“An estimated one out of every four American moms returns to work within two weeks of giving birth because they cannot afford to miss a paycheck or risk losing their job. We want every mother to have the chance to spend those precious few weeks with her newborn or adopted child.” - Donald Trump.

Get bent, Orange Man.

If you want to give six weeks, or one year or whatever, paid maternity leave for the employees of your hotels and resorts, that's your business. Literally. Otherwise, it's between the employer and employee.

If you don't want to be apart from your child, make your choice. You don't get to demand other people subsidize your choices. If your employer has to pay for your private decisions and aspects of your life outside of work, your employer has the right to order those aspects of your life. These sorts of policies also explain some aspects of what appears to be the so-called glass ceiling. Why would you want a woman holding down a critical position in your company, if the law gives her incentives to fuck off from her job with no consequences? And don't get me started on the nonsense of extending this to fathers as well. If there was some law mandating paternity leave, and I were a pregnant woman, I would be taking bids on who gets to be named the biological father of my kid (no, I won't take a DNA test, that's intrusive and a violation of my privacy), so he can get a nice long paid vacation for nothing. And my husband gets in on it, because he's also involved, he's playing a paternal role, who are you to limit the size of my child's family?

Anecdotal evidence - my brother is a nurse at an oncology center, and when he was trained to administer a particular type of treatment, the woman training him expressed relief that he was male, because the last four nurses she had trained to take up the task had gotten pregnant and gone on maternity leave, forcing her to take up the slack and train a replacement. Additionally, I received a note in my mailbox at work on Monday demanding that I use the rest of my vacation time before the year is up or lose it (which is effectively shorting me on my due pay by making me work more hours for the same salary). I had enough vacation time saved to leave work four hours early that shift and never come in for the rest of 2019. But I can't take the time, because I can't get anyone to cover the shifts, because somehow employees are responsible for staffing issues. When I pointed out to my supervisor that there were sufficient personnel on the schedule this weekend, he said that no one from our unit can take time off without coverage, because one of them knocked up his woman, and his maternity leave could start any day now. One of our coworkers (divorced father, shared custody, don't even get me started on what a great job the patriarchy has done enforcing his parental rights) had to withdraw his request for Christmas off, because what if his coworker's female partner's reproductive system decides to start the party early. I'm actually better off than the rest of the team, because I have more theoretical flexibility in getting my shifts covered.

And that's the real cost of "family leave", setting aside the risks to the fiscal viability of an employer and the adverse consequences the expense of family policies can have on employees who just do their jobs without incurring superfluous expenses for the company, or the cost of tax-payer subsidies of private lifestyle choices: the colleagues, coworkers and peers of the new parents who have to pick up the slack with uncompensated additional labor, or reductions in their own family time because lawyers or politicians (or a spinster bartender-turned-politician) decided what families actually need. What they need is fewer immigrants to reduce crime, reduce competition for jobs & wage deflation and reductions on income taxes, so they can keep more of what they make, and school taxes, that fund separation from their children for over a quarter of every day!