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Refusal to return part-time following maternity leave
01 October 2005
- IT employee discriminated against from date of pregnancy. It became clear that she was no longer considered a valuable and reliable member of the team as a result of becoming pregnant. Following her taking maternity leave, there was resistance to allowing her to return on part-time hours. The IT company refused to negotiate. She lodged a claim for constructive dismissal, which eventually settled out of court. She succeeded in recovering compensation for indirect sex discrimination and loss of earnings arising from unfair dismissal.
- Police officer was told she would not be allowed to work part-time following her pregnancy. This was a claim for indirect sex discrimination which was settled before trial.
- We recently acted for another female police officer in a successful claim for at the Employment Tribunal. Our client found that her child care responsibilities prevented her from performing her on-call duties. The tribunal agreed with us that it was indirect sex discrimination to impose such on-call requirements, and that the force had not justified the discriminatory treatment. This was an important victory at tribunal, since our client had worked in the murder, the major crime branch. If even working in the murder branch was not enough to justify the requirement of 24/7 availability, it is hard to see when such hours could ever be justified.
NB This is also a good illustration of a typical negative/ unconstructive approach to these types of requests by companies. We hope that the result would encourage other female employees not to be put off by an initial refusal by the company and to continue to fight their corner if inadequate reasons for refusing these requests are given.