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?

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.
One way would be to run a better business. HTH.

This.

I work for and co-own a small business and my maternity leave cost the company a total of £300 over the 9 months I took - this was purely the excess employers NI they had to pay (this was 2012). Every other penny was covered by the government.

I think what might help more would be encouraging fathers to take a portion of parental leave. Or offering more paid KIT type days (on top of govt funded maternity pay) to assist businesses.

So what do you want if you don’t want to force mothers back at 6 months?

I think it’s worth thinking longer term. Women who are treated well during maternity and especially if offered some flexibility on return have huge stickability. So you may have a short term disruption but in the long run there may be more continuity for the business.

I hear you and I’d never suggest separating a mother from her baby at that stage just for convenience. I’m not dismissing how physically and emotionally demanding it is to care for a 6 month old, especially if breastfeeding is still central.

What I’m questioning is whether there’s a better way to support everyone, including businesses, so that maternity leave isn’t something that places disproportionate strain on one side or the other. If we want parents to be supported properly, that means everyone needs to be supported: the mother, the baby, and yes - the business trying to keep going while that parent’s away.

I’m not calling for a rigid 6 month cut off. I’m raising the question of whether more flexibility and shared support could make things fairer for all involved. This isn’t about taking anything away - it’s about making the system work better.

My work put NO plans in place to cover my role or my work when I went off, instead I essentially had to do my actual job and plan and schedule for the year before I went off. Can't help but feel that if they now struggle it's totally on them. I put in the hours to make sure everything was in place before I left, but if something unexpected arises I will not be helping. I imagine a lot of women who work for SMEs are treated similarly.

In addition to the points already made about recovery and feeding, returning to work early would, for many, mean paying for the baby to be in nursery for an additional 6 months.

If you are saying that the way to help small businesses is to scrap the repayment scheme mentioned by other posters, and instead cut maternity leave, you are essentially arguing that individual mothers should bare the cost of subsidising small businesses.

I know it's a lighthearted comment, but for many small business owners this is still unfortunately a big issue. Not that they're allowed to admit it out loud as that's, you know, sexual discrimination!

I am an employer who has a number of female staff of child bearing age who could announce a pregnancy at any time. I can't say the thought didn't cross my mind when I first took them on (though ultimately still took them on, along with that risk!).

I don't think, however, that maternity leave should be capped at 6 months. Family comes first, no matter what. It's a burden employers of any size have to carry. I agree with a PP that it would be easier to find a 12 month cover for mat leave than 6. You'd get better work out of them over a longer period, the more familiar they become.

So where are these babies meant to go? Research shows that children do best with a primary care giver for their first three years of life. Does a team having to manage absence for six months trump the mental well being of both mother and child?

Small businesses should take a leaf out of big business book for this sort of thing.

Handbooks explaining how to cover a person's role.

Defined and structured job roles - not simply oh that's one of 'Anna's areas'. Don't have 'Anna' and 'Sue' have 'an administrative manager' and a 'HR assistant' etc. Make the roles clear, and don't let a person's work ever only their business.

Hire temps for a full year, utilise job sharing, hybrid working, flexi-time, TOIL etc etc.

Yes, maternity leave can be difficult for companies, but larger companies don't let it destroy them. It's not about the size of the business the woman works in either. Think of, for example, a small roadside Greggs. Unlikely to employ more than 10 people. If one full time worker went on maternity 10% (likely more given some will be part time) of their staff has gone! And yet I guarantee it doesn't throw them into hell.

Have a succession plan with all your employees - identity the best ones to be able to step up - even if only for a year. If a bottom rung employee leaves for maternity, hire another, temp or permanent, and look to grow.

If an employee having maternity leave causes a problem, that problem lies with the business, and their solutions should be in place before anyone so much as announces a pregnancy.

If you want systems to work better for small businesses OP, why have you proposed something that will act as an incentive for all their best employees to piss off elsewhere as soon as they become sufficiently attractive to get more rights?

Frankly, there are already more than enough reasons for women not to have children - the cost of housing and childcare, the hit to their career plans, the difficulties that come with juggling the competing demands of work and family, dire maternity care, plus the complete uselessness of so many men - that if you add too many more disadvantages into the mix, the birth rate will plummet even lower than it already has to the eventual detriment of all businesses. You are being very unreasonable - and I speak as someone who ran her own small business for nearly 30 years!

Perhaps you shouldn't employ anyone with that attitude.

How do you know they aren't going to get cancer or have mental health issues which lead to them going off with stress?

Given your inability to adapt to other people having the audacity to not be a slave to your company I'm not sure your business is particularly viable in the first place.

