UK's most family UNFRIENDLY employers??

[JusAnothaMum]

Been doing some pre return-to-work research on family friendly employmers and it seems that 21st century England is happy teaming with all sort of best employer to work for lists and family friendly kitemark schemes. However, the numbers involved in these schemes seem relatively small as a proportion of employers in total, and they also all seem to be self nominated rather than reflecting what the mums and dads work for them really think.

So... I wanted to ask the MN world: who would you nominate as the country's most family UNFRIENDLY employer? Is the private sector really still so much worse than the public sector? Have the big corporates all really sorted themselves out in this respect. Anyone had requests for flexible working turned down from major employers with no clear business case?

northerngirl41, I think that flexible working should be actively encouraged. It is a way of helping people in their sixties as well as mums. I agree that ANYONE should be allowed to apply. I think that tax incentives to employ part time workers would be better than legal force.

My employer is very negative about part time work. I wanted to return to work at 9 months. I also had difficulty about getting time off for ante natal appointments

Surely you don't really think we should go back to the dark ages and not allow women maternity leave? I agree with you that women should be clearer about when they return to work.

It makes my blood boil when I see RBS always do well in these awards. Yes, if you're a cashier or work in a call centre there are flexible working patterns available and they offer childcare vouchers etc, but in the areas where there's any "status" or top rates of pay, e.g Commercial and Corporate Banking, it's still incredibly male dominated, because it's just not family friendly at all.

I'm not sure Reallytired - what we have at the moment is a situation where women dread telling their employers they are pregnant and they can't be honest about whether they are planning on coming back or not because they get financially penalised. And then you have discrimination against all women of childbearing age, regardless of whether or not they have kids because they might have a child and expect to be able to take a whole year off without being able to find a suitable replacement. If you switched to a system of everyone being able to take leave, albeit unpaid, then you level the playing field and stop businesses from discriminating.

I actually think it would make the workplace much more flexible in general with people moving jobs more frequently and more jobs opening up rather than being held open for someone who "might" come back to work.

Then you have the mum who comes back to work after, say, nine months off, to find all her work colleagues absolutely frazzled at covering her workload since the temp they hired isn't up to the job, to a big backlog of work when they aren't necessarily feeling their most on the ball, and bosses are singularly unimpressed when she suggests that actually instead of working till 6pm like everyone else, she needs to leave at 4:45 in order to pick up the baby from nursery. It makes for a truly horrible work situation - no one is happy about it. We need to change it.

I'd be really interested to see what would happen if they let women opt out of maternity leave... I suspect that those who did would get promoted faster and would get paid more, because the company isn't having to factor in risks associated with them going off on maternity leave. And what's more because of equality laws, the men at the company would probably get paid more too... We do it with the European Working Directive - why not with maternity leave?

Just some ideas - I'm sure there are more from others!!!

I have spent long weeks in hospital with DS.
The NHS appears to be one of the hardest jobs for parents of sick children. Parents with children in acute states were not able to get even unpaid leave. One Dad had to dash from the Isle of Wight to King's to see his very ill dd on the day of a critical op - he arrived after she went into theatre and had to dash back before she had come round. The poor Mum was so alone, the dd was crying for her dad the next day.

northerngirl41, have you ever had children or intend to have children. The problem with your idea is that accidents happen. Unplanned pregnancy often requires the mother to return to work as the chances of becoming a single mother are higher.

I do not think its acceptable for the state to financially support a woman because she has no income due to opting out of maternity leave.

I think the idea of anyone being able to take a sabatical is interesting, but small companies would find it a nightmare.

northerngirl - while I'd agree with on the flexible working policy as most people nowadays want a job which allows you a work life balance I'm not sure about your maternity leave idea. Legally the only amount of time you actually have to take off is 2 weeks post birth (I think it's 4 weeks if you work in a factory) because it's considered an HSE risk to allow women to work then. The reason women take longer is because they can. Countries with shorter maternity leaves e.g. New York (6 weeks or 8 weeks for a csec) do not have higher levels of women working in good jobs. Quite the contrary because it's so difficult to try and balance conflicting demands.

