Electronic Signature Licitness for Pregnancy Leave Policy in United Kingdom

How to eSign a document: electronic signature licitness for Pregnancy Leave Policy in United Kingdom

my name's adrian burgess i'm from the uk and i'm here to tell you a story which is what we did around paternity leave and it's not just because it's because i think if we think about the world and we think about the different countries now thinking about parental leave paternity leave all over the world including in the us it's interesting to hear how other countries have done it and what the pitfalls have been and also the failures and this is a story in lots of ways about failure but it's about the lessons that we're learning along the way now i want to also reinforce what um and marie said uh the whole idea that this is a kind of game changer that part it may not you know seem to work out so much with lower income families but when you when you have when you have policies that are up for debate it generates column inches so that this becomes a very visible topic so involved fatherhood becomes a very visible topic so it's incredibly useful to have these conversations um to have these conversations you know as you develop the policies also what does it say with regard to low-income families if you have statutory leave that is to say it's state it's it's the state says you have a right yeah if at the bottom level at the level where people are earning very little there is no gender pay gap because one of the things that's always been said is that what stops parents sharing is that mum earns more well at the lower levels mom dad earns more at the lower levels that ain't true everybody's badly paid so one of the barriers is immediately gone so if you pay your parental leave at a a reasonably even at a low rate but at a reasonably you know better than the minimum wage or even at the minimum wage you will get more sharing okay so now i'm just going to go through our little story if i can yep there it is um it all began of course with maternity leave it all began with the need for mothers to be able to stay at home to breastfeed to get over the birth and this was a hard one right and it was very late in coming in the uk and it was driven by the trade unions right so it came out of labor law so in the 1970s what was going on well maternity leave was introduced right across europe and of course we're nested next to europe in the european union and in in the uk the first maternity leave legislation came in in 1975. however it was very circumscribed you know what the women had to have worked for so long for the same employer and you know it was pretty difficult so only for less than 50 of working women uh were eligible for it at the same time in sweden they already had maternity leave and now they were introducing cross-gender parental leave fathers and mothers could take it there was no reserved leave for dads what they call the daddy month which is what andrea talked about the use it or lose it benefit if if daddy if there's a reserved leave for a parent a mother or a father and they don't use it they can't transfer it over to the other parent and that's truly truly vital to have an element of reserved leave so in sweden they didn't at that stage have an element of reserved leave but they did they made it open to the sexes and talking about this whole idea of the super bowl ad that's coming out which is going to say caring makes you strong now what's so interesting about that is of course it's buying into stereotypes and we don't know actually how productive that is in lots of ways because on the one hand it's confirming the old stereotype i'm very dubious about that now the swedes and not in the 70s but in the i think the 80s or the late early 90s they used that image at the bottom there can you see it it's he was a famous he was a famous wrestler or something and they had him they had him uh holding this baby the baby has since grown up and is now talking about parental leave but but what was interesting was again they were trying to deal with that whole idea of masculinity um and i came across a wonderful um wood carving from the 17th century in france where uh um the king king henry i'm terrible angry the fourth i think for the sun king he had lots and lots of children he brought them all up together at the royal palace illegitimate legitimate he didn't care right he had them all there and there's a wonderful image it's extraordinary in its time i should have brought it where you see him holding a baby and looking at this baby and when you see this you think you never see men doing this this is an extraordinary image for a king to be holding the baby and his leg he's in a doublet in hers and the leg is like this and it's really muscly and what it's saying of course is that real men can hold babies so someone he has analyzed has done in in sweden presumably they've done uh some studies to see whether this kind of advertising often done through the trade unions did have an impact and they don't think it does so there there are other ways necessary if they're not sure they don't think that the public information campaigns themselves uh changed things okay so in the 1980s britain was lagging behind so we are bad the country is bad the european union who by then is starting to become powerful and and integrated castigates britain tells them off it says you are the only member state not providing statutory maternity leave and we britain had blocked the adoption of a draft directive from the european union setting out minimum standards on parental leave we were really bad and falling behind the game in came the labour government the left first left with left-wing government for about 12 or 15 years or something in 1997 and they got to it the trade unions were behind them and they granted mothers 18 weeks paid leave at 90 percent pay um employment relations acts granted all employees a minimum of three months unpaid parental leave now we have had leave for fathers since then in the sense that it's three months so i think it's now four per parent per child non-transferable nobody uses it they don't use it because firstly nobody knows about it only the specialist likes that like myself are even aware that it exists it's never spoken of the government never talks about it it's not in any if you look at employee contracts you never see it so that's one of the main reasons it's never taken up nobody knows and the second reason is that it's unpaid i used to work on cosmopolitan magazine and in 1999 when there was this talk for the first time about paternity leave they brought out this image i don't know if you can see it it's a father breast feeding a baby i threw it in because it's a truly ambivalent and wonderful image on the one hand it's sort of shocking but on the other hand it's really beautiful and i think that it is truly beautiful what they call the the hairless adonis who holds the baby and we now know that the aka pygmies who are the best fathers in the world they're 47 percent of the time within arm's reach of their newborns the i think that's how they're pronouncing they're the stars of paternal involvement and they do actually offer their s for a suck it's a very hygienic way when you're in the middle of the amazon jungle of giving the baby something to suck on if it's not feeding at the time so we move on into 200 2003 and here we are now in 2003 my little organization the fatherhood institute had begun and we were in with the government with all the organizations lobbying for paternity leave to be included in this and eventually we got it two weeks at below the minimum wage two weeks at below the minimum wage at the same time the maternal lobby extended the leave for mothers from 18 weeks to 52 weeks and my the team my team member who was managing all this stuff from our point of view sat there helplessly and said to the the meeting at the end you have done the worst possible thing for women and