"it is unacceptable for men or women to call in because a child is sick in my view."

[hunkermunker]

Xenia says "it is unacceptable for men or women to call in because a child is sick in my view."

I am interested to know what other people do in this situation.

I was making the point that often the lower paid jobs are less flexible because you don't own the business, aren't in charge, don't call the shots - just one of the team, a minion as it were and you can't say right it's sports day I'll take the afternoon off school. It wasn't one of my "special jobs" with potential to earn £1m a year although I suppose if you set up a network of schools which succeeds (is Chris Woodhead trying that?) then you may gain that power.

Monkeytrousers, you wrote: ""Interesting balance to get right." It is interesting. As parents I think we're doomed to get it wrong no matter how sensible we think we are. The major problems may occur when we don't adapt to the needs of the individuals that are our children."

Perhaps I am a bit more optimistic about getting the balance right as parents . I think what Xenia is essentially saying is that it is a day-by-day, hour-by-hour balancing act, in which parents have to weigh the need to nurse a sick child v. the demands of work v. the individual needs of the child.

It is not black-and-white to say, that because a child is sick, whether with sniffles or having to spend time in a hospital, that a parent must automatically be at the child's side because no work on earth is more important than my sick child (not quoting you, just paraphrasing some posts). It makes life simple to take that attitude, mind you, but that does not give weight to the fact we also have responsibilities to our employers, esp small businesses like Bubble99 describes.

I am sure that if Xenia's child was not as independent as she describes and was more needy, she would have arranged to stay in hospital. Afterall, all children are different, as you rightly alluded to. I am emotionally self-sufficient and would have been happy amusing myself in hospital if not in pain, but my sister who is more needy would probably have liked a parent in with her.

i am at home today having called in with apologies for 2 Board meetings as my daughter has the croup. what was i supposed to do - take her with me and let her vomit all over the men in suits?!

it happens a bit as she tends to get this for some reason and i can't get anyone else to look after her when she's throwing up (its a reflex thing i think with the coughing). My husband leaves earlier in the morning than me sois at work when i have to make the decision. he would stay at home but he works full time and earns our base salary (he has taken her in sometimes during a spate and he has stayed at home too but i mean on the first day it's usualy me).
pixiefish - me too! i had to accept 'redundancy' through similar circumstances . i was in a really senior job and my ch exec was so pissed off at me taking time out for hospital/gp appointments he told me to get alive in anny, i said no (we don't have money/space and anyway why should we?) and the next week he made me redundant. suspicious heh? i should have done something but had no energy. now i freelance and juggle badly and we are broke.

"If we reskill women for him, then this will be less bad. "

Ahem - lots employers are female!

Mea culpa, but the vast majority are male, and that includes sectors where the majority of "the workers" are female, yet somehow men end up in charge. The NHS is a particularly bad example.
I'd be interested to see the number of sex discrimination cases brought against female bosses vs male ones. Any know ?

..because women take the time off sick and they marry men who earn more largely so their careers come second... women make themselves in that sense unlikely ever to become the person running the NHS trust because their choices if they truly are free choices rather than just conditioning.

DC, I actually found my year off very intellectually invigorating. I didn't read much but that fallow period definitely made the soil richer

I've only met 2 chief execs of hospitals and they were both women

"I'm a hard line Thatcherite Economist reader"

I never took you as a ideologue DC

employed a guy once who did his back in

6 months off and surgery

came back a more mature person and better employee

lucky i stood up for him when he was about to be sacked

Are we living to work or working to live? and are we employing robots or individuals with multiple roles in life?

I'm not much of an ideologue, since I regard Thatcherism as pretty much a rejection of ideologies. Yes, there is a bit of a contradiction here. Thatcher was the last liberal in British politics. By that I mean she wasn't very much into cosying up to big groups, be they unions, religions, or even her own party. Usually we've have leaders who think that because a group is big that somehow imparts moral authority.
Thus before and after her, vested interests have prospered, and since governments pander to them, the incentive to join a group has gone up, leading to a vicious cycle which is already turning violent again.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember the closed shop ?

