James Bond - International Women's Day 2011
http://youtu.be/gkp4t5NYzVM
Women in the UK can be fired for pregnancy? Really?
Fired for pregnancy, well that happens in a roundabout way. It's illegal to fire someone just because they get pregnant, but there are many ways to let a person go and employers without morals find a way.
There are many things that employers must do to keep in line with UK (mainly European Union dictats) laws when someone has a baby, and that can genuinely put a strain on small companies (so some compaies even disciminate by tending not to employ women... but that's a different issue). For example, you must keep the position open for the employee so that when they return from maternity leave they come back into the same role - in reality (especially in a small business) this means that a 6 month temporary contractor is brought in and it takes time to train them (so they may be brought in for 9 months just to properly cover 6) - then the role you have trained thm on is filled again, so attracting the best people for these contracts is tricky.
I am a UK employer (with a 50:50 split of male/female employees) and can see why (even though it's wrong) people do this. There are many things that are making running abusiness in the UK more difficult, so avoiding as many as you can in the first place is often a priority.
Quote from: inbound on March 09, 2011, 04:50:55 AM(so they may be brought in for 9 months just to properly cover 6)
just a technical "but" == but hasn't the maternatity leave gone up to 9 months?
It may well have... just goes to show that keeping on top of changes (although I should have spotted that) isn's easy when you are running a dynamic business too. Apparently it was due to go up to a year, but that has been postponed. According to Wikipedia you get 0 weeks of paid maternity leave - so the info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave will be an eye opener to msome people in the land of the free.