MATERNITY, WORK AND FAMILIES EMPLOYMENT LAW DEVELOPMENTS

Maternity, Work and Families Employment Law Developments



Maternity, Work and Families Employment Law Developments

The aim of this assignment is to highlight last few years key developments in family's friendly employment legislation and show how they can be used in practise in working environment and also at Watermark Publishing LTD, the company I am working for.

Watermark is private own company with around 160 employees. They are mostly office workers. We also have got sister company Watermark Packaging which employee around 100 staff mainly in the warehouse/factory environment.

We are still developing HR policy and procedure, starting few years ago with creating staff handbook with basic policies, since then we are still working on improvement taking into account how any of recent changes might affect us and employment relationship with employees.

Secondary research was conducted through a number of sources, including libraries and the Internet. A number of libraries were visited for gathering valuable data from textbooks and journals. The Internet was also a major tool in obtaining relevant information, leading to the search for a number of articles in journals and newspapers from database.

To prove the research hypothesis, a survey was conducted through a three-step process: construction of an item pool, validation of the items, and pilot testing of the items.

Also the data has been gathered through various sources out of which some are on line while some are on paper.

The outcome of this project is the results of a content analysis of online resources. The research involved analyzing the news postings on the web over a period of years. The analysis consisted of reading the title, and body or abstract of each article posted. Then, each article was qualified and placed in the body of the report, including the research collected.

1. The Maternity and Parental depart etc. and the Paternity and Adoption depart (Amendment) guidelines 2006

One of the major changes to employment law in recent years was 2006 amendment to The Maternity and Parental Leave etc. and the Paternity and Adoption Leave (Amendment) Regulation. The Regulations which came into life in October 2006 and then was followed by future changes which were implemented in 2008. The major changes were:

-extending the period of SMA, MA, SAP payments initially from 26 to 39 weeks from April 2007

-extending period notice woman must give to the employer if she changes her planned date of return to 8 weeks.

-clarifying that an employer may make reasonable contact with woman on maternity leave.

I think 2006 changes was one of the few major steps government took to support working families. The overall objective of this package of measures was to give children best start in life ,parents more choice about how to balance their work and family responsibilities and to support employers in recruiting and retaining new people.

At Watermark we had to revise our existing policy and make sure the new one was in order with law changes. I think significant change for a business was the period of notice ...