Hmm. I grew up in a mining village in the Northeast. You'll be aware of my opinion of Thatcher.

Sorry re;the empty post ! Still getting to grips witha new work station....I think it is all a matter of weighing things up, is my work today important ? Do I value it ? What will happen to the 'consumers' of my work ? What will happen to me if I stay home with my child ? How else would the child be looked after ? I value my children's happiness/ comfort every bit as much as the work I do but the facts are that someone who comes to see me as a specialist doctor may have waited for weeks,( if not months..), and have complicated and often dangerous problems...they 'win' I'm afraid.That's not to say I won't be worried/concerned re; my lo, and will call home more often, and call in if I can, bring alittle extra treat in the evening,spend more time with the sick child when I get back etc Also I always, always discuss and share the support with dh...we have,( or had, currently doing something very different but will go back to previous life ! ), similar jobs, samish pay/responsabilities etc. Now I seem to be working in a much more laid back atmosphere but will continue the above way of dealing with ' sick child dilemma ', if only to show colleagues that there are other ways of coping with this common problem that doesn't involve ' giving in' and signing out of the adult world,ie; the workplace....Xenia, any chance of coming over to a 'legal thread', that appears above this one on the 'last hour' screen ? Someone thought you might be just the person with this experience...

choosy floosy, ithink most people have agreed that one prolonged period of absence isn't such a big deal, it's the ones with odd days off quite regularly, which are 'anacceptable' (so well done for sticking up for him). If you are paid enough to have a great lifestyle, then you should use some of that money to ensure that you do have enough childcare options, except in genuine emergencies!
the real problem is people in critical (often caring industry) roles, who aren't paid enough money to cover extra childcare, but who really cause a problem if they are absent, e.g. healthcare, childcare, education.

Monkeytrousers, I have physical scars from the miners strikes, even though at the time I was only a child.
We were dead poor at that time, couldn't afford large numbers of batteries, and what passed for heating in my home was mostly electric.
My burns come from what happens if you have a home with no heating or lighting and you are reduced to candles and burning shit in the fireplace with kids.
Some 30 years later my burns are still visible and ugly enough that I use them to show my kids why you have to be careful with fire.
My experience was far from unique, go look up the records on accidents both fatal or as in my case "non-lethal" burns on kids.
You won't see burned kids on miners banners procaliming "solidarity". No.
Wonder why ?
BTW I can still recal the pain from one burn, screamed so loud my voice permanently changed.

By that ponit in thw 1970s point British miners were about the highest paid manual workers on the planet. (This was under Labour and Tories before Thatcher).
They certainly earned a lot more than my family.
So what did they do ?
Go on strike for more money, causing electricity to be cut off to working class homes like mine.
Their position was that we should pay more to keep them well off.
By this point British coal was amazingly expensive, so much so that products such as steel could simply not be made economically in Britain, this caused protectionist measures which made all of British manufacturing industry, with it's high % of manual workers (all earning less than miners) to suffer.
They used violence to enforce their will. This wasn't a bit of shouting, they killed people as well.

So I regard every lost miners job as a personal victory over those selfish bastards.

sorry kickass, yes i was reacting to the thing about people effectively going backwards as employees during maternity leave, i don't personally think it's nec the case. but i pulled thread off topic which i am v prone to do, sorry.

I'm from the North East and Mrs Thatcher was always my hero... anyway that's a bit off topic.

mox, will look for the other thread.

Yes, the people who aren't in what I called "special jobs" (high pay etc) but yet critical jobs - teaching, a nanny etc vital things where it's not easy for others to cover (even being a mother at home!) who have time off sick are the difficult ones. Employers will pay (and they do in the City with company nannies to cover your own nanny being off sick) if there is a business case for that but that isn't always so.

Interesting is whether a mother at home not feeling very well can struggle on and manage the children rather than having her husband give up a day's pay and whether the same woman in an office would also struggle on with the same level of sickness in herself too.

I was a child too DC. But I'm not sure if I follow you..I'm really sorry about your injuries, but are you saying the miners strike caused them?

