Taking a job in a tiny business when pregnant

[Fromageetvino]

Ok so I know IABU but venting a little.
I took on my first FT employee in July this year (already have 1 x part timer). Three weeks in she disclosed that she is pregnant and is now off on Mat leave.

It’s an industry where recruiting is super difficult at the moment so getting a mat leave cover is likely to be practically impossible.

I know it’s her right etc, and of course have treated her fairly and she will be returning whenever she chooses to return.

But if I’m honest - it’s absolutely screwed our plans for any growth this year (on top of covid troubles).

While I know it’s “right” would you take on a job in a small business when pregnant?

Am prepared to get flamed here (hence the NC).

Oh look, another poster making me question whether I should be supporting small businesses after all.

The sense of entitlement from some small business owners is starting to grate. Not just on this topic either. It’s like the employees, the tax payer and even customers owe them because they are a ‘small business’. Boo hoo. If you can’t handle standard, legal employer responsibilities, which all existed prior to starting up so shouldn’t be that unexpected, then maybe owning a business is not for for you.

The attitude towards women and particularly pregnant ones on this thread is disgusting.

There’s such a double standard here. On the one hand OP is wishing for a ‘pioneer attitude’ from her employees and bemoaning the fact that they’ll never be as committed to or passionate about the business as her, but on the other this employee is being viewed as someone who ‘screwed over’ the business and was a bad hire because she is having a few months of maternity leave. OP wants her employees to be invested in her business but she doesn’t see her employees as an investment.

You have no idea what value this woman may bring to your business over the lifetime of her employment with you. She might be the reason you eventually achieve growth. But you’re taking this incredibly short sighted view that you’re screwed over by a mat leave which will, in the grand scheme of things, be a few months in what might be years of good work.

If you want your employees to be invested in your business, start seeing them as a long term investment too.

As someone who worked in a small family firm, the European attitude toward maternity leave seems mad.

You only think that because the British attitude towards the same is so shit.

Miraculously, it works in Europe and has for many years whereas women here have to put up with an insultingly low SMP which is so bad many can't even afford to stay off on ML. O guess that's the trick, right, provide an entitlement of 52 weeks off but make it unaffordable for many to use it, and then make childcare in this country prohibitively expensive for many women to work. Keep them in a catch-22 where they belong. Ffs. Give over.

Some of you employers had better watch out. There have been a number of cases recently where pregnant women and mothers discriminated against at work have won tens of thousands of pounds of compensation. Take a look at the campaign group Pregnant then Screwed...

I think the question to ask is why so many pregnant women feel they need to hide their pregnancies to get these jobs. Some of the responses on this thread make me utterly despair.

@glowingtwig why is the pregnant woman going for a job though? She doesn’t qualify for any maternity pay so isn’t financially better off? She’s essentially just book marking her place somewhere to return at some point? I don’t understand how it’s not a better idea just to have a baby and then look for a new role afterwards - is it for health insurance or not to have a gap in the CV? I guess that’s a big benefit. I think I answered my own question

It is literally against the law, which you are very clearly trying to advocate people to go against, no matter how you try to word it, as if unlawful sounds much better! Luckily employment tribunals see through such bullshit, and rightly put businesses in their place when they act as you advise.

Keeping employers out of tribunals is literally my job. On the rare occasion that it has happened, we’ve not lost a case (15 years in).

I am not advocating anyone breach employment law at all. Merely stating that it isn’t hard to defend recruitment decisions provided the employer hasn’t made a really stupid mistake in writing.

Employment tribunals consider whether actions were unlawful - including discrimination. The burden of proof in employment claims is completely different to criminal action for a start.

[quote Allsorts1]@glowingtwig why is the pregnant woman going for a job though? She doesn’t qualify for any maternity pay so isn’t financially better off? She’s essentially just book marking her place somewhere to return at some point? I don’t understand how it’s not a better idea just to have a baby and then look for a new role afterwards - is it for health insurance or not to have a gap in the CV? I guess that’s a big benefit. I think I answered my own question [/quote]
We don’t have health insurance in the UK.

