Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
In the UK, maternity leave is a statutary 26 weeks, with pay (ie 6 months), and you're entitled to that no matter how short a time you've been with your employer. Your job is protected while you're on maternity leave.
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Yep, there's arguements against statutory maternity leave here.
Imagine you run a small company, you are going to hire someone to do the books. Do you hire a 25 year old woman who has just got married? Or do you think to yourself that she's going to miss 1 year out of the next three if she decides to have kids. It's also illegal to discriminate against women. If it's a small company how are you supposed to cover for someone for 6 months, and still keep their job open?
I can see why maternity leave is there, but I can also understand the problems with it. Personally I think people should be sensible enough to save up in advance, but that's not going to happen. There's really no easy answer I can think of other than a complicated complete revamp of national insurance to turn it into actual insurance against things like that.