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France to offer four-day week to parents sharing custody of children (www.telegraph.co.uk)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Why not all parents though?

[–] [email protected] 58 points 8 months ago (3 children)

or just, y'know, everyone?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago

If you have no children but have a cat, you should be entitled to caternity leave.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Gotta boost that birth rate somehow

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Why though? There are more than enough people on this planet. Delaying the failure of pension systems for a few more decades is not a sufficient reason to screw over all of humanity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

This won't delay shit

[+] [email protected] -12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

But why prevent births in France while emerging/ developing countries are spawning armies of babies -maybe under their own policies? Don’t we want to have some births in western / rich countries as well? We’re already below replacement rate if I’m not mistaken…

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (3 children)

The main reason poor and developing countries have high birth rates is that their rate of child mortality is higher and that they have no social systems to take care of the elderly so having many children is sort of their pension system. If anything we want to introduce measures there that make the high birth rates unnecessary.

Also, why would we want to make the problem worse by having births here in addition to theirs? Assuming you don't mean the obvious racist or nationalist motivations?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Also, this commenter escalated "not pushing rates" to "preventing" pretty quickly. Noone is keeping you from getting children, mate. It's a personal choice that should neither be prohibited nor rewarded.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It seems though that our pension system is failing, as you pointed out yourself. So maybe having a stable number of children is the better pension system?

Given the productivity rate that we have in industrialized countries, we don't need 5 children per mother, but 2 seem reasonable. And there isn't "more than enough" people. Any number of "enough" is arbitrary, until the planetary limits are exceeded from the number of people. But we could easily sustain another 2-4 billion more people with a good life, if we would get rid of capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sure, but how likely is that? Shouldn't we start on filling the planet up to that limit only once we have a better system, not now?

We could also stabilise pension systems by allowing in immigrants to work the jobs that aren't getting done tight now. Skilled craftspeople are needed, and if they help us with pensions and get a better life for their families out of it, even better, right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think there should be no limits to immigration, but we also need to avoid deliberately robbing other countries of their skilled work force. Germany for instance has installed programs to get nurses from countries like Romania, which then are lacking there. Meanwhile they are faced with strong racism here, the notion being that they should feel grateful and accept being subjected to shitty (and often illegal) working conditions.

When you look at the people "invited" for working in agriculture or slaughterhouses you often find conditions that fulfill many criteria of forced labor.

And telling people they shouldn't have children is one step towards enforcing them not having children. And this will be done along ethnical lines and it will be genocide. That is why we need to reject this notion, before the idea becomes normalised and then the fascists say "obviously population control is needed for the other people, not us"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

That's a very good point of course - brain drain is a problem and we shouldn't encourage it. I suppose I'd rather propose encouraging countries to offer refugees good educations. I am explicitly talking about jobs that require training and come with an expectation of a good life - I agree that the jobs in agriculture and slaughterhouses and such are inhumane.

I don't think we should tell people not to have children. I just think that we should stop telling them that putting more humans on this world is the moral option or their duty. I think we should at least encourage people thinking of having kids to consider the consequences that has, and then leave the choice to them.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 8 months ago

I like diversity… and I wish my culture survives, same as the others.

I believe you’re wrong on the rest: by having birth rates that exceeds the infancy mortality rate they are still largely growing in absolute numbers. Just check the numbers; there’s growth. Likely they would grow further without the sad and unfortunate mortality rate but still.