Woman in the workplace penalised for taking maternity leave!

[CreepyCrawlyCarmenere]

Check this out for some depressing reading.

dont get me started on this either! I never did find out if it was legal for a company using me through an agency to sack me - when I was pregnant!

this is a touchpaper for me (is thst the right saying!!! ) !

My twerp of a boss before I left to have dd1, said he coudnt bare the ones that got pregnant , it was such a pain he said and he warned me not to start . He was revolting to anyone who was and made thier lives a hell. Weirdly though I was told I was one of the highest paid in the team ,as he kept ramming it down my throat. Im sure if I had not resigned before getting pg and stayed during my pregnancy and then had leave, he would have not given me a pay rise and he would have been very harsh with me.

Pretty poor imo that the only solution to this problem is for men to take more paternity leave.
The bottom line is that woman need to spend time with newborns in order to keep the human race going. And yet no allowances are being made for this. Very poor indeed.

I can't see how taking 6 months to a year off work should warrant 13K less pay even if they are looking at length of service minus time off that's a lot of money! Should companies start counting all the sick days people have as well!!!! I'm shocked by the European court, I thought they were one step ahead on this stuff especially when so many countries in the EU are facing a shortage of children being born to support social services and pensioners in the future and there is a definite need to encourage people to have more children! Absolutely shocking!

Sorry but I don't see how taking maternity leave would make that much difference to the length of service. I've had 3 babies whilst working for the same employer. In all I've taken less than a year 'off'. I appreciate that maternity leave is longer now but even assuming that I'd taken 6 months each time it still wouldn't add up to a great deal.

The thing is that in many jobs your ability is a function of how long you've done it.
Not true of all jobs by a long way, but true in things like medicine, law, piloting planes etc.

In many fields, it is a requirement that you have X years experience before you can do certain things.

IME women are invariably paid less for the same job/ability. Years of service is used as an excuse sometimes to justify that. That is what is wrong with this.

It seems that the more the EU / govt try to "help", the more employers just prefer men full stop.

I'm not sure about the angle on this story. I think if you go on maternity leave on the job, then that DOES count towards your length of service.

I think the point that the woman in this case was making was that if you had taken time out to look after children, say between jobs, then this adversely affects your years of experience 'cos you're not technically 'working'.

But you are still 'working' when you are on maternity leave from your job.

I.e. If I am doing a job for five years, take a year's maternity leave, and return for further 2 years, my length of service is still 8 years, not 7.

If I work in a job 5 years, leave my job and look after my kids for 3 years, then return to work for 2 years, I have only clocked up 7 years.

Think this article might be a tad misleading. Although it still does badly affect women who take time out of their career to care.

K, so the EU Court gives 'human rights' to repeat offender paedos and rapists, but not to women who take time off work to have children.

I also work for the same employer - I thought she didn't have kids but used it as an example of how she might have been at a loss. I've just had over a year off and I earn no less than the people who started at the same time as me.

I don't really understand where she was coming from - the real issue is that it can take 12 years to reach the top of the pay scale (13K difference) and the people at the bottom of the scale do exactly the same job as the people at the top. Has nothing to do with gender.

Again, I think the point is that you are more likely to take 'time out' of the workforce if you are a woman. So it is harder to 'build up' loads of years of experience than if you are a man (therefore indirect discrimination).

If you stay in the same job, but take regular maternity leave, even if it added up to 2 or 3 years worth, this would not affect how many years' service you have. Its only if you actually leave your workplace and then go back into the workforce at a later date - as many women with pre-school children do - that you will have a service gap.

That's my reading of it all - but I do not actually know!

Fondant - I have to read the article again you may be right, but my understanding was that she had taken maternity leave. If she took several years out of work then I can understand that it could be considered she had less experience at the job which could warrant less pay.

Interesting point GQM 'It seems that the more the EU / govt try to "help", the more employers just prefer men full stop.'. A friend of mine was convinced that she wasn't getting interviews for jobs because she of typical age that professional women have children, therefore would probably cost money, time etc... I live in Switzerland which is really bad on maternity rights and equality, however my company is rich enough and forward thinking enough to recognise the benefits of encouraging and actively supporting women to come back to work after having children. When and how will this culture change so that this becomes a norm rather than an exception?

