A thirty-year old woman of my acquaintance has signed a contract with an ethnic Chinese company based in several Southeast Asian nations to be some sort of assistant general manager in some media company in Sydney. At the end of the three years she is 'guaranteed' a general managership of her own in whatever city she chooses in which the company has a base. However her employment contract stipulates that she may not get pregnant for the next three years. I am unaware of the penalties should she do so. The problem is that her husband (and she) observe that the injections she must submit to every three months are making her heavier, and gosh knows having what hidden side effects. They have been married for less than a year.
Now she knows very well what she has got herself into, and no one forced her to sign this contract, but I am thinking one of the main reasons she was able to land this plum job was that so many other candidates were horrified at the offer.
So my question is: is this standard procedure in the brave new world of the 21st century? A hundred years ago when I was just starting out, I don't believe any corporation, even a presumably amoral ethnic Southeast Asian Chinese one would have dared to make such an offer. To my way of thinking, this contractual obligation is clearly a human rights violation.
Even the mainland Chinese government, which I also presume to be amoral, or at least eager to accept whatever is expedient to its own ends, while it has an official one-child policy and penalizes couples who 'slip up' - even this long-considered to be oppressive Communist government probably realizes that it is unprecedented, and a bit much (if they weren't sitting on a population time bomb in that country) to interfere in married life. I mean, isn't one of the pleasures of copulation that no one is in charge of it? King and country may push you around plenty during the day, but what couples do once the lights go out is pretty much beyond government as well as corporate regulation... or so I thought.
If such contracts are the price women must pay for equality in the workplace, I say it is too high a price.
This woman is thirty years old and isn't asking for my advice, but if it was me, I'd tell them to take their job and stick it where the sun doesn't shine. How about you?
Now she knows very well what she has got herself into, and no one forced her to sign this contract, but I am thinking one of the main reasons she was able to land this plum job was that so many other candidates were horrified at the offer.
So my question is: is this standard procedure in the brave new world of the 21st century? A hundred years ago when I was just starting out, I don't believe any corporation, even a presumably amoral ethnic Southeast Asian Chinese one would have dared to make such an offer. To my way of thinking, this contractual obligation is clearly a human rights violation.
Even the mainland Chinese government, which I also presume to be amoral, or at least eager to accept whatever is expedient to its own ends, while it has an official one-child policy and penalizes couples who 'slip up' - even this long-considered to be oppressive Communist government probably realizes that it is unprecedented, and a bit much (if they weren't sitting on a population time bomb in that country) to interfere in married life. I mean, isn't one of the pleasures of copulation that no one is in charge of it? King and country may push you around plenty during the day, but what couples do once the lights go out is pretty much beyond government as well as corporate regulation... or so I thought.
If such contracts are the price women must pay for equality in the workplace, I say it is too high a price.
This woman is thirty years old and isn't asking for my advice, but if it was me, I'd tell them to take their job and stick it where the sun doesn't shine. How about you?
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