It’s not “society’s children” they’re refusing to support, it’s their shitty employer under capitalism. If we lived in a utopian society, you’d have a point. It’s not the employee’s role to sacrifice for some other person the employer is accommodating at your expense.

When it’s possible to give the same flexibility to everybody, that should be done of course, but it’s not always the case.

That's the crux of the argument, and one that I, as a father, side with the childless people.

Yes, they should get the same flexibility afforded to parents. 1000% But the problem comes in here: "When it's possible..."

Ask yourself why that's not always the case. The answer, of course, is that payroll is treated by virtually every business owner on the planet as pretty much a min/max game. Minimum wage possible for maximum productivity/profitability. It's not even just limited to having proper staffing levels...I've worked at places that would fire people for not accepting a promotion due to being in their current position for "too long" and having accumulated annual raises to the point where they made a whole few dollars more per hour then their colleagues in the same position...it wasn't even enough that they'd been there for years and were twice as productive, they needed to climb the ladder so they would be an underpaid supervisor instead of an "overpaid" worker. That's all that mattered.

The question people should be asking is why something like a single coworker being out of the office unexpectedly has such a large impact to the rest of the group. Why they're running so close to the bone so fucking always that all it takes is one or two people to get the flu and the whole fucking office is suddenly falling behind. The only reason that happens is because their employer lives in complete mortal terror each and every single day that they may be paying someone a full time wage and only getting 80% productivity in return. They would rather have all their people work at 100% all of the time, and then when someone gets sick or god forbid breeds, have the rest of their employees just work at 120% to keep up. Because that is cheaper for them then having an extra body around and the whole office working at 80% when someone isn't out. They don't care about burnout, they don't care about work/life balance. They care about getting, at a minimum, 100% output from someone working 100% of the time...or rather, they will settle for 100%, but if you made it 110%, hey, here's a pizza party a few times a year, aren't I magnanimous?!

This is just one of the many methods the ownership class uses to divide us. They tell you that so and so went out on maternity leave and there's just nothing they can do, they just need everyone else to work harder to make up for it, as if the possibility of hiring another person so that you can be down someone and still cruise along without everyone busting their ass like lunatics trying to stay afloat never existed in the first place.

Don't be mad at the people with kids. Don't be mad at the people without kids. Be mad at your employer who just refuses to have more than the barest minimum payroll at all times so that people can't even get sick without feeling fucking guilty to their teammates as if it's their fault that their boss won't build in a buffer.

if you’re having kids, best account for the reality of them

your lack of planning isn’t my emergency