Being sued by a disgruntled former nanny

[Angeldust99]

Has this happened to anyone else? It seems like everywhere I turn, I hear stories of disgruntled former employees suing their employers for money - often on made up grounds. It’s scary!

Don’t understand the outrage, you employed someone to provide consistent care for an SEN child and to be physically able to lift etc. Your new employee would presumably have been unable to provide such care in a few months and would go on mat leave for at least six months.

Oh yeah because women can’t get pregnant unexpectedly, not every pregnant is planned… sorry but you sound awful and as others have said you sound so proud to have caught her out.

It's illegal, pure and simple.

You don't see special educational needs schools for example sacking all their staff when they get pregnant. It's tough, understandably frustrating, but at the end of the day she had a duty as this nanny's employer to treat her as per the law.

It also doesn't help that in her original post she sounded so smug about it like she'd got one over on her.

Hmmmm maybe because it’s illegal to fire someone because they are pregnant…

But the nanny had lied about her commitment to working for them long term which is what they were looking for.

Nanny's are trained and skilled at their jobs .
Why therefore do you all seem to treat a nanny like she is beneath you?

That is diabolical behaviour and it’s the nanny that had the lucky escape there. I hope karma comes around one day. Classic example of bad employers looking for loopholes in protected employment law. I would be too ashamed to admit that.

So you lied.

wow! How nasty are you?

I think it is common because lots of people employ Nannies without understanding their responsibilities then act in a shitty manner as the poster above. Nannies have the same employment rights as everyone else.

Had she? Do women never get pregnant by accident?

Did she though? How do they know she wasn't planning to return immediately or even put the child up for adoption ? They don't and the poster has simply shown herself up for who she is!

@YellowAsteroid

1. We have no way of knowing she lied as others have pointed out.

1. It still doesn't matter. I could tell my employer till I was blue in the face that I didn't want any babies whilst secretly being pregnant and firing me for being pregnant would still be illegal! It's not good form, but you can't sack someone for it. You legally don't have to tell an employer that you're pregnant until 15 weeks before your due date.

It’s AGAINST the law that’s why. You don’t get to ignore that and then lie and brag about it without being called out for it. I sincerely hope you aren’t an employer if you can’t understand that basic concept.

You can’t justify what you did so stop trying 👎

I think this is true. Many families see a nanny as a childminder who works from the family’s home rather than their own and believe they can dispense with their services in the same way they would a childminder. But it’s not the case they are an employee and therefore have rights.

That said, some nannies don’t help the cause by, for example, demanding net pay (why - everyone else is paid gross), stating their ‘hourly charges’ rather than salary expectations, expecting to be able to dictate their annual leave, wanting to bring their own children to work with no reduction in pay (the number of adverts I see which say ‘I have a 3 year old who I bring to work with me’), want employers to pay for their professional registration… None of these things are possible in other professions. It often feels like some want the benefits of employment with the flexibility of self employment.

We said that we were terminating the employment due to her being late every day after the first 2 weeks and that I was going PT and we no longer needed childcare.

You are awful people.

No I did go PT, we still needed a nanny for that though so just employed another for 4 days 9-4 instead of 5 days 730-6

We said that we were terminating the employment due to her being late every day after the first 2 weeks and that I was going PT and we no longer needed childcare.

You and your husband are absolute arseholes and while I don’t believe in karma I hope that if it exists it bites you both firmly on your entitled arses.

I think it’s due to lots of people like @Removingthehat who see themselves as buying a service, they need childcare and buy childcare - but it’s not buying a service from a company or a self employed person, it’s becoming an employer, which in our society has a lot of responsibilities as well as benefits.

@Removingthehat doesnt see they did anything wrong because they were paying for a service and realised quickly it wouldn’t work for them so got out of contract quickly. But they weren’t buying her time, they were employing her. It’s different and yes, they broke employment law, but got away with it because their nanny couldn’t prove it.

Many other employers don’t get that they are employers so end up being sued because they’ve acted like they were using a regular service from a business.

@Removingthehat

Your own words:

we decided to let her go she hadn’t even told us yet she was pregnant so we got away with it

Lies. Despicable.

I don't know how many times I've had this conversation. Not about a nanny but about my mom's carers.

My brother wants consistency and says that there should be 1 carer every day, 7 days a week. I pointed out to him that even if the carer wanted to it would be illegal to insist as legally she has to have time off regularly. So he conceded 2 carers splitting the week but no one else every. And I had to point out that one of them might get sick or have a holiday. What really bugs me about this is he's a smart guy, head master of a school but that in itself means he gets lots of time off during the year. But he can't see that others need time off too. We're lucky a carer hasn't sued us/mom.

At that point in time we needed someone physically able to look after ds carrying him etc , someone who he would have long term and to bond with him due to the nature of his SEN. She assured us she was that person . It wasn’t true and ds was our priority. Luckily for us we found out and could avoid the situation of having to pay someone to do what we needed

So @Removingthehat you got away with being a shitty employer by playing on a technicality and worming your way out of responsibility towards someone you employed. 👍