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| Recession hurts working moms |
| Family |
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Ontario’s Human Rights Legal Support Centre suspects working women are being forced to bear the brunt of workplace cutbacks caused by the current recession, Canadian Press reported. An independent agency funded by the province of Ontario, the centre provides free legal counsel to people who allege they are victims of discrimination. Executive director Katherine Laird told CP it now receives up to 15 complaints a week from women who have lost their jobs or fear they will be fired solely because they are either pregnant or on maternity leave. She said the volume of such cases began rising significantly in January, just as the recession began impacting the workplace. “Sometimes employers are very direct about it,” she said. “There was one case where the employee told her employer in the morning [she was pregnant] and was let go in the afternoon.” Twelve days before her maternity leave from a financial services company was due to end, Toronto mother Vera Trevisanello was notified that her services were no longer needed. “I think they planned this,” she told the Toronto Star. “I felt they were really gunning for me from the minute they found out I was pregnant and about to change from this young married woman, who had all this time on her hands and was willing to work as many hours as needed, to someone who’s got needs of her own now.” Trevisanello also told CP she felt “very degraded” and “helpless.” “I am still the same skilled, intelligent person I was before,” she said. “And I’m being made to feel like I’m supposed to regret my son, and I certainly do not.” When contacted by the Star, Trevisanello’s previous employer would not comment beyond pointing out that it had been forced to make the “difficult” decision to lay off about 400 employees over the past five months. The Hamilton Spectator is not impressed. “[Employers] talk about the burden of uncertainty and lost productivity, of the need for employers to be able to optimize performance in difficult times. All that is true, as anyone who runs a business in these times knows all too well,” it stated in an editorial. “But the challenges employers face, even when made more acute by the recession, must never be used as an excuse for uncivilized and unethical behaviour. That’s a degree of societal degradation we should not tolerate.” Some employers also have no sympathy for businesses that allegedly target these women unfairly. “We’ve even hired pregnant women,” said Michael McNally, a father of six children and the owner of four Tim Hortons franchises. “I don’t see [pregnancy] as a disadvantage [to employment]. As employers we need to respect and support families,” he said. “After all, we depend on families for our business.” |
