Hello
Mumsnet, Maternity Action and the Employment Lawyers Association are teaming up to provide a free online legal clinic all week this week, offering advice from specialist employment solicitors and barristers on pregnancy, maternity and parental rights at work.
Maternity Action reports huge demand for its advice line, especially topics such as redundancy during maternity leave, return to work, maternity pay and rights during pregnancy. On Mumsnet, the topic of employment rights is a hardy perennial.
So we thought we’d try this out to see if we can help make good, free advice available to all.
The clinic will take place on this thread. If you’re dealing with a work situation and you want to be sure of your pregnancy, maternity and/or parental rights, post an outline of your dilemma here. You don’t need to include identifying details: a specialist solicitor or barrister will follow up with you via PM if they need to know more.
You will also be asked by one of the volunteers, via PM, to disclose your name and the name of your employer so that possible conflicts of interest can be ruled out. Because PMs are critical to how this works, please don’t change your username within this thread, as it will make it difficult for the volunteers to be sure they’re exchanging personal messages with the right person. (Of course, if you want to change your username before posting your problem, that’s fine.)
Personal information collected via personal message for the clinic will be held by Maternity Action and will be deleted after 18 months. Private messages are stored on Mumsnet until the user deletes them.
Answers and advice from the specialists will be posted up on this thread. The clinic will run for a week; we will do our best to provide all answers during the week but, at the latest, by the end of the following week. You can find information on where to go for more help once the clinic has ended here.
Finally (!) - for anyone who takes part - we’d love it if you could fill in Maternity Action’s feedback survey once the clinic has finished, so that we can find out how effective this has been for you.
Important: The advice provided to an individual poster is based only on the information provided by that poster. Advice on this thread is also particular to the individual who has asked for it and is likely to be specific to that person’s situation. A poster may have provided further relevant information by private message which will not appear on this thread. So please take care if you choose to apply that advice to your own situation - it is recommended that you first take legal advice from one of the sources we have recommended here.
The lawyers, all of whom are specialists in employment law, will be working as volunteers for Maternity Action in respect of the clinic. (You can read more about how this works, and the complaints procedure, here.)
Mumsnet, Maternity Action, Maternity Action's volunteers and the Employment Lawyers Association accept no liability for any loss suffered as a result of an individual choosing to follow advice provided to another poster's question on the thread. If you wish to make a complaint about the service you received, you can use Maternity Action’s complaints policy here.
So, please feel free to get posting with your dilemmas and questions for the lawyers. (Any non-legal questions about how this will work, please feel free to post those too.)
Thanks
MNHQ