This situation involves my husband rather than me and I would appreciate any advice and guidance regarding how he should handle his manager's unhappiness with time off to cover our children's sickness.
The immediate situation is that he had to take 1 day off last week (which was half term) to cover our children being unable to go to their childcare due to a tummy bug. He then caught the bug and was off the following day Thursday, struggled in on Friday (when I had the children) then had to take Monday off again due to his own illness. I don't work Mondays and the oldest was back at school.
Today he was called in by his manager who told him they were exceedingly unhappy regarding the time he takes off for childcare issues, that "it looked suspicious that it was half term" and that they were now going to log every day he takes off for childcare related reasons.
He is a civil servant, has worked in his dept for 14 years and has no history of any complaints in the past for taking excessive amounts of time off sick or for childcare emergencies. Their sickness trigger point is 5 days and at the moment he is on 4 for the past 12 months. He has taken 3 days off for emergency childcare since I returned to work in September (including last week.) Before then no time off for childcare since Sept 2011. I can't remember before that date.Our youngest is 1 year old and we share taking time off between us.
The thinly veilled allegation that he deliberately took time off to look after our eldest during half term is upsetting him and he has printed off the holiday booking club confirmation email to show them. Our son loves his holiday club and was upset to miss a day! I could have taken annual leave over half term if we had wanted to, but not at short notice when the children fell ill.
How should he handle this with his manager? This is not the first time she has made comments about him looking after the children too much. She was very unhappy in the Autumn when he first took a day.He has a flexible working arrangement that means he leaves work early and she has commented that this is all the flexibility he is entitled to. ( arrangement was agreed by a predecessor.) She also told him she could not recommend him for promotion or training due to him prioritising his childcare commitments over work.
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Manager Unhappy Regarding Time Off For Children's Sickness
18 replies
TheKin · 16/04/2013 13:27
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