And now back to the 19th century when mothers knew their place

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Published: Tuesday, 24 February 2015 14:37

Getting hot under the collar is the wrong response

We’re not going to identify the Council at this stage, nor name the Director pictured above, because we are hoping for the best and we have a member returning to work after parental leave in a hostile environment anyway. But how about this...

Can you imagine a Council where, as far as we can tell, HR’s correct advice about returning to work was ignored, then subsequent and similar advice from LGNSW was also ignored, where the GM was happy to let a Director hostile to part-time work at particular levels of the organisation and in particular jobs do what he liked and where, having extracted a trial three month arrangement from proceedings in the IRC, the Director could only respond with hostility?

Hostile? How about this: insisting that a Council phone be turned off out of hours or left at work, that her leaseback car be left at the Council on her day off each week (contrary to the leaseback agreement and inconsistent with everyone else’s RDO arrangements and where he threatened that if the IRC made him keep her part-time arrangements, he would make sure she lost the car.

All the while ignoring the suggestions made in the IRC that some KPI’s or benchmarking be established so that both the Council and the employee can measure whether the reduced hours really do provide a business case for the Council sufficient to allow them to reject it. Or to expose it as a misogynistic, ideologically driven overreaction to what happens in a modern workplace.

All this over a long- serving, loyal, well-respected and over-achieving employee wanting to return from parental leave to temporarily work 31 hours over four days. Yes, that’s four hours fewer than full-time-time employment.

But it’s true and we’re back in the Commission on 26 February.