Or, perhaps, the clash of cultures within globalisation:
A senior TikTok executive has been replaced after telling staff he did not believe that companies should offer maternity leave.
Joshua Ma, who leads a Europe division at ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the social media platform, will “take some time off”, a leaked email suggested.
The email came after an investigation by the Financial Times disclosed a culture clash between TikTok’s Chinese owners and some staff based in London. It reported a staff exodus from a “toxic” company culture.
The economic bit of the buying and selling is easy as compared to that cultural bit.
Want to have kids? Great, but why am I paying for that? Brits might not be willing to say that any more but apparently Chinee are.
Surely with maternity leave it’s the person on leave paying for it. It’s part of the “paid benefits” of the job, you get X amount in pounds and Y amount in days off. And if the employee has the choice between one company offering X and another offering X+Y, surely it’s entirely their expression of their preference which they go for.
So much for communist shared destiny…. The Chinese thinking of self, family, village in that order means if you’re outside those groups you should work yourself to death for my benefit.
Slight aside – Men don’t get maternity leave. It looked really sexist so they created shared parental leave. This worked well until the point where men recognised the career hit. To be honest that’s only an issue for those intent on rising to the top. More men than women think they can. Almost all of them are wrong.
jgh,
Beyond a certain point, yes. The problem is that the employer is also forced to keep the job open for the woman. Which means you can’t fire her and replace her, you have to backfill with expensive temps/contractors for that period.
I know a company that closed down their development team in the UK because they had 2 women who went on maternity leave. One of them got pregnant not long after joining, so the company had spend something like £6-8K on recruiters, to have her work for 6 months, and then go off for a year and have to pay a contractor for a year.
Perhaps they should go back to the good old days where dad went to work to support mum and the kids. But of course I’m so old that that seems normal and natural!!
With a name like Joshua Ma, it’s impossible to tell if he is a patriarchal Chinese bloke one generation out of the paddy fields who has seen women give birth and then get back to hard labour. Or whether he is an ultra-wokie Californian who thinks that “maternity leave” discriminates against the beardies in frocks.
Either way, I don’t care.
Michael O’Ryanair is always saying things like this (eg charging passengers to borrow a wheelchair), but he gets away with it. What’s the difference?
Boganboy, get with the times! Haven’t you seen families on the tellybox? Normal families are either a single working mother, or a biracial couple.
Way back in the 1980’s, one building society branch in London had 7 female staff and one male manager. At one point, 6 of the staff were pregnant at once. (No the manager wasn’t the dad!) But as they took time off, for various reasons, he became so stressed, he took off in his car, driving around the country, with all the mortgage applications in the boot.
There was genuine concern that he may do himself in, to the extent that they topped up his bank account so he could continue to fund his walkabout, while they tracked him by his ATM usage.
I know this, because one of those applications belonged to one of my clients. The delays that resulted took a bit of explaining!
If Joshua Ma thinks that productivity is enhanced by a baby under the desk or next to the sewing machine then he shouldn’t just take some leave of absence he should be fired.
Andrew M
He owns the company. Ownership confers rights; including the right to be wrong.
My experience teaching in a Poly and a Uni is that the female staff arrange their pregnancies so that they get to do FA in the Autumn and Spring terms, so that male colleagues have to shoulder the burden while they are off, as the institution won’t even begin to advertise for a part timer to cover the work until the bint has actually left, and then it’s too late to get anyone suitably qualified before she’s ‘back’. Although they never really come back, pulling such tricks as going half-time (so the department loses a half post forever), saying they can’t work evenings or do field courses, sometimes don’t show up at all for lectures, and have an excuse for everything.
Worst of all, the staff ‘colleagues’ who never cover for maternity leave are the other women who have kids.
If we take the emotional aspect out of it, having a baby is essentially a hospital stay and recovery period covered by the company’s insurance. Any other such situation, and you’d immediately return to work afterward.
Of course, this is different because there’s a newborn infant involved, and it is advised by most pediatricians that there is a period of bonding with the mother.
If she doesn’t have a work-from-home type of job, and given that having children is an expected life event for most, does that make the absence of maternity leave discrimination? What if it’s a predominately female company (a fashion brand, perhaps), and most employees are around age 28, and a third of the staff need to take maternity leave simultaneously? Should the company be required to pay all of those people to not work, while also paying temporary staff to fill in for them? Even for jobs that can be done remotely? Is that fair?
Or, does there need to be some kind of compromise? Seems like we haven’t yet fully figured out how to integrate women into the workforce. Seems we’ve inadvertently given men the advantage by making women more of a hassle to hire. In any event, paid paternity leave is a joke.