Miners were certainly paid well; it was an exhausting and dangerous job and safely was an issue too. The men who went down the mine could provide well for their families, but lets get it in perspective, it wasn't an astronomical amount. They could afford to own their own homes (2-3 bedroom terraces on the market now for an average of 70k so you can get an idea of their relative value in the 80s.

I'm not a historian either but I'm sure it was a bit more complicated than that. For a start the miners themselves didn't vote to strike - they were ordered to strike by the union and Scargill. Like many, they were pawns in a political game between Thatcher and the unions and Scargill and Thatcher, not selfich bastards at all. You are far too clever to think that surely? As you testify there was a huge amount of unbelievable suffering for everyone involved. I don?t approach this issue from any political perspective just a humanitarian one and both Thatcher and Scargill were supremely ignorant of that element..

I?m not trying to play a game of moral equivalences ? we suffered more than you, etc, that is a useless road to go down. People suffered, that?s a fact. The miners and their families suffered and people like you, though again I?m not clear on the logic of who you blame from your injuries.

Thatcher?s policy of individualism and free marketeering has its legacy in our stratified society. Again I?m not a political historian but I do understand the implacable nature of the market and where it is allowed free reign, many humans (and animals and landscapes) suffer indelibly. Thatcher, and right leaning economists might say that is a price worth paying for a strong economy and standing in the global markets. I?m of the position it isn?t.

No, don't remember closed shop, sorry

Thatcher was my mothers hero too. She was very confused my mother

Thatcher was my mothers hero too. She was very confused my mother

Yes MT, I thought that was an extremely one-sided history of the miners strike myself!!

I believe one of the problems was not with pay but the fact that Thatcher wanted to shut down the majority of the mines, and then she did. So they didn't want more money, they wanted their jobs.

And I don't think you can blame them for you being poor.

The country was in the grip of the unions. People were leaving. Tax rates had gone up to 65 - 99% in some cases. We had a 3 day week, power wasn't on, we were on our knees. Inflation was high. Unions picketed other than just at the place of the strikers. Then newspapers couldn't even move to modern print machines. ALl that was swept away and we have much of the prosperity we take for granted today because of the various things that Conservative administration did. Amusingly Blair only got in because he adopted similar policies which are now taken for granted as the norm.

LittleSarah is right that it's one sided. I am in general on the side of kids who get burned as against rich thugs. Fact that I was a burned kid, is extra.
What do you think happens when you turn off the power to poor people's homes ?
Sit around the camp fire singing jolly folk songs ?
Why do you think Thatcher was elected ? She was personally very unpopular even before she was PM. Ordinary people were sick of being kicked around, and I mean that quite literally. There was open talk of serious violence, way beyond the standard union actios of tossing lumps of concrete onto motorways to "show support".

In any case, LittleSarah, I was very careful to give dates. Thatcher was not in power in the 1970s, indeed half the miners strikes were against the fact that even the Labour government they hired thought their demands were excessive.
In effect the final Labour government was sacked for not doing what it's employers told it to do.

Recall that even now many Labour MPs are in effect employees of unions. In the 1970s the party was a creature of the unions, and they even squatted in the offices of one of the bigger unions.

The strikes for really quite amazing levels of pay were in the 1970s when Thatcher was variously minister of education or an opposition MP. Doubt if most miners knew she existed then.

Thatcher's actions were quite probably motivated by revenge since the miners had brought down at least one tory government as well.

But it needed to happen. If you allow gangs of armed thugs to declare areas of country no go areas, and cut off it's electricity supply at a whim, it is going to end badly.

As for the "closed shop". This was where you had to belong to a union else you were sacked, or not hired. That meant up until the 1990s that women and "coloureds" were shut out of several employers, or else not allowed to take jobs that belonged to white men like (err umm) me.
If you fell out with your shop steward, he could have you sacked, and no there was no unfair dismissal, race or sex discrimination act to protect you. Note that unions have all sorts of legal immunities, wonder how they got there ?

If, as we saw at Grunwick you were unwise enough to be an asian woman, it was stupid of you to expect that you could take a white union man's job. If necessary they would use violence to stop you.