Most "major employers" hire more than one person in a particular job category and they have a certain amount of turnover.  So a returning parent to the workforce would end up just having first dibs on the inevitable job opening equivalent to their old job. 

It's always interesting that folks think solutions are so impossible on balancing work and family needs, yet if we can achieve all sorts of innovative production methods to produce MORE stuff, we should be able to figure out innovative practices to integrate families better into our workforce systems.

At our school, teachers can share contracts, too.  It is different across districts and within districts, but it really works great.  The teacher who is starting/raising a family often teams with one whose kids are getting older.  This developmental approach may be applicable in other realms as well?

Ticia

It may be worth noting that with France's more restrictive labor laws comes an unemployment rate at double the US rate.

The sons of the prophet are noble and bold,
and quite unaccustomed to fear.
But the bravest by far in the ranks of the Shah
was Abdul Abulbul Amir

I am curious about how holding a job open for that long a period will work with technological changes. Each upgrade of computers and communications technology allows for the possibility of fewer workers, espeically in many of the of the unionized industries. Car plants already have robots as do many others.

The pace of change continues and seems to be going faster. Five years may be a generation of technological change and job held open might not exist any longer for anyone.

For example newspapers. Ebay, Craiglist, TMP etal. are destroying them. Are we sure how many papers will still be in business in 5 years?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I think Ford is quite disconnected from the real world. Many companies will have undergone relocations, downsizing, mergers etc. within a five year period that will make holding a position open completely impossible.

Of course it should apply to Dad as well-- just can't make as emphatic a headline :)

And you don't keep jobs open or unproductive.  Folks talk about churn in jobs, and that's true, but that usually means companies are almost always hiring even as folks are leaving.

But if parents have to be rehired and their old skills aren't exactly what's needed, here's a radical thought-- invest in them to retrain them for new skills.  If companies commit to rehiring, they can find a place for folks that take advantage of their talents, even if it requires a bit of investment in overhauling their skills, something companies should be doing more of in any case.

This whole topic is a straw man and irrelevant. Fiddling while Rome burns.

On April 5, 2007 - 7:28pm oakland said:

How about they guarantee everyone a job? This proposal is puff. Michigan is still sitting on a 7+ percent unemployment rate going on 7 years. It WAS 35% manufacturing until Willie and the DLC passed NAFTA.

As much as I dislike NAFTA:

NAFTA didn't force the Japanese to think LONG TERM rather than SHORT TERM like U S auto executives did.

NAFTA didn't force the Japanese to make safer, more fuel efficient cars than we did.

NAFTA didn't make the final decisions in the U S AUTO industry, the Executives did.

NAFTA didn't decide to manufacture gas guzzlers and all but ignore fuel efficiency.

It was the Auto Executives that fought against every benefit that the Japanese used to market their cars; safety, seat belts, air bags, fuel efficiency, fewer models, higher quality.

Even today with oil approaching $65.00 per barrel the Auto Execs are pushing high profit "gas guzzlers" like Hummers and Ford Excursions.

Finally;

The Ford Taurus was arguably the best selling car in Ford's history, but after a few years they cut back on developing it and threw their money into the big profit gas guzzlers. Last year FORD announced it was discontinuing the Taurus.

The FORD/Auto executives, people like Congressman John Dingle and the Unions all fought every great marketing idea in the auto industry because the Executives babbled that seat belts, air bags, better miles per gallon etc. would cost jobs, they dind't want to invest the money and now they're paying the piper.

No doubt NAFTA hurt the auto industry, but they were committing suicide long before NAFTA came along.

I agree. We are no longer a society of life-time employment and pensions with a single company. Over the course of 5 years, many many (most?) workers change companies, locations, skillsets, etc.

5 years is a pipedream.

A far more practical and potentially attainable solution would be a 1 year parental leave, with partial salary, funded similiar to unemployment.

Why is anyone worrying about this.  DLC knows that this is a non-starter.  It makes them SEEM more family friendly.

Nathan - you really need to consider this point that Abdul Amir is making.

