Reply to Is it poor form to request donated paid leave for childbirth recovery period?

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Reply to "Is it poor form to request donated paid leave for childbirth recovery period?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I will dissent.  I was incapacitated after my vaginal births.  To doctors I had minor complication.  To my vagina, these were MAJOR things like a huge tear.  I could not walk very far.  No way I could have worked.  I was not strolling to Starbucks to gaze at the baby and drink lattes.  I was in MEDICAL recovery, the same way a dude who has a hernia operation is.  Some of them are up and about a day or 2 later, some of them take weeks to recover.  Yet, The Dude is covered with paid time off.  My vagina was given no such time.

It doesn't hurt to ask.  I'd do it.[/quote]

+1 and I love your post PP! I had from the outside view, a healthy straightforward vaginal delivery. From my view, I had a 2nd degree tear and lacerations that made it very difficult to walk the first two weeks. OP, even if all goes well will still be recovering from a medical event. Not just the birth, but also the 9 months of growing an entirely new human and then figuring out how to keep it alive those first hazy months.

No one is requiring people to donate their leave to her specifically, but I can imagine (especially been there done that women who are with it) preferring to give and hour or two as they can over donating to an office baby shower gift. [/quote]

+1  I am 10 months postpartum and still amazed at how little regard our society has for women who give birth.  Saying a woman who has been told by her doctors that she needs time off of work to recover from childbirth should not allowed to take a particular type of leave (in this case, donated leave) that is available to someone else with a different medical condition is textbook sex discrimination.  Especially since childbirth typically happens early in a woman's career, before she can a accrue a ton of leave.  The whole "but a baby is a choice" thing is so stupid.  Why do people insist on making it impossible for people to have babies?  We do actually need people to have babies.  Otherwise, enjoy your Children of Men dystopia folks.

That being said OP I agree that for your own benefit find out what the norms are in your workplace.  [/quote]
OP had said that she will take the time off, regardless of whether anyone donates leave. The amount of time off she will take to recover will not be affected by donations. The only thing that will be affected is her wallet. She would basically be asking people to please skip a day off with their own families, in order to put some extra money in her bank account.[/quote]

How is that different from someone else with any other medical condition?  Leave is money whether it's for childbirth or surgery.[/quote]
In some cases, leave is not only money.  Some employees may face job loss, for example, if they take too much unpaid leave. Other employees may simply forego an adequate leave and return to work earlier than medically safe because they can't afford unpaid time off. So paid leave donation for them is not "just" money, but money that makes the crucial difference between making a full recovery and not. Neither is true in this case. In this case, the donated leave will be solely money. And asking people for money is generally only acceptable when people have insufficient money of their own.

It seems like OP is not worried about her finances, but simply would prefer to have more money than less. If her colleagues are swimming in use-or-lose leave that they don't plan to use, then I think a donation request seems like a win-win. But asking someone to forego family time in favor of work just to put some extra cash in a UMC bank account seems tacky to me.[/quote]

So, to review, you don't think anybody (e.g. someone with cancer) should request donated leave unless they are about to go bankrupt, lose their job or be forced to come back to work before it's recommended medically?[/quote] I gave some examples of extenuating circumstances, I'm sure there are others, where it would be appropriate to ask colleagues for, effectively, monetary gifts.  And, if the leave donation doesn't "cost" colleagues anything because they were going to otherwise lose it, then go nuts.

But if colleagues would actually be giving up their own time off, then I would not want to do it unless I was in a situation where I would also feel justified accepting charitable contributions, taking food from a food bank (which I have as a child growing up), and so on. [/quote]
You act like OP is taking food out of someone's mouth. She is literally filling out paperwork and that's it. In my agency a boilerplate notice is blasted out to the person's division, it doesn't state what their medical issue is. I delete the emails unless I have use or lose, I assume others do the same. No one who is hard up for leave is going to participate. It is completely voluntary and if they don't want to they just don't take any action. I think you are overthinking this. [/quote]

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