Ms Tan Mai Gek, make it clear in your employment contract:"Female employees must practise birth control." Mai la, you must also understand that sometimes the husband does not want to put on condom la. Shot gun liao,how?
I agree. While I understand the reasons for implementing the many baby incentives, practically speaking, small companies stand to suffer. Firstly, when one employee goes on maternity leave for 2 to 4 months, the impact of one less staff is so much harder on a firm with less than 10 employees than it is on large firms. Secondly, there will be some people (like the female staff mentioned by the author) who may take advantage of these incentives and capitalise on the goodwill of her employer. Therefore, it is an extremely unfortunate consequence of implementing these incentives that women would end up being seen as less preferable employees compared to men.
Yes this indeed happen quite often, have seen few cases myself especially the first baby... Most quit after enjoying the long maternity leave as they decide to be stay home mom... I find these acts gave bad names to woman, and yes, employers especially small companies will suffer most...
While thats policy that company cannot fire pregnant employee during certain time frame, I think there should be fair policy where employee back from maternity leave have to be bonded with the company for at least 6m, else face penalty of 2m pay (employer shares of maternity leave). By doing so, if the employee already decided to be stay home mom, she should quit before the maternity leave, so the company can move on with replacement hire.
Small companies hire all men better.. at least one of the men doing the same work will be deferred from NS if both get called up for reservist on the same date..
when an employee is pregnant. hr needs to get ready for a temp.
if she quits after giving birth, need to extend the temp while looking for her replacement.
no excuse not to implement the baby bonus scheme. it's the previlege of pregnant ladies, why give all sorts of stupid excuses trying to confuse the whole issue?
To kakakuli:
Do you seriously believe that if there are 9 employees in the author’s company (7 staff, herself and presumably one boss) that there will actually be a HR department? The issue here is the practical aspect of implementing the baby incentives, and not about compromising the “privileges of pregnant ladies” (the phrase itself is ridiculous but that is beside the point here). The facts are these: small companies make less than big companies, therefore small companies hire less staff, therefore to hire temporary staff (in such bad economic times even) to cover the duties of a staff member who has gone on prolonged fully-paid maternity leave and then for longer periods when the staff member subsequently quits her job is simply not equitable. Note as well that these are opinions of people who have experienced such employee issues and are not excuses for not implementing the schemes.
I think government should oso couple another rule with the current one stating that those who enjoyed the baby incentives should at least work for like say, 6 months after the maternity leave before they can leave the company? This will allow the company to have enough time to search and train another stuff to replace her.
"“privileges of pregnant ladies” (the phrase itself is ridiculous ...."
if in the place you do not recognize this as a previlege, then anything can go. no point in formulating all sorts of solutions.
September 04, 2008 Thursday, 08:24 AM
