Chambers of Commerce critise extending parental leave to men

[Workingmum101]

Hi All

I'd be interested in your opinions on this matter below. David Frost thinks that extending parental leave rights to men will leave small businesses in a pickle, but in reality there should be no difference in how parental leave is applied to men or women with children, just greater flexiblity in how it is 'divvied' up. This is the press release below. Give me your views and I will direct the Chambers of Commerce press officer to the site for a more enlighted view..

Commenting on today?s announcement on shared parental leave, David Frost, Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), said:


?While Nick Clegg?s announcement on shared parental leave may prove politically popular, it fundamentally ignores the needs of business. Last week, David Cameron claimed a pro-growth, pro-business, pro-jobs agenda, but now the Government expects small businesses to cope with yet more red tape.

?Business is not against the principal of shared parental leave, but how is an employer expected to plan and arrange cover with this fully-flexible system? This is too difficult for small businesses to deal with, and could prevent them from taking on staff at a time when they are expected to create wealth and jobs. The rigid rules Nick Clegg refers to and plans to abolish are the very same rules needed by business to help them plan.

This is yet another example of rushed thinking. It suggests that the Government is out of touch with how to support business owners. This sort of red tape is like a sledgehammer hitting small businesses which should be sources of growth and jobs.?

[HecateQueenOfWitches]

I used to own a small business. It is so tough for the little guy.

how can small businesses survive and build and become bigger businesses and continue to be employers if the costs of employing are so high? You only have so much money! Time to sort all this stuff out, disruption.. these things all cause problems.

Realistically - what will happen if the costs of employing people with young families / of an age when they are likely to have children keep rising?

Small businesses don't have the resources of large organisations. There needs to be a balance.

[GrendelsMum]

I'd be interested to know exactly what's being proposed, and what the objections from the Chamber of Commerce are.

Are they saying that people will have the entitlement to announce at a week's notice or so that they're going to take a month's paternity leave a few months after the baby was born? I can see that that would be difficult for businesses, but this doesn't seem to be what's being suggested at the moment.

[Workingmum101]

Ok, in a nutshell the changes propose that maternity leave currently only available to women has the potential to be applied to men.

A couple might for example decide to split the 12 months maternity leave entitlement between each of them. The mother take the first six months the father the second. Maternity pay entitlements will remain the same and are paid by the government to employers.

The issue is one of flexibility, but flexibility has significant benefits for employers. Employees are likely to be more loyal, work harder and be more motivated. More women are likely to retain a foothold in the workplace and enhance their careers, great equity all round.

I know it's tricky for business owners but adaptability and flexibility is a core business strength and one proven to pay dividends in the long term.

[frgr]

am i missing something - surely their admin issues should be sorted already since female employees already have this requirement, smaller firms get slightly more than the cost of wages for a temp replacement (although i'm aware it probably doesn't cover the headache or entire costs e.g. training, advertising, disruption)....

... also what they are losing for male employees they are gaining for female ones? i.e. they'll lose more male employee time to parental leave, but they'll get their female ones back earlier... won't it all just balance out in the end?*


so perhaps they would avoid hiring parents if they really wanted to discriminate, whilst at the moment they just do it on the sly with women. it'll make their unwillingness to hire certain women less sensible. (i was told unofficially by a female supervisor in my first graduate job that they avoided promoting female grads for a couple of years due to the possibility of them starting a family with a career set in place... if i heard that now i'd challenge it but easier to ignore when you're wet behind the ears)

• i've just thought that perhaps gender sector imbalance will come into play here. so if you run a nursery the chances are you'll benefit since most of them (unfortunately) are female. but in my DH's department, he's in IT, systems programmer, it's 99% males. So they will have a massive disadvantage. IN my own work, it's 75% older women, most of whom already have their families. Hmm. That's interesting. I guess there isn't "one impact" for business... it will really matter most if you are in specific industries and of a certain size...

[BeenBeta]

I was listening to a representative of an employer organisation being interviewed about this on Sky a few weeks back.

As far as I recall, the objection raised was that a man might be able to take a week here and there of paternity leave scattered over say a whole year so the employer would never know if he was oing to turn up on Monday or not.

This is a fair enough criticism but I do not get the sense that this is what is being proposed. This criticism could be dealt with by stipulating that the man or woman has to take the parental leave in a single block.

This kind of ad hoc week-by-week 'flexibility' would clearly be extremely disruptive to a business but surely taking it in a single block could be planned for.

In reality, I get the sense that employers would really prefer to not have men (or women)on parental leave at all - but the problem is that if men dont get a rightto paternity leave then business will always discrimnate against women (and prefer male employees) on the basis they have maternity rights that men dont have.

To be utterly truthful, as an investor in businesses, my frequent ipresion is that many large businesses would prefer it if their employees had no life outside work at all. Its an inconvenience to them if employees have other priorities or needs (eg illness) that mean the company cannot have them on 24 hour call.

[GrendelsMum]

I agree with BeenBeta.

If you never knew whether someone was going to turn up on Monday, it was obviously be very inconvenient. If you stipulated that you needed 2 months notice, then it would be a little incovenient but not overwhelmingly so.

Recruiting people is shockingly expensive (largely in terms of staff time to administer, interview, train, etc), so having people off for long enough that you have to cover for them is a genuine cost.