I'd agree that it's fairer to give employers more notice on how long you'll be off but this is something which is impossible to predict pre-birth as so many things will impact on your decision. If a first time mother you may discover the idea of leaving your child is something you can't do, equally you may be desperate to return. If your baby is premature you will probably want longer to ensure that everything is ok than if the baby is bang on targets at every point. The way in which your return to work is managed will also impact on how you feel about going back. While your point about temps not being either up to a job or having the same skill may be true to a certain extent, if you make it too difficult for women to return to work then you will regress the situation to a 1950s one of women should only do low level work because once they've had kids they can't work. Is that fair?

Everything has to strike a balance and while I'm not saying we're there yet, making every part of organising cover a woman's sole responsibility doesn't seem to me to be the way to do this. When people take sabbaticals they're not asked to arrange their cover or at least I've never heard of it.

reallytired - I have two and I'm self-employed.

You say accidents happen - let's say that they don't realise for 2-3 months that they're pregnant, you've still got 6 months left to save money. Realistically if you're planning on coming back to work, you'd need to be paying around £500 out in nursery fees each month after the baby is born. If you can't afford to save £500 a month from your current salary, then you actually can't afford to go back to work, so why should that company have to pay out and keep the job open when you have no intention of coming back to work? The cash you save whilst pregnant could fund your maternity leave. That's what I did. And that's what hundreds of other self-employed women do because they have to get back to work ASAP otherwise they wouldn't have a job to come back to.

I'm not saying it's ideal - and obviously if there's a better solution I'm all for it... I particularly like the Scandinavian model whereby all the childcare is covered by the state and all the maternity/paternity leave too. That way parents can choose whether they want to go back and don't get trapped at home simply because they can't afford childcare.

tiggersreturn - you make an interesting point about it being mostly women who the vast majority of childcare falls to - surely to counteract this we need to give women LESS maternity leave, and split it evenly between parents if it is to be taken?

northerngirl41,
I think it desperately unfair that the state does not help self employed people get no help with maternity costs. It hardly encourages enterprising women to set up their own companies.

I want to set up my own social enterprise and I can see what you mean that I could be paying benefits for a woman who never works for me. Ie. gets pregnant 3 months after job, has pregnancy from hell so is off sick and then expects paid maternity leave and for her job to be open.

I think there needs to be fairer system for helping pregnant women costs. Even stay at home mums should have some help, and its understandable why a self employed person is bitter. Maternity leave needs reforming not dismantling. I think that level of maternity leave you get should depend on national insurance.

I see no reason why high earning women shoud get more in the first 6 weeks of maternity for example for statory leave. When you are on maternity leave you are not at work, the job of looking after a baby should attract the same level of pay whether you are a cleaner or a merchant banker.

They do pay maternity allowance, but do so on the proviso that you only work 10 keeping in touch days whilst off on maternity leave, so it's effectively blocking you from making business decisions whilst off. And it's nowhere near enough money to replace my salary, so I didn't bother.

I wholeheartedly agree that giving children the best start in life is paramount, and that having parents involved is the best way of doing that. But if the government wants that, then they need to be the ones putting their hands in their pockets, not expecting businesses to support their airy fairy ideals. I'd totally be supportive of having say 8 weeks full pay maternity leave paid for by the government. And then after that, you decide whether or not you want to go back to work or not. I'm not convinced that giving mums longer off work actually makes the decision to go back any easier. Is it fair to let a child get used to their mum always being there and then ripping them away again after 9 months or a year of maternity leave? Far better that you set the standard early surely?

And interestingly - here's one to ponder - why is it that the government allows you to register as self-employed when claiming maternity leave from your existing employer so women can start businesses whilst on maternity leave? But won't let existing business women have any more than 10 KIT days in order to keep their business running whilst they take maternity allowance?

