This was something I experienced in the Civil Service 7 years ago and had hoped that a new finance/HR system may have corrected things in the intervening years but apparently not…
I was working part time (0.6FTE) before going on mat leave and did several keeping in touch days before my return proper. When I returned to work and submitted my details for my KIT days I ended up getting substantially underpaid due to how they calculated my “average daily rate” for those days: on the days that I was receiving no mat pay, this worked out as around £56, and then on my SMP days (when they subtract the daily rate for SMP) they paid me about £35! At the time my salary was around £35k. It turned out this was because they calculated the daily rate by dividing actual salary by 365, meaning my daily rate worked out this way was way way lower than a full time colleague on exactly the same wage would have received. I then had a two year long fight to get this redressed, in the end was award a bonus by my head of unit to cover the shortfall but HR never admitted they were in the wrong. Shortly after that, a new HR system came in, which I thought would solve the problem naturally, as AL etc related to part timers was based on number of hours worked per day. But recently I found out from a colleague now working in a different department that one of her reports who has recently returned from a extended period of sick leave is experiencing exactly the same issue and is being told they’re using exactly the same bananas calculation to work out their “average daily rate”. How is this discrimination still happening in 2025?! Do other workplaces try the same trick? I’m currently pregnant again and going off on mat leave in Jan (although working slightly more hours this time round: 0.75FTE) and despairing of the prospect of going through this protracted fight yet again….