European Court Decision re equal pay rights for women

Kell

Anyone any thoughts on this?

As a man I am apalled that women should denied equal pay rights based on length of service and the fact that so much maternity time is taken.

AFAIK its not women who decide how long they take, its set out by law. AFAIK the law is set about for the best interest of mother and child and the crucial bond between both in the first year of the childs development.

In effect, I think the ruling says "women, if you are going to have babies and look after them the way we think you should, then we're going to penalise you for it".

What does th European Court want? Negative population growth or babies?

Its my thinking that women should be paid more to have babies. Has someone on hi forgotton the incredible role mothers play in rearing in infant and how arduous a task it is to actually stay at home and look after an infant be you woman or man?

K-

Aoife-FM104

I think what the ruling is saying is that companies are not charities and they should not be penalised because their female workers have decided to get pregnant!!

As a female, I have very mixed feelings on it. I don't think it is a sexist ruling though!

fly_agaric

Kell wrote:

As a man I am apalled that women should denied equal pay rights based on length of service and the fact that so much maternity time is taken.

[edit] So you (and feminists I presume) are appalled that women can't have everything?

If women with children are going to have everything (in this case - entitlement to lots of govt. mandated maternity leave and in addition all the time you spend on maternity leave instead of as a wage-slave has no negative effect on your wage increase prospects) who are the patsies who pick up the tab for it? I mean everything never comes for free, does it?

Kell wrote:

Its my thinking that women should be paid more to have babies.

Why do employees who do not or cannot get pregnant have to pay for it by having their service at the grindstone set to naught in the cause of bogus "equality"?

Dades

Kell wrote:

AFAIK its not women who decide how long they take, its set out by law. AFAIK the law is set about for the best interest of mother and child and the crucial bond between both in the first year of the childs development.

It is not the job of an employer to ensure the crucial bond between mother and child is not upset, and it would be the employer (or the workers collegues) who would foot the bill had the decision gone the other way.

And doesn't length of service not equate to experience in many cases, and the better ability or efficiency in a particular job? If I know I was better able to do my job through experience I would be perturbed to know someone with 2/3rds my experience was legally entitled to the same salary as me. Likely as not, both our salaries would suffer.

There's already real difficulties with replacing staff that leave to go on maternity leave without having to maintain their pay level with staff (male or female) that don't.

It's biology, it's nobody's fault - therefore nobody (except the government) can be expected to foot the bill.

coffee_cake

Women don't have to have children, and I think we get a fair enough deal out of it when we do... maternity leave, isn't that paid or something?
I don't think this is an issue... that said maybe I need to find out more about it

BrianD3

In this case did the woman have "less service" because of statutory maternity leave or because of some other reason (eg career breaks and so on) This distinction is very important and it could be that this case has nothing whatsoever to do with gender issues.

It appears this person had taken a case against her employer in the British courts. Some info at the link below. I can find no mention of children or maternity leave here.
http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/judgmentsfiles/j2836/bernadettecadman-v-thehealthandsafetyexec.htm

Last night on the George Hook show they were debating this and it was not made clear why exactly the woman had less service. Brian Crowley who contributed to the show agreed with the ruling but said that maternity leave should not/cannot be used as a reason to pay employees less. Perhaps he was talking about policy in the Irish public service?

George Hook had another contributer on Kristy someone from the labour party who initially started off saying the ruling was blatantly sexist. After Crowley rebutted this she changed her tune to saying that the ruling wasn't encouraging women to have children and it wasn't family friendly. Finally she resorted to saying that length of service shouldn't be used for salary determination in any case. Because employees with long service could have spent their time dossing at their desks whereas someone with shorter service could have worked harder and in effect had more experience. This final part was a ridiculous argument IMO and she came out of it looking foolish.

Sleepy

TBH, I don't see why anyone should have their pay determined by anything other than performance/ability. Why should anyone receive more money than another employee purely on length of service?

This ruling was a victory for common sense imho.

Beruthiel

Kell wrote:

Its my thinking that women should be paid more to have babies.

In france they go some way towards that
http://www.enjoyfrance.com/content/view/124/36/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2005/09/23/france-offers-thirdchild_n_7786.html
They also have government run creches which you pay by a percentage of your wage. Im not sure of the details, but say it's 5% of your wage, if you are low paid it's 5% of that, if you make a lot of dosh, it's 5% of that. It's a very fair system imo and it means people can afford it. The irish government could learn a lot from it.

DeVore

You'll notice that paternity leave isnt a problem, because we get fnck all of it to worry about.


DeV.

Beruthiel

DeVore wrote:

You'll notice that paternity leave isnt a problem, because we get fnck all of it to worry about.

Also a disgrace, as a new mother needs the help of her partner more than any other time in her life. Not to mention the fact that a new father needs to get to know how to take care of his new child.

The_Minister

Sleepy wrote:

TBH, I don't see why anyone should have their pay determined by anything other than performance/ability. Why should anyone receive more money than another employee purely on length of service?

Because the longer they stay, the better and more practiced they get, so their productivity goes up.

