- what the fuck does “donated sick days” mean
- what does sick leave have to do with this anyway
“Guarantee access to donated leave bank” fuck you. New mothers need a guaranteed six weeks of recovery time and should be able to tag in with their partner for at least a year. Federally guaranteed.
The early years of human life are absolutely crucial for healthy development.
Our state legislatures really don’t care about babies after they are born.
The idea is women should not be working in the first place. Taking all the men jobs like teaching children!
🤡
For a moment there I was majorly confused as I read it:
William says Volkswagen teachers who are pregnant, new mothers would have access to donated sick days.
But the Bill is probably not a name here and the Volkswagen is VW not WV.
The grammar of the headline is still trash tho:
The law says some states teachers who are pregnant, new mothers would have access to donated sick days.
You misunderstood it, rewrote it incorrectly and then got mad at yourself.
It’s a bill, not law yet so it’s not correct to call it a law. In the US it’s pretty common to shorten states to some initials (such as FL, NY, CA).
Why so serious? It’s a goof. I’m not from US, I don’t know how a bill is supposed to be different from a law, It’s all rules and shit that governments enforce.
West Virginia lol. One of the worst states
Well we also don’t get a lot of kids in Denmark, in spite of very generous parental benefits. But regardless, this news story is crazy dystopian.
Women often have to trade career progression for motherhood. That’s a big ask considering the decades we’ve spent letting neoliberals devalue motherhood and labour in and out of the home.
~20 years ago my wife was mocked at university for wanting to have children. It hasn’t improved much since.
Bill will donate every dollar of his for this. Right? I don’t think bill thought this through.
I don’t think Elliot Pritt will give a single penny to anyone. Sounds like Pritt is a Prick.
What are “donated sick days” don’t you have maternity leave in the USA?
That is complicated. First, women who have given birth are eligible for Disability Pay for the first 6 -8 weeks. This is a fraction of their pay and generally does not actually arrive until a month or two later. Some states have paid maternity leave, providing certain conditions. NY state, where I live, provides for paid maternity leave on top of the temporary disability for up to 67% of pay… there is a cap on the income. For 2026, the NYSAWW is $1,833.63, which means the maximum weekly benefit is $1,228.53-- but this is at scale for the employee’s regular pay. This is $51.21 more than the maximum weekly benefit for 2025. There, however, are many states that do not offer anything other than the temporary disability. Some workplaces/employers offer some paid maternity leave as an employee benefit. Many do not but if you work for an employer that has over a certain number of employees, you may be able to get family leave (FMLA) which is generally unpaid but provides job security in name… but At-Will Employment states are free to just fire anyone under specious reasons. States that have banned abortion or severely restricted it offer the least amount of maternity leave benefits, ironically.
Sounds like a beautiful place to start a family in.
Americans have maternity leave under the Family Medical Leave Act but it’s a paltry 12 weeks and unpaid.
So for many people, including these teachers, they have the choice of paying your bills or taking care of your kid or begging your coworkers to please give up their vacation days so you can continue to live while having a baby
Like every other third world country.
what
It’s where they make you beg your coworkers for their own sick leave to be transferred to you, or have HR send out an email blast begging employees to donate their own meager PTO to you, instead of the employer granting an appropriate amount of sick or maternity leave to begin with.
How does that even work? How can you transfer sick days? It’s not like you have a fixed amount of days you are allowed to be sick, right… right?
You generally have a fixed amount of paid sick days per year. Those are what’s being transferred.
That’s fucking insane.
Here, if you’re sick you get sick leave. There is no real limit other than after 2 years of illness you basically go on disability instead of sick leave.
What if your illness takes longer than the amount of days you have, you are just expected to show up at the office in your hospital bed?
You are told after a certain amount of time, if you do not return to work full time, you are laid off/fired and lose your health insurance. By law, they have to offer COBRA health insurance coverage to you but that is like 3X the cost of your insurance while employed. At that point, you apply for state funded health insurance (Medicaid) and are still given a work requirement… 80 hrs a month now unless you can prove disability and it takes at least 2 years to qualify for SSD (Social Security Disability). There are some carve outs… like if you have really bad cancer, there is a Medicaid spend down for treatment, or if you are in kidney failure and need regular hemodialysis.
Like you get two hours to recover and they shove you back to work.
Manufactured subjectivity for serfs: “Remember: Your children are very sacred to us until they are born into in this world; then they become slave-meat for degenerate billionaires.”
I live in this state.
These same folks can’t seem to figure out why we’ve had an ever worsening teacher shortage for the last couple of decades or so, btw. (Spoiler alert: It may not solely be due to the fact that everyone who can gets the fuck out of here as soon as humanly possible 🤯)
Betting this is only the thin end of the wedge.
What an uncivilized shithole.
You couldn’t make this shit up
Should have posted this in nottheonion honestly.
Thanks for nothing, Elliott Prick.
Also, fuck you.
“Donated sick days”? WTF? Sick days should be a right. Maternity leave should be a right.
Back when I was a teacher, we could “donate” a number of sick days to a pool that would help other teachers who ended up with long term health issues. And yes, you are correct.
That’s the employer’s responsibility, not yours
I think it’s the government’s responsibility.
FMLA IS a right (albeit crap compared to most of the rest of the civilized world). They just find ways to screw people out of it
In addition to what everyone else has posted, FMLA also has the wonderful caveat of not coming into force until you’ve been at a job for one year. Yay…
FMLA? Some kind of US maternity leave?
FMLA is for any kind of family leave (children, parents, even your own medical issues) but there are requirements on how long you are employed at a particular place and how many employees they have there. For most small businesses – they do not qualify. Larger institutions/job places do.
For people outside of the US, FMLA is up to three months of unpaid leave where you get the privilege of getting to keep your job and your benefits (though you continue to pay for them while not being paid) if you have a medical justification to be out of work.
For many American women, this is all they have access to for maternity leave. So they power through those three months (caring for a newborn no less) then have to scrap together the cash to put their 4 month old in day care ($15 to $20k annually) while not getting paid for that quarter of the year.
40% of infants are still breast feeding at 12 months. This means a new mom is often trying to find time at work to pump and is providing pumped milk to the daycare to be given to their child while they're working. Health officials consider only 40% to be less than ideal since breastfeeding has immunological and cognitive benefits for infants and remarkably cognitive benefits even for moms later in life. Many American women stop breast feeding at 6 months (the minimum recommended duration) since pumping at work becomes too cumbersome.Around 40 to 45% of women in the US don’t even qualify for FMLA because your employer needs to be large enough (50+ employees) and you need to have worked for them long enough (usually a year) to qualify.
Blue states fill the gap with their own state run programs (still usually only three months, though you get some pay) but if you’re in a red state the choice for many women is 1) have children and enter financial ruin or 2) don’t have children.
America lags behind most advanced economies in this regard and there isn’t any sign of these circumstances improving.
the right to take the time off, not the right to be paid for it.
Thanks I hate it
