Thursday 4 November 2010

Pregnancy Discrimination- £45,000 award after employer pretended employee didn't qualify for statutory maternity pay

As my previous post was for maternity leave, after doing a bit of research on the subject of discrimination of pregnant woman I found on legal news a very interesting case.
 A woman named Ms Quigley has been awarded £45,000 from a Northern Ireland employment tribunal for unfair dismissal and sex discrimination, with the compensation for injured feelings being at the higher end of the scale, after her employer Mr McGrory pretended that she was only working part-time in order to avoid paying her statutory maternity pay.

The case was as follow: Ms Quigley worked in a café owned by Mr McGory. She worked 40, 45 hours a week and after she fell pregnant around 30 hours. However, when she ask from him maternity pay he told her that onlu 15 of her weekly hours had been put through the books so she didn’t qualify for those payments. Although, he insisted that Ms Quigley must lie to Social Security staff to cover up his actions. Hopefully, she refused to do this.
Ms Quigely told on the tribunal hearing that she had had to use her own saving while she tried to secure statutory maternity pay; she was also said that due to financial concerns she was unable to enjoy time with her baby. Although, evidence showed that during her work, Quigley had been left feeling shocked, distressed and betrayed by the experience and became ill due to the treatment of her employer. Eventually, the tribunal awarded Ms Quigley £45,000.

I think that there are many other cases like this! Many pregnant women have been discriminated on work and have been treated from their employers in the worst possible way. If you decide to hire a woman you have to think that possibly in the future she will become pregnant and you have to give her rights whatever those rights are (e.g. 12 or 14 or 18 or 20 weeks maternity leave on full pay). But off-course this does not mean that because is a woman and because probably she will become pregnant in future you should not hire her in order to avoid the maternity pay.
For further reading:

2 comments:

=yinyen= said...

Interesting post =)

=yinyen= said...

Interesting post and nice pictures =)