MNHQ here: Another FREE legal advice clinic from Maternity Action about pregnancy, maternity or parental issues at work

[AnnaCMumsnet]

Hello

Mumsnet and Maternity Action are teaming up once again to provide an online legal clinic, offering free advice on pregnancy, maternity and parental rights at work from volunteer employment solicitors and barristers who are members of the Employment Law Association.

Maternity Action reports huge demand for its advice line, especially topics such as redundancy during maternity leave, return to work and maternity pay, and on Mumsnet's Talk forums, the topic of employment rights is a hardy perennial.

The clinic will respond to this demand in a hopefully innovative way, providing free, accurate, public advice online and raising awareness of parents' rights at work. It will also enable Maternity Action and Mumsnet to identify trends and produce permanent content to address areas in which employers and workers could benefit from clear, upfront guidance.

The clinic will take the form of a 'Q&A' session on this thread, where you can post your questions on pregnancy, maternity and parental rights at work and benefits on a dedicated public discussion thread.

Specialist solicitors and barristers will take necessary additional detail via private messaging before posting up answers and advice.

The clinic will run for a week from Monday 16th to Friday 20th November (but you can post your questions from now) and will be held on a quarterly basis. We will do our best to provide all answers during the week but, at the latest, by the Tuesday of the following week. You can find information on where to go for more help once the clinic has ended here.

What to do if you’d like to post a question
If you have a question about your rights at work during pregnancy, maternity or parental leave please post it online here in the week of the clinic. Please give as much information as possible but remember that this is an online forum and can be viewed by the public – including your colleagues and employer. Please don’t name your employer publicly if you are likely to be taking action against them in future. You can use the private message facility to disclose any information you would prefer to keep off the public forums.

Please send your name and the name of your employer by private message to MaternityActionfreeadvice so that it can be passed on to the volunteers to do a conflict of interest check. We cannot post a reply until you have sent this information by private message.

Once your advice has been posted online, you will have an opportunity to provide feedback. This helps us to find out whether you found the advice helpful, whether it helped you to resolve your situation at work and some information about you. All survey responses are anonymous and confidential. Providing feedback will help us to see what improvements can be made in developing this type of online free legal advice clinic. You can fill out the survey here.

Ts and Cs – please read

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 suggested here
Mumsnet, Maternity Action and Maternity Action's volunteers 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.
The lawyers, all of whom are specialists in employment law, will be working as volunteers for Maternity Action in respect of the clinic. Any personal information collected as a result of the clinic will be held by Maternity Action and will be deleted after 18 months. If you wish to make a complaint about the service you received, you can use Maternity Action’s complaints policy here.

Thank you

@Linushka

Dear team,

thank you for helpings us, mums :)

My questions is as follows:

While on maternity my company has changed owner and my employer has fired me - they opened a new position (lower paid) and employed my colleague - without any internal or external advert - they just gave her the job. Is that a correct way? Could I challenge it?

Please advise. Thank you :)

Dear Linushka,

Thank you for getting in touch. We are sorry to hear of the difficulties you are facing. Even though your question is short and to the point, it does actually involve a number of legally complex issues which may not be properly addressed in short written answer. This response is given as a general overview only. I would strongly encourage you to take some further advice, promptly.

TUPE:

I’m afraid that I am not clear on what you mean by “changed owner”. If the business in which you were employed transferred to another business, and immediately before the transfer the original business was based in the UK, the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations (aka ‘TUPE’) apply. TUPE will not apply where there is simply a transfer of shares to other individuals or another business.

If TUPE does apply it means that your employer may have had a legal duty to handover what is known as ‘Employee Liability Information’ to the new business and to ‘inform and consult’ affected employees on the transfer. If TUPE applies but you were not ‘informed’ and/or ‘consulted’ on it, you may have the right to claim up to 13 weeks’ pay in compensation.

Importantly, if TUPE applies, the affected employees should automatically transfer to the new business. If this doesn’t happen, any dismissal due to the transfer itself will be an automatically unfair dismissal unless the employer can show that the dismissal was actually for an economic, technical or organisational reason and that it followed a fair procedure in dismissing you.

Dismissal:

You have said that you were ‘fired’. I have assumed for the purposes of my response that you were made redundant; but different laws will apply if you were dismissed for another reason.

If your role becomes redundant whilst you are on maternity leave your employer is obliged to follow all the usual rules on a fair redundancy dismissal – including that there must be a genuine redundancy, that you were selected fairly, properly consulted, a fair procedure followed and any suitable alternative roles offered etc.

However, you have an important additional right if the redundancy occurs whilst you are on maternity leave. When you take maternity leave you have the right to return to your exact same job unless it is not reasonably practicable by reason of redundancy. If your role becomes redundant whilst you are on maternity leave you are entitled to be offered any suitable alternative vacancies that exist with priority over other employees who are not on leave. A suitable alternative vacancy must be both suitable and appropriate for you to do in the circumstances and on terms and conditions that are not substantially less favourable to you than if you had continued to be employed in your old job.

You may have a claim for maternity discrimination and/or automatic unfair dismissal where there is no consultation, or there is inadequate consultation, because you were on maternity leave, you were dismissed (or selected for redundancy) due to being on maternity leave; and/or you were not offered any suitable alternative role that existed.

If you were made redundant it is worth checking that you were paid all that you were entitled too including: notice pay, accrued but untaken holiday, and a redundancy payment. You should have also received your full entitlement to Statutory Maternity Pay. Do also check that you have been paid in full for any contractual entitlements you have over and above the statutory minimum. If you have not been paid these sums you may have claims for unpaid sums.

I have outlined a number of potential claims you could have. It is probably best that you work out what you want to achieve – if you want to get your job back, you could appeal their decision to dismiss you. I would always encourage positive and constructive discussions with your employer, explaining where you think they have gone wrong and offer them some practical solutions. Ultimately, you may have the right to make claims in the Employment Tribunal for unfair dismissal and/or discrimination and/or failure to ‘inform and consult’ and/or unpaid sums owing to you. It is important that you are aware that there is a strict 3 month less 1 day time limit for making claims to the Employment Tribunal – and the time limit runs from the date of the act/decision that you are complaining about. You also have to go through Acas Early Conciliation before you will be eligible to make a claim in the Employment Tribunal. You can contact ACAS on 0300 123 1100.