I thought that, whilst in hospital, I would catch up with a couple of posts that I have had in mind for the last few months. One of them is the issue of the maternity leave.
It pretty much depends on your employer, how long you’ve been with them and their own internal policies. My company, despite being a massive multinational, will only give me the minimum required by UK government: 6 weeks at 90% of my salary, and then a further 6 months at something like £120 a week. I can take a full year off, but the last two or three months are unpaid (but they still have the obligation of giving you your job back or accommodate you into a different role that will fit you)
And it goes without saying that they do not give you anything extra for having twins…
To be honest, it’s a bit pants in a way. It’s great that you can get so much time off and still have a job at the end of the tunnel, but the pay is ridiculous. You can also claim child benefits, but with the recent changes to the benefits system it means that if your joint income, or your partner’s income is over £50k, you might as well not bother. We will bother, that’s for sure, but they won’t make it easy.
Tara, one of the girls of my NCT course, works for Siemens (direct competitor of my company) and she recently told me that she’ll get 21 weeks full pay leave!! And if she decides that she doesn’t want to go back after her leave, she doesn’t need to give any money back (some companies have that policy). Oh well, if only I had known before I got pregnant!
It’s really disappointing that a company like mine, that boasts of looking after their employees and all that bullshit, won’t give you anything more that what’s minimum requirement…
On the subject of maternity leave, I suppose I have officially started mine. My last day was going to be the 26th of this month, and then I would take all of May as my accrued yearly leave. However, with this unexpected turn of events (two weeks sick leave as ordered by Mr O’Sullivan), I have pretty much stopped work. Very unexpectedly.
We tried doing the right thing and got someone to replace my position for when I left. She started at the beginning of March and the idea was that we would “train” her for two months before I left. But due to several issues (the most important being that the company failed to supply her with a computer or the right tools for a month) she didn’t quite get started until a couple of weeks back.
Now, the real problem is not that my job is so difficult that only I could do it. No, the problem is that I’ve got such a wide range of responsibilities and I’ve been doing this job for such a long time, that it would take a long time to teach someone to do everything that I do. We have tried, though, and in several aspects she should be able to cope without me. But then, there’s the difficult stuff, the stuff we haven’t even had the chance to brush upon: the autoCAD drawings… That’s going to be a challenge to resolve. The only solution I can see as viable would be to subcontract an autoCAD company to finalise them. But that would cost so much that I’m not sure we would be willing to pay for it…. Oh well, we’ll see…
So yeah, I’m officially off work now (although I haven’t stopped thinking about it) and I won’t be returning until June 2014! Sounds like a lot of time, doesn’t it?