Unlike, say, the EITC, family/parental leave is NOT the kind of issue where more is better and the most progressive position is to max it out. In countries with very long parental leave -- almost all of which ends up being taken by women, because of the massive social pressure for women to do the childrearing work and the massive social stigma on supposedly emasculated stay-at-home dads -- you see a predictable pattern. The huge leave mandate leads to a ton of discrimination in hiring against all women of childbearing age. It's even worse if the employer has to pay the worker during the leave. Also, when you have that kind of leave, and return to work, you are generally shunted into a low-paid mommy track. Occupational segregation increases, women's job prospects worsen, and most insidious of all, the already-intense social pressure (and sometimes employer pressure) on mothers to cut back on work and go home becomes even stronger.

The FMLA was a good first step and we need to make it PAID leave so that people can afford to take it. But 12 weeks is about right. Once you start talking about leaves of over six months, you're not doing women (or men) any favors. Around the world, almost every country offers some kind of maternity leave for mothers, but some of them make the leaves long and some even make them MANDATORY. While nobody would suggest anything that cravenly anti-feminist in the U.S., you get the point. Parental leave is the goldilocks kind of policy issue. You have to get it just right, and Ford's comment doesn't.

Refer back to my first point.

Put some definition in this proposal so we can see how it might or might not work. I think five years is too long, the job might not exist then, and the employee may no longer be qualified and current. I'll float this framework again:

At the beginning of employment, the employee makes a choice, revocable at any time, to accept or reject the Working Parent Option (WPO). Those who accept the WPO are eligible, after working for some qualifying period, to leave their jobs for one or two years and return, more or less on the same terms that National Guard members (or, with an eye on the near future, draftees) are given by state law. WPO members will have some percentage of their pay deposited into an interest-bearing account under their name. When the WPO employees take their time off, some percentage (at least fifty) of what is in their account, including interest, will be paid to them as they direct (lump sum or monthly).

When they return to work, the remaining percentage of their WPO account, including interest, will be added to their monthly paychecks over a specified period.

If they fail to return to work after the company has held the job open for the specified time, or if they return and then quickly quit, the unpaid portion of the WPO account is forfeited to the company. Finally, an appeal mechanism will allow repayment of the remaining WPO money to the employee in cases where the employee is unable to return to work, or who must quit soon after doing so, but only for specified reasons that are crafted to avoid the usual loopholes sought by upper-income parents acting in bad faith.

Employees who wish to revoke their acceptance of the WPO get their money back, plus interest, and revert back to the pool of non-WPO employees, who have only the minimum amount of family leave provided for under existing law.

There would obviously have to be a minimum employer size for this to be workable, but minimum employer size is well established in other laws providing remedies and entitlements, and so should not be an insurmountable problem.

Fair and simple. No pay inequality, single or childless employees have less to complain about, parents are not treated any worse or better than people gone on military leave, and only welshers forfeit any money.

This program should really be implemented as an affirmative action program for those who have left the work force to take care of children. Employers should be forced to hire new parents who are minimally qualified before being permitted to consider other candidates. That would be much more enforceable than trying to tie employees to specific functions at specific companies.

To begin with, lower-income parents probably can't even afford the time off, so the question of making the WPO payments, in all likelihood, won't arise.

Don't kid yourself. Any plan (Ford's [via Newman] or my suggested alternative) which purports to hold a job open for a period of years, rather than weeks or months, is a measure calculated to bolster the dignitary interests of the upper-income set, and won't amount to beans for the lower-income population.

It is likely that in an organization, jobs held by lower-income workers are more numerous, more fungible, less demanding of current knowledge, and less likely to be destroyed by reorganization during a lengthy absence than the specialized employment arrangements of upper-income workers. They are therefore likely to be more easily regained after some time off.

I’m not sure what’s in this for the employer. He will incur a cost when the WPO employee leaves since a job really can’t be held open and then incur another cost if he is obligated to take the employee back at a time when he is not in a position to hire. He gets part of their account if they don’t return, so he is partially compensated only if the employee does not return and he is not hiring.

More straight forward to simply pass a law requiring that employees on leave must be rehired and allow the WPO employees set up their own accounts if they wish.

I really don’t know how much this would help upper income people. They will still lose the potential advancement within the company and in fact might lose market value while not working. Would they really want to go back to a company that had to be forced to hire them back?