Alex Gable spent recent weeks in the bleary-eyed haze of new parenthood. His son was born in November and Mr. Gable powered down his laptop, deleted Slack from his phone and focused on caring for his wife while making the most of the four precious hours a day that their baby was awake — there was tummy time and time spent ogling little drawings of snowflakes.
Then on Jan. 18, Mr. Gable got an early morning notification for an all-hands meeting at Coda, the software company where he worked as a data scientist. Four hours later Mr. Gable, 30, found himself having to deliver the news to his wife: He had been laid off while on paternity leave — months after choosing the company for its generous paternity leave policy and openness toward work-life balance.
“It’s like an earthquake,” he said. “It’s the weight of ‘What am I going to bring him up with? How is his first year going to go? How are you going to make ends meet?’”
Workers across the tech and media industries are experiencing a period of immense whiplash. After lavishing their employees with perks, in a tight labor market and a war for talent, companies have turned to mass job cuts, including Alphabet, which laid off 6 percent of its workers last month, and Microsoft, which cut nearly 5 percent.
These are the same companies that spent recent years expanding benefits in one area in particular: paid parental leave and caregiver benefits, which fill in the gaps for white-collar workers in a country where the federal government does not require employers to offer paid parental leave. Which means that working parents have felt the turbulence of mass layoffs in an especially visceral way.
Continue reading at The New York Times