Redundancy after mat leave.

[Winterberriesonatree]

There have been articles the press over the last couple of days about new protection proposed for women who have been made redundant following return from Maternity Leave.

I am well past this stage of my life, but have younger adult children, so it concerns. I find it incredulous that younger women are still discriminated against in this way. It was not unusual in the 1980s, I had hoped society had moved on.

Has anyone on MN experienced this, how widespread is this practice?

www.maternityactioncampaigns.org.uk/

What are the Women and Equalities Committee for? They've been castigated for their handling of so many issues and they've done nothing for a year on this matter.

It happens a significant amount

Equality and Human Rights commission have done a lot of recent research - 2016 and 2017. The headline figure quoted is always roughly 54,000 wrongful maternity dismissals a year.

Women and Equalities Committee are actually pretty effective - one of the best select committees.

I was made redundant when I went in for a KIT day about three weeks before I was due to return from maternity leave. I was particularly annoyed as they'd made a few other redundancies during the year I was off, and each time I spoke to HR and asked them to confirm that my role definitely wasn't being made redundant, and every time I was assured it wasn't and they were desperate for me to come back as they had loads of projects waiting for my return. It turned out that during one of the previous redundancy rounds they had effectively saved a man from redundancy by giving him my role .

It shouldn't have surprised me - my boss hadn't been able to look me in the eye since I had to tell him that I'd had a missed miscarriage (before my pregnancy with DS) and was signed off for a week after the ERPC operation. Oh and whilst pregnant with DS I had a major bleed at 32 weeks (DD having previously been born at 33 weeks) and was taken to hospital by ambulance and kept in for 4 days. Whilst I was in hospital he emailed me and didn't ask after me or the baby, just asked if I'd done something yet and if not please could I do it asap! Unbelievable!

I also have a friend who was made redundant about 3 weeks after returning from maternity leave, which in a way was worse as she'd already had to start her DD at nursery - at least mine was just before DS's first settle so we didn't have to go through all that.

I've just remembered something else that really pissed me off - I was asked to leave immediately without talking to anybody, and then once the dust had settled they told all the other staff that I'd chosen not to come back from maternity leave . I don't think many people will have believed it though as I'd been saying the morning I was in how much I was looking forward to coming back and getting stuck in!