Paid Maternity Leave Makes For More Productive Workers In Europe

No. 2 daughter is basking in the glow of a New England maternity leave - for now. She's being paid for two months by her employer, and will take an additional month without pay. Her old job will be waiting for her when she returns to work.
Those are better than average terms for an American maternity leave, yet she had spent the first 25 years of her life in Europe expecting more - much more. So, while she's extremely delighted to be a mother, she's not exactly a happy camper.
My daughter grew up in Sweden, which is probably an extreme example of the national government, usually but not always Socialist, where the legislated norm for maternity leave can be as much as 18 months with 80 percent pay.
Marginal tax rates are so high in Sweden that a 20 percent pay cut is barely noticeable. A $30,000 annual wage is taxed at 60 percent - high by American standards, but education, health care and, of course, social security are both government-funded and government-mandated.
The hitch in a long and paid European maternity leave is that anything more than a year has to be shared with the father. As a matter of fact, a month's paid "paternity" leave is required to enter the mix.
European paternity leaves have been the practice for some 30-35 years, and participant rates are around 70-80 percent. Shared leaves are fairly customary, after heavy marketing blitzes, in much of the Continent. So much so, the term "parental leave" has crept into many vocabularies.
In Sweden, for example, a photo of a burly professional wrestler, a national icon just as fashionable as an Ingrid Bergman or a Bjorn Borg, cradling an infant was widely used to sell the paternity-leave concept. It obviously worked.
Much of Europe's paternity or family leave argument has been waged in the name of sexual equality - whatever a woman is entitled to, her partner is, too. Or vice versa.
While American feminists were burning bras and marching for equal rights, however, European feminists were busy piling up quality-of-life benefits.
There's much more emphasis in Europe than America on creating happy workplaces. Parental leave is just one aspect; flexible work hours and longer vacations are among the others. Net income is not particularly decisive to the family equation; not when taxes are triple what they are here.
"The main thing," explains one of my Swedish grandsons, "is to have fun with my little girl."
He's fairly typical of European men, planning his paternity leave so as to extend his vacation. Like many Europeans, he will get an annual four to six weeks of paid vacation, depending on age.
The Europeans, generally, can afford their parental largess. All that striving for happy workplaces seems to be paying off. On average, the Europeans outpace their American colleagues by 1 or 2 percentage points of productivity a year.
Yes, it's common to hear Europeans to complain about their taxes. But most seem to have their little cottage by the water and a favorite Mediterranean resort.
Americans can afford the same fringe benefits as Europeans. All they have to do is reallocate resources that are now wasted on such expenditures as excavating Mars and building bridges to nowhere.
Once long maternity leaves are culturally established in the American workplace, paid paternity leaves can't be far behind. It might help if Americans find a fancier name for parental time off - my daughter's maternity leave puts her on "disability."
On second thought, though, I'd probably be disabled, too, if I had to change 500 diapers in a month.