Given the woman will have lost out financially by changing jobs, I expect that means there was something about this role that she saw as a good opportunity she really wanted. Maybe the flexible working / working from home / being allowed to work around school runs. Flexible working is quite poor in this country and massively impacts mothers. If this is the case then it shows she intends to come back.

More generally there are plenty of reasons why a pregnant woman may need to apply for a job. The same reasons as anyone else. Not hard to understand surely.

5.6 weeks paid leave at the end of the mat leave is worth quite a lot (assuming 12 months taken).

@StFrancisdeCompostela

There’s such a double standard here. On the one hand OP is wishing for a ‘pioneer attitude’ from her employees and bemoaning the fact that they’ll never be as committed to or passionate about the business as her, but on the other this employee is being viewed as someone who ‘screwed over’ the business and was a bad hire because she is having a few months of maternity leave. OP wants her employees to be invested in her business but she doesn’t see her employees as an investment.

You have no idea what value this woman may bring to your business over the lifetime of her employment with you. She might be the reason you eventually achieve growth. But you’re taking this incredibly short sighted view that you’re screwed over by a mat leave which will, in the grand scheme of things, be a few months in what might be years of good work.

If you want your employees to be invested in your business, start seeing them as a long term investment too.

Firstly I was not “bemoaning” it at all. I was saying it to clarity that I don’t hAve an unreasonable expectations of commitment. Secondly I very much see my employees an investment and am happy to invest in them. However in this instance 3 months of investment is basically wasted and will need to be duplicated again. As a very small business that’s problematic - it costs in effect tens of thousands really once you factor in my time etc. I’ve said “it is what it is” but at the same time - what it actually is does hugely impact on me personally, the growth etc.

I think it’s very easy to sit in an employee position saying you can’t understand how I feel (maybe I would have felt the same), but it is fucking hard.

OP, I feel for you. I had a nanny who did the same to me, accepting a job and then disclosing she's pregnant and cannot do things like lifting a 1 year old or pushing a buggy. She went on sick leave immediately then, and i had to pay the sick pay out of my own pocket (the government doesn't compensate for small employers). To be honest, I was very wary after this when hiring women of fertile age.

@Blossom987

Oh look, another poster making me question whether I should be supporting small businesses after all.

The sense of entitlement from some small business owners is starting to grate. Not just on this topic either. It’s like the employees, the tax payer and even customers owe them because they are a ‘small business’. Boo hoo. If you can’t handle standard, legal employer responsibilities, which all existed prior to starting up so shouldn’t be that unexpected, then maybe owning a business is not for for you.

The attitude towards women and particularly pregnant ones on this thread is disgusting.

Yeah because large corporations treat their employees well, pay their fair share of taxes and never shirk their responsibilities 🙄.

In fact they get away with far more as they can afford the best accountants, lawyers and pay the least tax.

Most (not all) small business owners try to do everything right.

Small businesses have to pay SSP out of their own money but large businesses don’t? If that’s true I’m really quite surprised.

@Blossom987

Small businesses have to pay SSP out of their own money but large businesses don’t? If that’s true I’m really quite surprised.

It’s not the case anymore but limited companies could claim back ssp in some circumstances whereas sole traders couldn’t. Now no one can (except for covid related).

@Blossom987

Small businesses have to pay SSP out of their own money but large businesses don’t? If that’s true I’m really quite surprised.

From April 2014 there's no reimbursement of SSP for small / domestic employers. Large ones I think don't get reimbursements directly, but can offset at the end of the pay period against the total Employer NI bill (someone will surely correct me on this, I am not 100% certain).

It can also screw up large businesses. As a team we were missing a very key role which made things very hard for us for a long time. We were tired and exhausted from not having the right skill mix, customers complaining. Then finally someone was interviewed and appointed for the job, hooray! A few weeks passed and she finally arrived on first day with a smirk and going around rubbing her belly in a cat has got the cream. She's was very very pregnant and sat in the office all day refusing to work and just wanting to talk about her baby and how she couldn't wait to go on maternity leave! Also saying how great it was she was given the chance of this job so she could get paid to not work. We were absolutely shocked at her attitude and as a team no better off. To cut a long story off, when she did return she still didn't work and received a warning for only seeing three customers in the space of two months when should have been three a day!