Yes, you are being incredibly unreasonable.

I can only assume (by the fact you put the needs of a small business you don’t even own above those of a tiny human dependant on its mum and those of that mum who is already most likely struggling on what garbage our maternity pay is and the short amount of time she is given to raise and bond with that tiny baby) that you don’t have children. What you’re suggesting doesn’t ‘make things fairer for all’, it makes a difficult time more difficult for a new mum while making things better for the employer.

I like my job and am currently 6 months into maternity and can’t imagine EVER putting that job above my baby. What you’re suggesting is putting the needs of the business first. Absolutely not.

But OP what are you calling for?

You seem to be suggesting that mothers should “share the burden”? What do you actually mean? Work part time?

If the amount of leave was based on business size, how would small businesses retain talent.

Ok, so:
You think we need to 'balance everyone's needs better' and that SME are being badly treated
But it isn't about the money and temp cover isn't a solution
Yet you don't want to force women back at 6 months

So what do you want? It feels to me what you actually want is for women just to feel suitably guilty and ashamed of their selfishness in taking mat leave.

The thing is, unpopular an opinion as it is, having a child is a physically and.emotionally life changing experience. We need to accept that mothers and families need time to recover, build attachments and learn how to parent. When mothers and families flourish, so does society. We need to offer mothers.more time to spend with their children in those crucial first 3 years...not less.
Even more unpopular...no-one thinks that nurseries are great places for very small babies to be full time. Bearing in mind most women don't work up to their due date you are basically proposing that we get babies under 6.months into nursery as a matter of course. There just isn't an expert in child development who would advocate that as an ideal option.
On a more personal note, if I had had to return to work after 6 months with my children the negative fall out from that in terms of my family and workplace would have been substantial!!

OP I don't know what you mean when you say it should be limited to six months with the possibility of extending it "with government support". That's... Already more than what happens, if you're talking about money. I certainly didn't get any pay beyond the bare minimum from my employer (I think 16 weeks?), yet I took 12 months and received (a piddling amount of) statutory maternity pay during that time.

It's really unclear what you are actually concerned about. It seems like, when you boil it down, you're worried about disorganised small businesses who can't manage to arrange suitable cover, and get their knickers in a twist. It's really not that hard to recruit a 12-month temp, especially as you have months of warning. My mat cover was great and brought a different perspective to the role, we learnt from each other and it was a benefit to the small business I was in, to have a fresh pair of eyes.

Think back to the 1980s when maternity leave was very short... How many working mums did you know? I was a child then, and the only working mums I was aware of had jobs like being a dinner lady. That's because most women basically gave up work when they had their first child, and had one or two more kids while a SAHM, then maybe tried to find a part-time school hours job at minimum wage. Those women were lost to the workforce.

I was told in no uncertain terms by a previous employer that if I got pregnant he would sack me because he couldn't afford to plan for it.

I left eventually (before getting pregnant) his business went under within 12 months. Someone was doing the work of about three people and he broke them

I finished work 2 weeks before my due date. My child was born 2 weeks post due date. I would have gone back to work leaving a 5 month old with who exactly? I couldn't put that kid down as he cried all the time and I don't think a nursery could have provided that level of care.

As it was, we had to give 3 months notice and at the time we only got 9 months leave, so I gave notice based on my 5 month old who screamed pretty much none stop and didn't sleep. By 9 months they were much more settled and I would have been able to think about returning to my job. A year's leave seems much more sensible.

This is a lot of words that say nothing. If you’re not calling for separating mothers from babies at six months, what are you suggesting? What would be “fair”?

I could not have returned to work at six months – physically, emotionally, mentally, breastfeedingly. There isn’t a fair or flexible solution to that except the very good one we have in place already, that was hard-won: a full year of maternity leave plus the right to accrue annual leave during it and take that too. The only change that system needs is to pay women more for taking that time.

Hmmmm. I’m only taking 6m (I dont like being at home and will not breast feed for reasons not in scope) but my husband is taking time as well. However, my team were never going to hire someone to cover my role regardless as the training load is not worth it for even a year (specialised software development). But I’m in a big corp so the team will just have less output for this year and that’s just planned for. My role is not critical and I’m not the only one who can do my job. I am fundamentally replaceable and I wonder if big corps just have the ability to have the skills coverage?

From the business point of view if I was someone was the only person who knew my bit the company would be boned. I’m really not sure how to square that circle if resources are tight, because the incentives for the business owner are to discriminate unless they are motivated to be a good person and not just motivated by profit. And they are most likely just motivated by profit as they are a business.

That's what many do to stop the problem the OP is talking about.

Send the babies into the office to do some typing, perhaps.