I see your point northerngirl and I completely agree with you that this is an unfair system for smaller businesses and the self-employed.

The difficulty I have with your suggestions on how to resolve it is that while for some women your system might work personally I was on heavy pain killers until 5 1/2 weeks post work and could not walk more than 5 minutes until that point. This was as a result of an EMCS and infection and ds then being re-admitted to hospital. If I'd had to return to work 2 1/2 weeks after that I would not have bfed and would almost certainly have collapsed particularly if required to work the 12-14 hour days that I was working before I went on maternity leave. Having dh do childcare at that point would not have helped the situation as obviously he can't bfeed (and I would have felt very guilty about having to give up at that point - I've never been much use at expressing and when I did return to work was not able to find time in the day even if I had been good at it) and more importantly I probably would have collapsed. I'm sure there are superwomen out there who could manage it but generally those who do don't have lengthy commutes and usually seem to have the ability to work from home which I most definitely did not owing to that employer's general attitudes.

In terms of splitting childcare responsibilities that does come down at the end of the day very much to a couple's agreement which is shaped by societal attitudes. Dh and I did have a pretty much 50/50 arrangement until recently when I took the decision that since his career chances were looking much better than mine I should take on slightly more instead of him always bailing me out which had been our previous arrangement. I'm not sure however that cutting maternity leave will have that effect. In my case it would have strongly discouraged me from going back to work or have spent months trying to persuade my GP to sign me off with sick leave which is also unhelpful for an employer wanting an employee to return to work.

Cutting the point payment is made on mat leave might work but obviously that would penalise anyone who is either in lower earning jobs or could not save for other reasons.

No system is perfect but personally I'd rather have the current one than the one you propose.

All the major broadcasters and record companies, as far as I'm concerned.

Really Mumbrane? I used to work for a big record company and you got absolutely tons of time off on maternity and could usually drop kids at school before coming in during the mornings. Plus no one blinked an eyelid about working from home, bringing the kids in or popping out to sort personal tasks during the day. Plus if one parent did the mornings and then worked thru till late, the other parent could do pick up and bath/bed in the evenings without chopping their day at both ends. Where they couldn't be flexible is letting you off the evening schmoozing and gigs - it's an essential part of the job.

Blimey, where did you work? Please do tell!

Can I plead the case for law firms, at least a bit? Some do their best, although it's patchy even across a particular firm and we should do better. I am at a City firm and although I am working now (in between posts!) I came home from the office, put my daughter to bed and am now working at my kitchen table.

Law firms will always find family-friendly policy, for lawyers at least, hard, because they are driven by client needs (which these days require 24/7 service) and billable hours (which require long days). All the law firms need to work harder at being family friendly, it's a constant source of discussion amongst those of us who are trying to combine career and family but none of us can come up with an easy answer. And I am very conscious that however un-family-friendly my hours may be (and mine are actually very good) I am lucky to be paid a lot more than many other people who have a much harder time combining career and family so I am always very hesitant to complain about it.

Good point MrsTeddy - not everywhere can be family friendly simply because of the demands of the business.

Mumbrane - think the biggest and baddest of the lot. Complete bastards about lots of other stuff, but generally parents got treated reasonably well - as long as they were actually valuable to the company, of course. For me, I worked in a really niche area and so the mums there were really important to keep so the knowledge was retained within the company.

And therein lies the problem - a lot of parents AREN'T valuable to the company and therefore if they can hire someone else to do the job with half the hassle, they won't bother to make accommodations. I think if you genuinely want to work flexibly or negotiate terms, you'd better make damn sure you're good at your job beforehand!

My previous employer was awful in the last year of working. They tried to get me to change working locations which increased my travelling time by over an hour with only a days notice. I dug my heels in and refused to do this and got HR involved and filed an informal grievance via my union.

They have refused one of my friends flexible working hours yet they're "performance managing" excellent people out of there left, right and centre.

Anyway naming no names but they're Proud To Be Different.