal repercussions. Workers are too often treated as commodities - units of productivity, if you will - in this country, rather than as people. The government is loathe to create more regulations, assuming that the "market" will take care of any problems in our capitalist society. However, the market does not address employment practices, especially for those on the lower end of the earnings scale. Low-skill workers can not pick and choose where they work based upon benefits, they have to hope to get jobs wherever they are available. If that's at Wal Mart and they won't be getting health insurance, too bad for them. Organized labor faces more roadblocks every year, making them less effective than in the past. And the consumer market isn't really in a position to have much influence, because we simply are not informed of a company's employment practices, and we are not educated on how poor educational practices can be a detriment to society.

If the US is supposed to be the greatest country to live in, then we should act like it. People should be treated as people, and poor employment practices should not be legal in this country. It's shameful to be the wealthiest country on Earth and continue to appear at the bottom of these lists.