Sleepy

In theory that's true The_Minister, but falls down on the inherrant assumptions that different individuals have precisely the same ability to perform their job, have the benefits of the same training/education and the same work-ethic.

In reality, length of service is a very poor metric of an employee's contribution to an organisation. In many places (particularly state/semi-states) it seems to be almost the opposite: the longer someone is there, the lazier they are.

Surely it's fairer to monitor performance and ability and reward employees accordingly?

lostexpectation

its funny that that ruling on age discrimination came into law in the UK this week too, which implied you couldnt pay people based on the length of service, inehibitaly linked with age, but only on their grade/position.

So that may reverse this ruling if applied here. But women won't just have less earnings over her lifetime she would been unable to move up during her time off. its unavoidable.

How long is statutory maternity leave for women, 9 months? after birth?

I wouldn't want a women to lose out on pay etc if she took a year out of work, anymore then that and she's will really be falling behind, 5 yrs and thats a different story more her choice. what was the length of time in this case,

seamus

There does seem to be a lot of confusion about this case. It's not been made clear exactly why the woman had less service - many media/people just jumped on it and brought up the maternity leave issue.

lostexpectation wrote:

How long is statutory maternity leave for women, 9 months? after birth?

I don't know if maternity leave is statutory. In this country, women may take 22 weeks paid maternity leave (paid by welfare) and 12 weeks unpaid, if they wish. If they are taking maternity leave, they must start their leave at least two weeks before the end of the week of the due date. They must then take four weeks after the child is born. All other leave can be spread out (i.e. the woman can work half days or part-time, covering the rest with maternity leave).

I wouldn't want a women to lose out on pay etc if she took a year out of work, anymore then that and she's will really be falling behind, 5 yrs and thats a different story more her choice. what was the length of time in this case,

If a man took a year out of work, is it OK for him to lose out though?

Ultimately, grading people based on their length of service is ridiculous. People should receive a standard increase in pay based on inflation rates (regardless of parental leave), and all other increases in pay or in grades should be on merit. I don't see why a civil servant doing the same job for the last twenty years should get paid twice as much as someone whos been doing it for two. It's the same bloody job. There's only so long it takes to become efficient at a job. After that, you're just stagnating.

Anyone who chooses to take a sabbatical or a career break for whatever reason, should of course lose out on full increases if that's how the company structures itself.

simu

BrianD3 wrote:

In this case did the woman have "less service" because of statutory maternity leave or because of some other reason (eg career breaks and so on) This distinction is very important and it could be that this case has nothing whatsoever to do with gender issues.

Indeed yet it was not clarified at all in the media coverage. All parotting, no analysis.

I think it would be most unfair to penalise women for taking maternity leave as that is quite short anyway but tbh taking a few years out of work beyond that is a luxury that you can't expect employers to fund.

BrianD3

There is a bit more about this in today's papers but I'm still not 100% whether it's maternity leave or "other" leave that is the issue in the Cadman case. Brenda Power in the Sunday Times seems to say that it is "other" leave that the woman took to bring up children which resulted in her having fewer years service than her colleagues. But apparently Cadman's service was in a more senior role than her work colleagues service so it could be argued that she had more experience. So that is another angle on it and one that has nothing to do with gender.

Eillis O'Hanlon in the Sunday Indo makes the point that having children may be a sacrifice when it comes to a woman's career but choosing to not have children may also be a sacrifice with social and personal consequences. Both Power and O'Hanlon are critical of the feminist lobby for portraying this ruling as one which victimises women. I don't know who came out with the line that this ruling "'will undo 50 years of women's struggle" but it sounds like something that the NWCI would come out with. Also the Labour Party rep on George Hook's show who was bleating on about the ruling being "blatantly sexist" is now looking pretty foolish.

fly_agaric

simu wrote:

Indeed yet it was not clarified at all in the media coverage. All parotting, no analysis.

Yes. Quite confusing. Isn't it their job when they report on these things to spend some time wading into the legal crap and then explain it reasonably clearly for the rest of us lazy or busy plebs? Or is that asking too much?

simu

fly_agaric wrote:

Yes. Quite confusing. Isn't it their job when they report on these things to spend some time wading into the legal crap and then explain it reasonably clearly for the rest of us lazy or busy plebs? Or is that asking too much?

Uh, are you being sarcastic there or not? I can't tell. But yeah, if they decide to cover a story and hype it up, they should go into detail.

fly_agaric

simu wrote:

Uh, are you being sarcastic there or not? I can't tell.

No sarcasm. But I can see why you might have thought there was.

My post implies that I'm a lazy and idiotic lemming who waits for the meeja to digest and then regurgitate information for me before I'll make the effort to consume it and I suppose people usually only insult themselves when they are being sarcastic.

But honestly, I wasn't being sarcastic...

simu

Division of labour is a good thing...

JC 2K3

It's either this or you give men the exact same rights re: paternity leave.

But then productivity goes down, with twice the amount of people on leave.

In fairness though, men can't really choose to have children in the way women can. If women want high positions of employment then they have to accept the fact that they will probably have to not have children.

Surrogate mothers ftw.