they couldn't understand what he was talking about he said you want pregnancy discrimination to continue that's it you are defining the mothers as the caretakers and the fathers as these tiny helpers it didn't they went oh you just want rights for men no he said i'm really really i'm a feminist and this is really bad for women so what tends to happen when you go into these countries across the world if we do start to talk about paternity leave across the world in different states here in in and and in the federal uh arena is don't let them extend maternity leave because once you've got it extended trying to reduce it and make it shared is an almost impossible task let us move on at the time i remember this when it was brought in that fathers were to have two weeks paternity leave two weeks the times had a leader the times leader column said men need paternity leave like fish need bicycles that would never be said now so much has moved on since 2003 anyone who's i mean anyone who said that would be considered ridiculous so change happens and you have these forces at the beginning so what have we been doing over the last 12 years since 2003 right we campaigned for a system of shared parental leave where we wanted the father to have his own right to taking it based simply on his employment background like paternity leave a dad can get paternity leave it's a it's a universal and it's specific to what to his employment record if he's if he's worked for a certain company for a certain length of time he can get paternity leave and pay his wife his partner can be a stay-at-home mom it doesn't make any difference it's his entitlement based on his national insurance contributions based on what he does meanwhile over here the mothers have got their 52 weeks maternity and individual entitlement they are entitled to maternity leave and pay doesn't matter what their partner has done the worst the worst scenario is where you have transferable maternity leave she owns it 52 weeks ah i've used 13 don't need any more he can have it aha but only if his all if his employment record is good too and what this means is as soon as you have a transferable maternity leave you're taking into account two people's employment records and that immediately reduces eligibility so in our country if you have that system of transferable maternity leave under one in three couples is eligible so it becomes quite a small group and you get a lot of frustration because you get a lot of couples who think they're going to share it and then they find they can't so we asked for an individual entitlement we wanted the daddy month the reserved element they use it or lose it we wanted the dads to have um you know a month that they could that if they lost if they didn't use it mum didn't get it and similarly you have to for gender equality one that the mum would lose if she'd if she doesn't use it and we asked for better pay we said at least the minimum wage please the mothers a lot of the mothers maternity leave is also below the minimum wage so we were asking for it for both and how did we advocate for it we said this was to government because they're making the policies we said it's what families want i.e there are votes in it right quite good good way to talk we said it's what families are already doing we said look at all the data the dads are all taking time off they're saving up their sick leave they're saving up their um their hot res their holidays they're all sort of trying to have it around the time you know it's happening dads are already doing it how can we make this work better and we also said oh dear the uk is very bad it's very old-fashioned we produced a thing called fifi our fairness in families index we pulled in all the data on mother women's empowerment on father's participation in child care and we put it together and we created a table and the uk came satisfyingly right down towards the bottom not as low as the united states but pretty low and that and we immediately got as soon as we published that the minister called us in it had an impact we also said the old arguments more highly qualified women will stay in employment if you destigmatize the mommy track by bringing men into it and we made those kind of arguments we also said now recently we've been saying because we've got a conservative government who are in there who are terribly worried about marriage so we said to them well the data says that um coupled relationships are more stable if fathers take leave which is true they are so and we said child wellbeing and we said when fathers don't take leave there's developmental it's correlated with developmental problems in children it's a good it's a nice piece of research that so we came up with those kind of statements and it had an effect we thought we have a result we have a win in 2011 the government produced a paper for consultation called modern workplaces a great title and they set out a design and architecture for parental leave that was everything that we could have dreamed of it had a daddy month but they added that onto the leave so it wasn't seen as being taken away from mums they had um they had the sharing starting much earlier so mum could go off maternity leave and go on to parental leave it was all wonderful it was an individual entitlement it depend on his record whether he could take it we thought we're home and dry all this work has paid off however it was defeated not in the house of the houses of parliament but out in consultation because loads of organizations lobbied against it now business lobbied against it business as you know lobby against anything you want to bring in the minimum wage it's going to ruin us you want to bring in maternity leave oh we can't possibly stand that not extend maternity no we can't do that we knew that business would but what happened was that a conglomeration of trade unions women's rights organizations family organizations that were mummy people said no no they said we can't have this women must own the leave and if they want to give a bit of it to their partners that's your old transferable maternity leave well that's fine but if you give men an individual entitlement oh my goodness you'll have employers not giving any not topping up payments to mothers because they'll have to do it for both sexes so mothers are going to lose out and they said and we'll also have these men who who want to look after their children forcing the mothers back to work so they they said this this could be so what actually happened was the government who had put forward a wonderful system in the end compromised and what we have is a system of transferable maternity leave so that i think is the end of my story no individual retirement no reserved leave and the payment rate remains below the minimum wage but we have one thing that i think is important and is a message for any other system one of the problems with the nordic countries is that they normally allow their parental leave to be shared and individual entitlement to all those good things up to the to the um child being i think just about eight just before it's a long period of five but i think it's eight in some countries so that you know it's for raising children in the early years what they don't do is to concentrate on the first year and it's in the first year that the patterns of caring are set it's in the first year if the women have taken a whole year out of the workforce and then they have a second child take another good goodbye that's goodbye to your career what you want is the men and women sharing probably the women will in you know take most of them their months early on but what you want is the men taking the same amount of leave out in the first year and that has not happened in the nordic countries they weren't on the game they didn't realize when they set up their systems so that is the one thing we do have is that all this poor as it is has to happen in the first year thank you very much