Building on our 2015 announcement
Three years ago, we announced that we would require a wide variety of suppliers that do business with Microsoft in the United States to provide their employees with the important benefit of paid time off. Today we are announcing that over the next year we will take a further step, to ensure that these suppliers also provide their employees who handle our work with paid parental leave.
We have long recognized that the health, well-being and diversity of our employees helps Microsoft succeed. That’s why we provide industry-leading benefits for our employees, including comprehensive health and wellness programs for families, paid vacation, paid sick leave and paid time off for new parents.
We also know that we rely on a wide array of other companies to supply us with goods and services that reflect their core competencies, and that the people who work for our suppliers also are critical to our success. That is why we took the step three years ago to require our U.S. suppliers doing substantial business with Microsoft to provide paid […]
My first reaction to this article was quite negative as I immediatly saw that the same authoritarian principle of dictating to their supply chain could be utilized to support an agenda that Increases human suffering. It also occurred to me that quite likely this is already happening as like seems to attract like and businesses tend to deal with those thry like.
But then the bright light hit when I realized that corporations are probably more vulnerable (but less targeted) than government to organized citizenry acting strategically and nonviolently.
I was surprised to learn that maternity benefits are left up to individual employers in the U.S. I had assumed it was a state or federal responsibility. Leaving it up to employers must result in a patchwork of maternity benefits available to workers across the country and industries. In Canada, it is a federal responsibility under employment insurance that all workers pay into. Mothers who give birth get 15 weeks that can be taken before or after the actual birth. Following that either parent can take parental leave for 35 weeks or extend it to 61 weeks (but they get the same dollar value in benefits as 35 weeks, it’s just spread out). The amount you get is pegged as a percentage of your income. The parents can split the time if they want and parental leave applies to both birth and adoptive babies and of course same-sex couples. It’s a flexible and adaptive system and much like our medical system, while not perfect, is much loved.