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Since the European Union passed its Parental Leave directive in 1996 there has been a rash of national laws both implementing it and extending legislation to other areas such as care leave, urgent family leave, career breaks and flexible working. Most recently, in the UK, fathers have won the right to paid paternity leave and parents of young children to request a change in hours for child care reasons. We examine how these new laws have affected the balance between work and life on the ground and how things could be improved.
All EU Member States have now enacted laws which implement the European directive on Parental Leave of 1996. This instituted minimum provisions for all workers to take three months leave to care for a child under the age of eight as well as a right to time off for family reasons in case of sickness and accident. It also included protection from dismissal and the right to return to the same or an equivalent job. As 'work/life balance' has become a phrase enjoying greater prominence in government and trade union thinking so a start has been made in extending rights for parents and carers. As mentioned above, the UK has improved paternity and child care leave provisions but in Sweden a total of 480 days can now be taken for parental leave, most of which is payed at 80% of earnings while the German system allows the first three years of a child's life to all be 'parenting time', two years of which are payed.
There are some signs however that the new legislation is not having the effect that was hoped. The position of women both in the job market and in the wider European economy obviously influences the take-up of parental and other leave rights. The stated aim of the European Employment Strategy to get more women into work is often seen as a pressure on them to carry on working after the birth of children and increased numbers of women in further education and later child-bearing does not seem to reverse this. However it is still far more likely for the female partner to take leave as they tend to earn the lower income and occupy the lower status job. They also continue to be saddled with more than an equal share of the unpaid household work according to a Eurostat survey. In Denmark and the UK there is evidence that parents of young children actually work longer hours as pre-school child care arrangements are more suited to long hours than the school day. In the UK even when an employee has claimed carer's leave the law has sometimes been interpreted narrowly. In the case of Ms.Qua who lost her job because of her son's continuing medical problems the Employment Appeals Tribunal decided that this was not an 'immediate crisis' within the meaning of the Employment Rights Act.
One way of improving work/life balance without recourse to the law is through collective agreements. This has proved popular in the Netherlands where, despite reasonable generous statutory provisions, unions have negotiated top-ups. For instance at ABN-Amro parental leave is payed at 50% of salary and care leave at 85% where the state scheme is unpaid and at 70% respectively. Under the agreement covering the retail flowers sector 100% of salary is payed during care leave. Even in the UK Peugeot has signed a deal that includes 26 weeks maternity leave at 90% of earnings and a child care voucher system. It may be that such deals together with a change in attitudes to gender rôles will be needed before the intentions of the law makers reach the home and the workplace.
A case from Germany has underlined the right of a female employee to privacy with respect to pregnancy. Wiebke Busch worked as a clinic nurse and, after the birth of her first child in June 2000, obtained the consent of her employer to take 3 years of parental leave. In April 2001 she was allowed to return to work, ending her parental leave period early. After one day she informed the clinic that she was seven months pregnant, maternity leave being due to start in the following month. The employer rescinded consent to Ms. Busch returning to work on the grounds that she had deliberately withheld the fact that she was pregnant in order to receive the higher maternity allowance rather than the lower parental leave one. They also stated that she could not, by law, perform certain tasks if pregnant. The court found that all discrimination relating to pregnancy is unlawful and, therefore, an employee is not obliged to disclose it whatever the financial or health and safety consequences for the employer.
Following the case of the North Yorkshire female catering staff (issue 21) a claim for equal pay has again been dismissed by the ECJ because of contracting out. In the latest case part time lecturers employed by a college in Lancashire were sacked and re-employed through an agency as sub-contractors. They lost both pay and the right to belong to the college's pension scheme under the new arrangement. A Ms. Allonby brought an action seeking the right to claim equal pay with an equivalent male lecturer at the college and stating that, because more women than men were in her position, the loss of pension also amounted to discrimination.
The advocate general's opinion was that as Ms. Allonby was payed by the agency and not the college there was no 'single source' responsible for the pay discrepancy which could be held to account for it. On the pension question he held that while no comparison could be made to direct employees of the college, it was up to the national courts to decide if the scheme discriminated in general.
In an echo of the recently introduced flexible working arrangements in the UK Employment Act a mother in Zaragoza in Spain asked her employer to halve her hours from 40 a week to 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day. The company, Makro, refused the request and offered another, unsuitable, timetable. The Spanish court ruled that national law gave employees the right to reduce hours to care for children under 6.
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