Jester, Jennifer and Maternity Rights

There were more rumblings of discontent at the Dark Satanic Mill yesterday. This time over two issues. I love the word "issues"; we use it so much in our line of work - "We will feed back the issues you have raised to the appropriate manager..." You know, that sort of thing.

Well, these issues are very close to my heart because they involve a very good friend of mine and the daughter of another very good friend. They have both roused me from my usual apathy and driven me to act! Hopefully, my actions will help them out, if only a little.

Let's start with Goodwill Jennifer. She sits next to me at work. She covers a very awkward shift, 11am - 8pm, which is invaluable to our bosses and also to me and my co-workers because we only need work one of those shifts per week. Jenny is pregnant and she's blooming. She suits pregnancy so well but of course she is getting tired more easily and needs a little slack.

She gets none. She's our senior Admin girl and she has always been up to the workload but recently, due to sickness of some of our other Admin staff, her workload has increased. This is one of my bones of contention. She is pregnant and has RIGHTS. The other is that she has asked to change her shift to 10am - 7pm but with no result. She did this back in November but still nothing has been done. She keeps reminding our bosses but nothing, zilch, nada.

Things came to a head for her this week when her 2 year old daughter refused to go to bed before her mummy got home. Jenny doesn't get home until well after 8pm and her daughter needs to go to bed by 7pm or she will get over-tired and be extra cranky the next morning. So she raised the issue again and still got no joy.

I told her to go to HR and after a little bit of bullying, she did. They told her to fill in a form for Flexible Working Hours, which she did and I took it back up to HR for her. Suddenly, all the bosses wanted to help Jenny and they even told her that if she needs to leave work at 7pm on Monday, she can, even if the new hours have not yet been put in place. We are now certain that they will.

Now all we need to do is to persuade the bosses to cut her some slack with the workload. She only has 5 weeks left before her maternity leave and when she leaves it will be noticed. She does an enormous amount of work and who will be able to fill her shoes?