I took a job but in a larger organisation when I was about the same pregnant. But I had suffered a miscarriage a few months before. I had no idea whether I would make it to 12 weeks, let alone term.
The job was something I was really passionate about and would have helped me out of the depression I was in after my first loss. So I was thinking of myself 🤷🏼‍♀️

Also Blossom, I’m not sure why you’re surprised. There are plenty of ways in which very small employers are disadvantaged (smaller even then me). Tax liability is a major one. Access to funding throughout the pandemic was a HUGE one.

I don’t tend to complain about this - it is what it is, but please don’t think that there isn’t an imbalance. So when you say “fuck small businesses” and trot off to Starbucks rather than your local coffee shop, that’s what you’re supporting.

[quote Fromageetvino]@IntermittentParps because my feelings have literally no influence on someone’s life. My actions could have huge ones.[/quote]
Advertising (or not) a job as temp-may-go-perm isn’t a feeling though, it’s an action.

@WouldIBeATwat yes it is but don’t you only qualify for paid mat leave if you’ve been there for a certain amount of time before going off?

@Blossom987 I have private health insurance with work which includes good benefits like death in service payments - so I can sort of see how securing these by being employed is worth taking a job you know you can’t technically start for a year as you plan to leave for maternity leave straight away.

But in general, if you planned to do anything else that meant you couldn’t work for a year (eg travel) usually people would just start job hunting towards the end of that time, to coincide with when they want to start working. Unless the role was one in a million chance that you simply needed to secure - but even then nabbing the job when you can’t even do the role for a year seems unethical to me.

Secondly I very much see my employees an investment and am happy to invest in them. However in this instance 3 months of investment is basically wasted and will need to be duplicated again.
Three months is very short-term though. Investment in employees is a long-term thing. That’s the point people are trying to make.

I'd actually doubt how competent she was. Who leaves a job when 6 months pregnant unless she was shit at her job and about to get the boot anyway? And who chooses to put themselves in such uncertainty, making themselves an obvious target for discrimination unless she gives zero shits about her job? She's likely just a chance, she'll come back to work and leave in less than another year. I'd rather give up some contracts to give myself some rest and make her redundant.

Did she know she was pregnant when she applied?

I once interviewed and got a job in a different NHS trust, in the 3 months it took the NHS to sort out paperwork I got pregnant (by surprise).

So on my first day I had to announce I was 15 weeks gone. Oh and to make it worse I had HG so was on sick leave then Mat leave.

I’m currently pregnant and my role, although NHS, is niche and not easily filled by a contractor. It’s hard to recruit someone to cover mat leave especially with staff leaving the NHS due to covid. It’s not a ‘desirable’ role to do as a contract unless you’re inexperienced and they don’t want someone inexperienced. My boss told me all this but in a friendly way, she’s unflappable and always looks on the bright side. She was more interested in my pregnancy and scans than in the problem of finding cover (she ran it past me in case I knew anyone as I used to work contracts). I didn’t feel she was in any way blaming me!

@WhatToDo1988

I'd actually doubt how competent she was. Who leaves a job when 6 months pregnant unless she was shit at her job and about to get the boot anyway? And who chooses to put themselves in such uncertainty, making themselves an obvious target for discrimination unless she gives zero shits about her job? She's likely just a chance, she'll come back to work and leave in less than another year. I'd rather give up some contracts to give myself some rest and make her redundant.

Have you not seen the post about someone who had a history of miscarriage and didn’t know if her new pregnancy would go to term? That’s just one reason. You must be lacking in imagination/sense if you can’t think of it, or of any more.

Yanbu to feel angry.
Because of the laws you can't even sit down and clear the air without the maternity card being played.
She may be within the law but she was morally wrong.whether this was because she was genuinely interested in your company or just looking for something else,only she knows .

As for ridiculous pp saying if she was in an accident or disabled would you feel the same,well she would already be disabled and you don't plan accidents.