My husband is a project manager at a construction company (smallish company of about 50-60 people). He’s good as his job and is kind of being trained by the current vice president to take over his role when he retires. That could be 5-10 years away, it seems like men in this company kind of just work forever because they enjoy it. It’s a pretty small and local company. He used to work in the field too but now has 3 guys working under him doing field work, but they call him almost daily to check their work or generally coordinate them.

He makes a good salary but he gets about a 20% bonus each Christmas. I guess it’s performance based but it has gone up incrementally up until 20% and has then remained steady since so we’re guessing this is the usual schedule.

Now for my question! When our first son was born he took 2 weeks of paid paternity leave in August. He really procrastinated talking to his boss about it and they ended up classifying those 2 weeks as his vacation time, which replenishes in January so it wasn’t a big deal. We were hoping he could at least work from home for the 3rd week but when he called his boss at the end of the 2nd week, he said he really needs him back in the office.

I know most moms are in this situation, we have no family or friends nearby to help so I was on my own. It ended up being fine but the thing is that he’s entitled to 12 weeks of paternity leave (state law) and 52 days of paid leave. The payment is made by the state, and the company doesn’t pay for those days.

He asked his boss if he could use these paid days but their HR person apparently just seemed really not familiar with it so they said no. Legally they cannot retaliate against an employee for asking to use this benefit. But this is a smallish company (50 people?) and they could easily reduce his bonus or cut his job assignments if they think he’s not serious about his job.

They do need him, it’s hard to hire good workers for this type of work. But I don’t want him to sour the waters between him and his boss or coworkers. I’m a SAHM so we do rely on his paycheck for survival.

Is it unreasonable for him to ask to take off 2 or 3 weeks for paternity leave, and then 1 day/week for the first year of our baby’s life? This is really common in pretty much any other company around here. It’s just so hard to tell with this company because it’s a typical conservative construction company full of middle aged or older men who probably can’t fathom a dad even wanting to take paternity leave.