This was covered quite differently by the Guardian.

guardian take on it

I see a correlation between the job and the attitude. Skilled women are harder to replace, and the transitional costs of replacing them is higher.

The huge rise in women with qualifications, and the destruction of traditional manfacturing "industry" has done for more to erode pay disparity than laws, whose effect is anything from marginal to actively bad.
In a free market, you simply can't pay women (or blacks or Belgians) less because someone else will pay the market price. That's why some of the worst offenders are state organisations like the NHS which is largely staffed by women, but mostly run by men.
Manufacturing used to be as bad because employers were local monopolies, but they self destructed for reasons like this.

As the obvious nasties have been cut down, we're done to issues so subtle that many women flatly refuse to accept they even exist.
The largest of these is the poor choices girls make in education, and the way they are systematically lied to by teachers when choosing subjects. That's not going to change any time soon.

I can't really see what is so shocking about this decision. Every organisation I've ever worked for gave people increased pay the longer they work there. And when I've applied for new jobs the fact that I'd had 5, 10 or 12 years in the IT industry makes a difference to the sort of job I can apply for and therefore the pay I can expect. If I took 3 years out to do anything else - be it look after kids, or my parents, or travel round the world, that would be 3 years less experience in IT. It comes down to who takes time off to look after kids - that doesn't mean that increased years of experience shouldn't earn you more pay.

Or am I missing something again?

The decision said it was possible to pay people more for length of service if by being there longer it meant they were better at their job. Argument against was that there was that if you were equally as good you should receive same pay as others of same ability regardless of whether you'd been there 6 years or 10 years.

Court held that emploeyrs could continue to reward length of service BUT that if you felt that resulted in unfair pay for you (with shorter service) then you could sue but the onus was on you to prove you had been treated unfairly, there is no presumption of unfairness inherent in rewarding length of service.

It was not an argument about matrenity leave - would apply equally to a male newer recruit versus a female lengoer serving employee.

Both sides have claimed victory of course!

Ah I see. Tricky to prove that you were as good or better than a longtimer I should say. No 2 employees are totally comparable in all areas.

It looks as if the Times completely mis-reported the story!

most of the papers are picking their angle and reporting that, but generally not reporting the whole story. I think the lawyers aren't clear how it will pan out in practice.

I think there's somthing to be said for having a salary structure which rewards long service, but I do think the cut off point is open to challenge.

E.g . is someone who is doing the same work but has been in the job 15 years, really £9,000 better than someone who has been doing the same work for 5 years? Surely, there's a point where long service does not improve your ability at the job.

Given that women find it harder to build up very long stretches of experience - because of caring for kids etc. - extreme examples like that will tend to affect women more than men abnd shuld be open to challenge.

I'm willing to accept a colleague who has been dong it for 10 years knows more than me when I'm in my first few years, but after 5 or so years.... is there really that much difference between our abilities?

I think that's why in most graded jobs, incremental rises tend to stop after 3-5 years, and salaries then become equal after that point.

This ruling suggests that if you are in a job where your colleagues keep getting more money year after year, regardless of ability, and you can never catch up no matter how good you are then it may be possible to challenge your employer.

The two articles have taken almost completely opposite viewpoints on the same ruling, which does make it a bit confusing.

This is not really about male/female is it? It's about long service being rewarded for its own sake, rather than for any performance related criteria. And from the two articles it isn't clear exactly what they have decided.

I do agree with the person that said that if you take years out for whatever reason, children, travelling etc. you have to accept that you have been out of the workplace and therefore will not have accrued the same experience/pay entitlement.

But that would mean that some women could never catch upand will be penalised for looking after children (how dare they)!

If I've got 15 years experience and you've got 20 years experience, I don't think it necessarily follows that you're better at the job than me.

At some point it's got to be based on performance....

Yes it has to be based partly on ability, and dead wood doesn't deserve extra payment just for being there longer. But still it is fair to base pay increases to a certain extent on length of service. The issue is surely, as it so often is, why does it have to be always the women who take the time out. If men and women equally take on these roles it's not an issue of gender inequality. Women don't have to lose out because they choose to have children.

This is terrible and really sets back sex discrim legislation, how fking depressing and awful.