I received an Email from the News Desk at WBUR.
“Baker’s administration announced a new grant program Wednesday to give employers $4,000 per new hire to cover either training costs or signing bonuses for the new employees.”
The problem with a signing bonus is that it’s really just an admission that next year, you are going to take a pay cut because there is no bonus for signing on for the next year.
“Of course, the new grant program is just one piece of solving the worker shortage.”
There is NO Worker Shortage. We do seem to have a shortage of journalists who understand economics. We have a labor market and for the first time in a very long time, probably before some journalists were born, we are in a “seller’s market”. Any employer (buyer) willing to pay fair market prices for an employee (seller) will not experience any shortage.
“House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka pointed to the prohibitive cost of childcare as a major obstacle for many women who want to get back to work. ”
Again, why must we assume that every parent WANTS to get back to work? If wages were higher, one parent could stay home, manage the household duties, raise the kids.
It’s not like signing bonuses are anything new. I think when I was in college MA was offering a 20K bonus for new teachers. Besides, you seem to both complain people aren’t being paid enough AND that money is being made available to pay them more.
Correct, signing bonusses are not new, they are the same scam they have always been.
Not in my field, and not in my wife’s field. In our fields, a signing bonus is one way that a hiring manager can bypass often-arbitrary constraints that tie compensation to a particular job classification. A signing bonus is often accompanied by a promise of a six-month salary review (for companies that normally work on a twelve-month review cycle).
When an actual person has filled the job and is well-regarded by peers, the hiring manager is nearly always able to increase the salary to match the shortfall implied by the signing bonus.
This is a routine approach used while real-market salaries for a given job category are rising faster than the HR guidelines for that job category.
A different question is “Why do you oppose anything that makes it possible for women to work?”
In many households — even MOST households — both parents want to work. In many households, the “one parent” who “could stay home, manage the household duties, raise the kids” is the man (leaving aside for the moment households with both partners are men or both partners are women).
Once more, your commentary leaves the impression that you oppose efforts to make it possible for women to be breadwinners in a family.
I don’t.
Why?
You wrote:
Were you referring to husbands in this paragraph?
You ask why both parents want to work in many or most households. Is it so hard to understand that both men and women want to make contributions outside their home and family?
There are some men and women who are content to make their home and family their most important priority, and who have no desire or ambition to go beyond that domain.
Many men and women strive for more than that.
Unlike many, I do not assume that a mother or father is best suited to be the home-keeper or the one who brings in wages by working in the market.
Unlike many, I do not assume that working in the market is “making a contribution” that one desires more than making a contribution outside of the market. While there are some, even prominent members of the Democratic Party that have a disdain for anyone who is not working in the market – and who denigrate patrenting and supporting the family as “staying home and baking cookies”, I see this as more reasons for ordinary citizens to view the party as elitists who only view an individual based on their W-2.
Frankly, I find it insulting to infer that a reluctance to work in the market while preferring to support and foster a family somehow shows a lack of ambition.
I’m sorry you are insulted.
Here is what I wrote:
Which part of “make contributions outside their home and family” is unclear?
Your value judgements are your own, not mine. Some men and women value the contributions they make to their home and family more than anything else. Other men and women place a higher value on the contributions they make to particular fields outside the home and family.
You appear to be unhappy that some people make different choices than you. That unhappiness is the result of your own judgements.
I didn’t write that anybody shows a generic lack of ambition. I wrote instead that some have no “ambition to go beyond [their home and family]”
You either misquote me or else you have your own private definition of “ambition”.
Your rhetorical flourishes do not obscure the fundamental assumptions about values and priorities that are reflected in your commentary.
It appears that you don’t like women to work outside the home. It also appears that you don’t like men or women who prioritize things outside the home higher than their homes and families. We are left to wonder how you feel about men or women who choose not to have families at all.
I’m happy that the Democratic Party has broader values and priorities than you express in your commentary.
I’d chalk it up not so much to contribution as ambition. At least to me, the reason we make strides toward equalizing opportunity to have careers between men and women is that many of both WANT to do work that interests them.