Sorry for linking to Krone.at, which is a running joke in Austria regarding their quality, but i couldn’t find an english language source anywhere else.
And it’s only mildly infuriating if you are a well-tempered person - i personally find it outrageous. His main argument is that child rearing is no business case. Maybe we should make it one.
I am pretty sure he meant he meant what you said. He afterwards “apologized”:
He said:" Family “is no business and no job, where you leave the office after your work is done. The payment is not to be measured in money, but in trust, family cohesion and uncountable shared moments”. He knows that “how much this assignment takes from you”, but family "still isn’t a business case“
I say fuck him. I say the time used for rearing children should be financially compensated, since it is work that makes sure that the next generation become a valuable member of society. This time should also be valued when calculating pensions - Austria had it’s “equal pension day” on 9th of August. Women in Austria work on average 96 hours per week for unpaid children care work, which would more than make up for that difference if acknowledged.
This cuts deeper than just “care work isn’t work”. It also devalues men who are willing to put in the work and hours to care for children together with their partner. This mindset makes it harder for men to refuse to work their ass off and never seeing their family.
I am a man. Fuck everyone who thinks like him. People like him shouldn’t be “a business case”, they should be sitting in a gutter dependent on the goodwill of random people - just as he expects from people who offer valueable time and work towards their children.
This is inexorably tied to legacy, the kind created by having children. The politics of it is why we’ve had a mere 50yrs of equality / the hard push for true equality and millennia of…not. It is, in part, why Roe fell in the US, to push back and reclaim some of the equality given.
To devalue the unpaid labor involved, to not acknowledge the value of not just having legacy but a legacy that is nurtured, is a rollback to a time without women’s liberation. It fails to acknowledge how integral that unpaid labor is to societies, growth, development. And is entitled as fuck. The man is a cretin. Apology or not, you know who and what he is now.