To think maternity leave should be capped at 6 months to protect small businesses?

[YourOpalLeader]

Hear me out before throwing things! I work for a small business, and every time someone goes on maternity leave, it causes massive disruption. Hiring temps who don’t know the role, training them, juggling workloads - it can’t always be absorbed. I completely understand that maternity leave is a right but should it really be up to 12 months? For SMEs, it’s almost impossible. AIBU to think six months should be the limit, with the rest unpaid or taken as shared parental leave?

Well, I don't live in the UK and I only got 6 months mat leave (I added vacation to make it 7). It's extremely challenging and I'm working at about 50% capacity.

Employer has to give me 4 × 20 minutes breaks to pump milk for my baby by law. realistically I faff a lot longer than that with my pump, sterilising etc. I leave the office at 5.00, never a minute longer, as I want to avoid pumping one more time so i go home to feed baby.

And I'm pretty slow as baby still wakes once a night so I am suuuuuper tired.

And I still have birth injuries I have to do physio for so employer has to let me do those too.

3 women in my team resigned while on mat leave as they couldn't face coming back so soon. So now employer is scrambling last minute for hires.

It really doesn't work very well. At 12 months, babies are not breastfeeding in the day anymore. They mostly sleep through the night and are absolute terrors in the day so you put them in nursery anyway so they can expend energy. Physically most women have recovered.

I work at a small business (30 something staff). We have men and women taking six months or so parental leave, there's quite a lot of leave sharing going on in our industry these days (science and tech). Our company has now approached some agreement on six months sabbaticals, so those of us who have no kids don't feel hard done by picking up extra slack to cover parental leave, training, etc, if we also fancy taking some time off. No one has taken a full year off yet, though, but life would go on if they did. It's difficult recruiting in our specialities but we have been able to pick up the slack internally so far.

No. I think that statutory maternity pay should be extended to a full year, making it easier for women to take the full time.

There are other, better ways to help small businesses in this situation.

For example, you could advocate for them to be able to claim more than the 103% of SMP costs they currently recoup. This would also have the advantage of helping those smaller businesses whose staff take extended paternity leave. Or there could be tax breaks for the period.

Any business should be able to survive with any member of staff being absent for a period of time or leaving, it really is the very basics and one of the first things I look at when taking over a new team. If you can’t do that you’re not viable and playing a dangerous game.

One of those be careful what you wish for situations. It's not necessarily to an employer's advantage to have someone in work who isn't fit to be there.

Reminds me of reading on here ages ago about some City firms who give full pay for a big chunk of the mat leave. Posters said the subtext was essentially, don't come back until you're fully recovered and ready to give 200% again.

You sound like a journalist.

Or researching a book.

CF.

You sound like someone who has never had kids.

I understand your concerns, and I want to be really clear that I’m not suggesting all women should return to work at six months, or that breastfeeding and early childcare aren’t major considerations.

What I am saying is that the current model puts a lot of pressure on small businesses, and that’s its worth asking whether there’s a way to better support everyone involved - including parents who want longer leave and the businesses trying to stay afloat in their absence.

If six months because a default with extended leave offered through shared parental options or government support, it wouldn’t mean forcing everyone back - it could mean providing more choice and less pressure on any one part of the system.

It’s not about disregarding mothers or babies - it’s about creating a setup that works more sustainably for all the moving parts.

@YourOpalLeader my husband is pretty hands on and a good dad. He can't breastfeed. He's also not the one who had to push a baby out and recover from that. So realistically most men will not be taking leave in the first 12 months.

Yes but in most cases, a temp that has worked there for 6 months will do a better job for the remaining 6 months of mat leave than a mother who is forced back to work on not enough sleep, needing to pump regularly and not physically healed from the major trauma of child birth. So someone will still need to pick up her slack.

And you idea says the second six months should be shared parental - now you’ve just doubled the number of people who are taking 6 months off to disrupt the business while at the same time making it harder to cover because it’s too short a contract length.

You also said the rest could be unpaid. But that it’s not about cost. Well it’s only 9 months paid now, so does reducing this by 6 months have a material difference?

I think with this sort of two tier system, you make large employers a more attractive offer and you’ll be less able to attract the best talent. And you might find a lot more people not returning after maternity and finding a new job instead which is even more disruptive.

I do think the system should be overhauled with more government funding for SME employers of those on parental leave - but reducing periods of leave is not the answer.

