A bonus for today, because this is important:
Employers 'targeting pregnant women for redundancy'
The Alliance Against Pregnancy Discrimination in the Workplace has identified a sharp increase in women consulting lawyers or calling helplines because their jobs have been terminated during maternity leave or pregnancy.
"It appears that some employers are using the recession as an excuse to break the law on discrimination," the alliance warned yesterday. Campaigners said that the "long-term consequences of job loss as a result of pregnancy or maternity leave jeopardise women's financial security for their whole lives".
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Campaigners are concerned that attitudes towards maternity rights have hardened among many employers whose businesses are struggling in the economic downturn. The alliance believes that new mothers will be seen as "fair game" for dismissal during the recession, and cites remarks by Sir Alan Sugar as evidence of a new hostility in the business community to enhanced maternity rights. Sugar said: "We have maternity laws where people are entitled to have too much. Everything has gone too far."
While almost any man is entitled to have as many children as he likes without having to physically go through childbirth and without being expected to give significant amounts of his time to any of them as long as he financially supports them. (I'm not saying this is the ideal situation, or that most men even want it that way, just that these are the limits of biology and expectations of society.) Who exactly is "entitled to have too much" here"?
Some personal experiences with this form of discrimination that illustrate how companies put women coming back from maternity leave between a rock and a hard place in order to force them to bow out of a job without doing anything clearly illegal:
About two weeks before my start date I was called in to the office and they told me a lot of people were being made redundant and that I should think about taking redundancy now, before I formally went part-time, so that the terms would be better. They gave me the impression that if I did go back I would probably be made redundant anyway, and made me feel like I had no choice. After such a long time away from the office, I was feeling very vulnerable anyway, so I agreed. That was six months ago, and no one else from the team has been made redundant.
