I get 18 weeks unpaid parental leave until the little one is 18 and have decided to start using them this year
From a corporate standpoint, this type of unpaid leave is statutory so cannot be refused.
Buying leave over here is usually limited to 3-5 days, with some companies offering a bit more (I have seen 10).
You can also take normal unpaid leave, but then they can refuse when you ask for it if there are business reasons for it.
Note:
Thanks for clarifying something that has been on the back of my mind about Australians for a while. They often take weeks of leave to visit countries and I was always a bit puzzled by this.
I agree that a progressive plan with cliffs that actually result in negative net marginal income is ridiculous. What would you propose as a remedy? A more slowly increasing marginal rate? Other than income tax changes?
Get rid of the distortion that makes those marginal tax rates ratchet up at £100k (removal of the tax free allowance of £12.57k)
You can then move the marginal tax rate for the highest band (45% at £125k) down a bit to £100k to make it revenue neutral.
Its a very simple fix. But in the UK any tax change that favours the “rich” (thats all the working folks making £100k+) is basically met with absolute venom from the population and the politicians balk.
The whole thing is absurd. Its like the country is inside some weird mass delusion where you can tax “the rich” into oblivion and they will just sit there taking it because “reasons”.
Of course, that is not reality. They are materially changing their behavior at the margins now and its having some pretty negative economic effects.
I have counselled them all to leave the country if they can because there is no way for them to build any kind of wealth when they are facing marginal rates of over 50% to pay for the old and unproductive.
The longer they wait, the worse off they will be due to demographics and labour policies regarding the public sector with their unfunded pension promises.
We should really start another thread about public pensions on GoA (similar to the AO) because those risks we talked about are now biting in the UK and making the entire country much poorer in the aggregate sense (the young specially).
Perhaps. But money is not products. Having a bunch of digits in an account won’t do any good if the actual material output is too low to support a deeply aged population.
The Canadian pensions system was a mess until the 90s (when the country was almost broke). They managed to take real concrete positive steps to fix their pension system by funding it properly.
They increased the contributions from the population and invested a portion of them every year in real physical assets.
They now have an actual investment portfolio of about 650bn CAN$
The CPP is like the OASDI in the US in that it is an earnings-related pension plan. Unlike the OASDI, it enjoys a steady state funded status and the investments are managed by professional investment managers. There are two other large Canadian components, the Old Age Security and GIS, which are income-tested and are paygo.