DH does his best to run a family-friendly business, and would never ever refuse to employ a woman because it's likely she'll go on maternity leave - but he tells me that around the office, there are quiet sighs of relief when the best person for the job turns out to be a man. Often, the people who feel most affected by the extra workload caused by a woman going on maternity leave are the women who already have children, and who are already juggling childcare and time at work, and they are the people who are more likely to comment on the disadvantages of employing young women.

[Workingmum101]

As Frgr points out all the HR process for maternity leave is already in place, but it looks like the government need to set some clear ground rules on what basis maternity leave would be taken. Ad hoc leave clearly won't work, but planned leave could work fine.

It's a good point about the cost of interim support while maternity leave is in place. But it could actually reduce the problem of covering maternity absence if the person on leave was off for less, because her partner was able to pick up part of the childcare for the first year.

It's a matter of perspective.

[mollymole]

my family has a very small specialised business - just 3 employees and whilst i can accept that you should be able to cover for an employee off work when you are loosing 1/2 or 1/3rd of your staff, maybe for months at a time, this is pretty much impossible - you can't get someone in to cover as it would take too long to train them before the other person was back and what are you supposed to do about the lost production
this may work very well for large companies but i think there should be some other way around this for firms employing 5 or less

[frgr]

mollymole, so do you not employ females then - is your objection against Parental Leave, full stop - or do you object to extending it to men too (which would negatively impact you if your 3 employees are male only)?

I'm trying to figure out what your objection is.... i can't really see any decent arguments put forth so far that means extending it to men is a bad idea unless it's a male-dominated workplace.

And, of course, only if it was planned leave rather than "i think i'll take 2 days off next week and call it parental leave". But I don't think anyone has suggested this, as explained above.

[Workingmum101]

It's certainly an issue for smaller companies and maternity leave can undoubtedly make life tricky for them.

The thing is that raising children does generate a lot of consumption needs (as we all know!) and the stuff that we all need when raising children (or think we need..) helps to drive our economy.

Looking at the whole picture, policies which deter people from having children or where they feel that they can only afford to have one child, have an impact on the whole economy.

Having talented, motivated people in the work place to drive business excellence should be the goal. At present half the talent is often lost because of a lack of flexibility which ofens effectively drives women from the work place..

[BeenBeta]

Workingmum - very good point.

If anyone doubts that we need children as an economy go and see what happens to an economy when it has too few children like Japan. The median age of its population is 44. There are so few children being born that Japan is literally fading out of existence as a nation.

Your point about half the talent being driven from the workplace also seems lost on business. If it didnt ignore half thr workforce, it would have more people to choose from and hence better employees at lower wages. It makes no sense economically to ignore half the potential workforce.

[mollymole]

frgr - our working environment, industry wide, is men based - this is why it would be
a problem for us in extending this leave to include men

[Takver]

Beenbeta, I think your first post makes a lot of sense - there clearly need to be some rules that specify the notice to be given, the need for the leave to be in a block, etc. - just as there are for maternity leave.

As someone who runs a (very) small business, I would like to know how all these small businesses who can't cope with maternity (or parental) leave deal with sickness. Our main employee has recently had a baby (will return from her mat leave next month). Yes, it was a pain having to recruit someone, but obviously we had plenty of notice, and we knew exactly how long we needed a replacement for.

What is far more difficult to cope with is the situation when (like yesterday) our - maternity cover - employee has to go into hospital for an emergency operation. Or two years ago in January when our employee fell and damaged her ankle badly, and could only work on and off (plus various appointments) through 2 of our 3 busiest months . . .

Presumably any business has to be able to cope with that sort of unexpected emergency, no chance to recruit cover, no idea how long it will be needed. Perhaps they should view parental leave as (a) preparation and (b) a chance to have an extra potential employee trained up.

[Takver]

Should also add, we certainly view maternity leave as an opportunity to check out an extra potential employee with no embarrasment about letting him/her go at the end of the year if they don't measure up. Looking at the number of people I know who have got permanent jobs following maternity cover contracts, we can't be the only people to see things that way.

[Workingmum101]

I was rather dismayed to see your press release criticising proposals to extend paternity leave to men. I hope you will take the time to have a look at this discussion thread from Mumsnet. www.mumsnet.com/Talk/employment_issues/1133916-Chambers-of-Commerce-critise-extending-parental-leave-to-men?msgid=23412281

I hope that you will agree that the discussion gives a reasonable and balance view of the issue from the perspective of parents and from people who are directly involved in running small businesses.

It?s easy to see proposals like this in purely negative terms. However it?s a shame not to see the positives that can come from having a more balanced workforce, one where both male and female employees have the opportunity to be with their children in the critical first months, yet have the opportunity to fulfil their potential at work and contribute their considerable skills and experience to the success of business.

The role of the Chambers of Commerce should be to take a considered view of proposed policy changes, to consider the positive and possible negative impacts of any changes. To deal with facts rather than fears. Which is why I was disappointed by your organisations rather ?knee-jerk? response and took the time to canvas views.

I suspect that we may continue to retain different views on the matter, but I would like to make a final observation. We live in an impressive diverse and innovative society and many of our small business reflect this diversity. The question is does your organisation reflect diversity or does it merely reflect the views of an ageing male perspective on what the workplace should be?

[Workingmum101]

(Above was my email to David Frost - British Chambers of Commerce) FYI - workingmum101

[finefatmama]

The admin problem for me would be determining how to 'share' maternity leave between couples who work for different employers. It was suggested that employers will have to check with each other to verify that the leave has been split between the two as stated or that mum has indeed returned from mat leave and dad is now free to go for three months. It would have been easier the other partner just had an entitlement of their own.