No it shouldn't be capped at 6 months. I had some friends back earlier as they were on french contracts where mat leave is less, in all buy 1 case within a few months the women were signed off sick for quite a while as they struggled with full on jobs, little sleep and usually a baby that's teething.
That's not good for a small business either!

I used shared parental leave both times at around 9 months but leave meant I was off for 11 months as my work wouldn't let me carry it over. By that point I was ready to go back, fully engaged and children settled well and quickly into nursery.
The other issue is finding a nursery which accepts enough young babies due to ratios - most women are off before birth which means your talking babies who are 5 months old. Add in the cost and you would probably find more women quitting.

For small businesses well frankly they should review how they conduct business no business (other then 1 person companies) should have a single point failure risk.

My first was born in 2000, he turned out to be autistic, and no he wasn't sleeping or eating well at 5 months when I had to go back to work. We only got 6 months leave back then you know, he was 2 weeks late and I stopped work at 37 weeks.

I think it’s not enough tbh!!!! Support for mothers’ in general is utter crap and nowhere near enough.

That’s true in theory and sometimes it does work out that way. But in reality, especially in small businesses, temporary cover is rarely a 1:1 replacement. Even if the temp gets a hang of the role after a few weeks, they’re often still operating at a ‘just keep it ticking over’ level rather than fully owning the work or driving things forward.

And depending on the role, the longer someone’s out, the more disconnected they can feel when they return - meaning there’s disruption again during handover or reintegration. It’s not always as simple as ‘they’re trained, now it runs smoothly.’

It’s not that I think we should cut people off at 6 months - it’s that I think we need to more open discussion around the strain long-term absences place on small teams and how to support everyone better through it.

It would be far more difficult to hire for a 6 month role than it would be to hire for a 12 month one. If you don’t understand that, then I don’t believe this is a genuine post. Anyone who has any involvement in hiring staff or running a team would understand it.

And you idea says the second six months should be shared parental - now you’ve just doubled the number of people who are taking 6 months off to disrupt the business while at the same time making it harder to cover because it’s too short a contract length.

Very true!

Speaking as someone who has moved job to do a maternity leave cover, I'd not have bothered for 6 months. It wouldn't have been worth giving up the stability of my existing role. In most sectors, it's harder to recruit for fixed term contracts of less than a year.

Can you explain why anyone should care about someone's small business?

Are you a man?
Or a misogynist woman?

You have to think about the wider picture of how we want society to be, not just the picture of your business.
Are babies better staying with their breastfeeding mothers for longer, are mothers better to have the option to recover for longer, do we want to force women to hand their children off to nurseries to go back to their jobs stressed and tired if they are not ready. A few poeple do go back early but for many it would force them to exit their jobs if maternity was cut short.
What is best for society and how should we manage it collectively should be the question. Then go from there. If small business suffer then there should be subsidy for small business supporting mat leave and training for cover staff, not cut mat leaves short.

I don't think it's for women to worry about. They need to heal and adjust.

It is for society to wake up and value the contribution of having babies (to pay your pension and care for you in old age). And to then reflect that.

If women's labour was actually valued this wouldnt be a question.

Overall women are more likely to cost less and be more loyal to an employer. This isn't just about how much they are paid per hour, it means they cost less to hire and train. And we should be talking about the loss of skills in the workplace from not supporting mothers properly in the workplace more rather than having this weird focus on how women aren't as good as men somehow.

It's bollocks. Women bring other things to the workplace and in economic terms it's not as straightforward as just looking at 'how much maternity leave costs' (which as demonstrated on this thread is actually bollocks anyway).

Change the conversation to accurately reflect reality. All reality. That doesn't make women invisible or deemed a nuisance from the word go without a proper unbiased and non sexist attitude.

I actually agree with you OP.

So in your mind, the welfare of a business takes precedence over the wellbeing of both baby and mother?

This. Small businesses wanting 6mths just want to take the piss and avoid hiring mat cover at all and want to try and get other staff to cover it because it's 'just a few months'. Maternity cover isn't there for the benefit of the company it's there to protect the jobs of new mums while they care for newborn babies. Yabu

It's a suspiciously glaring blind spot, isn't it? OP talks of wanting a wider discussion, but ignoring the issues of recruitment and of losing qualified staff once they're trained up doesn't suggest the desire is genuine.