The Rights of Pregnant Women: Not a Matter of Equality

In the news yesterday and today a story has emerged that a company has fired 8 women who were either pregnant or on maternity leave. The company is PFA, a company that sells pensions and prides itself of its high morals and ethics. Bad? You bet. A crime? You bet.

When an employer fires a pregnant woman or a woman on maternity leave, the onus is on the employer to prove that the firing was due to reasons other than the baby (on the way). In most cases they cannot prove this – by my guess, probably because the woman WAS fired due to her pregnancy – thus, in most cases the employer loses and has to pay damages to the wronged woman. It is usually measured in “months’ salary”. We have cases where women have been awarded 6 months’ salary, 9 months’ salary, 12 months’ salary, however, not too long ago a woman’s 15 month’s salary damages(largest ever) were appealed and then it was lowered to 12 months.

The problem is this: while on maternity and parental leave a woman is paid her salary by the company, which at the same time must pay someone else to fill in for her. This is, of course, expensive. And the higher the woman’s pay and the harder her job, the more time is needed before she takes her leave to train her substitute, thus making the period of a double salary very long for the company. There’s no doubt about it – pregnancy can be a costly affair for employers. AND that’s why we have laws forbidding lay-offs due to pregnancy. I can see why it’s tempting for employers to fire the pregnant woman, they have a business to run and being nice doesn’t figure on the annual budgets, and this is exactly why the consequences for breaking the law MUST be more expensive than it’d be to keep the wman employee.

See, right now damages are perhaps fair to the women, but in most cases it’s still cheaper for the company to fire her and pay damages than to keep her and pay both her and her substitute. See the problem? Pregnant women will still be losing their jobs, and once you don’t have a job AND are pregnant it’s pretty fucking hard to get one – same goes if you an infant at home. So perhaps it shouldn’t just be a matter of paying damages, perhaps fines should also be introduced, to increase the cost of undue lay-offs for the companies.

Here in Denmark we have a Secretary of Equality – or however I should translate the position. It is currently held by one of the most annoyingly flip-flopping and blubber-spined, weak-brained politician. Her name is Karen Jespersen. She is supposed to look out for equality in our society, to make sure that measures are taken to avoid discrimination of any and all kinds. Currently she’s doing jack-shit about this issue.

The spokesperson on equality from the Socialist People’s Party, Pernille Vigsø Bagge, have called the Secretary to a meeting about “systematic firings of pregnant women”, but the spokesperson on equality from the Secretary’s own party, Ellen Trane Nørby, thinks that is taking on the wrong Secretary. Why? She thinks the issue belongs solely under the Secretary of Employment – to an extent it does, as it is about employment. But since it’s always women and never men (at least not to my knowledge) who get fired for being expecting parents this is so very much about equality. How can she not see that? How?

The spokesperson who thinks pregnant women’s inequality isn’t inequality finds it completely unacceptable that emplyer break existing laws. Laws which she finds to be perfectly clear. Yes well, the law may be clear, but so are the laws against murder, rape, theft, assault, etc etc and that never eradicated those crimes now did it? Someone who’s of a mind to do something immoral won’t give a shit about what anyone else thinks about his/her actions, what they (might) worry about is the potential consequences their actions might have. And as long as the consequences are so inconsequential that there’s better business in committing the crime and taking the punishment than there is doing the right thing in the first place, then that type of crime will continually be committed. Laws don’t deter people, CONSEQUENCES do.

I’ll be following the development of this one. I sure hope Socialist spokesperson manages to get the Secretary properly involved in this, so we might see some actual job security for those women, who choose to procreate, even though it apparently makes them worthless in some people’s eyes.