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Connecting women and opportunity

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Connecting women and opportunity

Womanthology is a digital magazine and professional community powered by female energy and ingenuity.

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Forming a coalition of charities and trade unions to lobby for better support for working parents – Mubeen Bhutta, Head of Policy and Campaigns at Working Families

Children

Mubeen Bhutta is Head of Policy and Campaigns (job share) at the campaigning charity, Working Families, where she is part of the senior management team. She leads external affairs for the charity, covering strategic communications and public policy influencing, alongside her colleague Julia Waltham.

Mubeen Bhutta - Working Families
Mubeen Bhutta

Working Families has released its manifesto for the up and coming general election as part of the Families and Work Group, a coalition of charities and trade unions working together to ensure that working parents get the support that they need to balance work and family life.

General election manifesto

Working mothers and fathers make up more than a third of the UK workforce. But the way we currently design, organise and advertise work in the UK restricts many people with family responsibilities from working in the first place; causes many others to downshift or drop out of the labour market entirely, and is a barrier to returning to work.

We need changes to ensure the UK’s 11 million working parents reach their economic potential in the next Parliament, and beyond. We need better protection at work for new and expectant mothers, more support for working fathers and help for working parents of disabled children. We need a childcare system that means parents are always better off in work, and a labour market that provides both flexibility and job security.

Strength in numbers

The manifesto was put together by the Families and Work Group, a coalition of charities and trade unions working together to ensure that working parents get the support that they need to balance work and family life.

Organisations signed up to the manifesto include the Child Poverty Action Group, Family and Childcare Trust, Fatherhood Institute, Fathers Network Scotland, Fawcett Society, NCT, Netmums, Parenting across Scotland, Prospect, Unite, Women’s Budget Group, and Young Women’s Trust. The fact that such a breadth of organisations is calling for the same things shows that our proposals are what would make a real difference to working parents.

Establishing candidate’s stance on issues relating to working families

At its simplest, readers could be asking candidates how their policies will support working parents, and if they agree that helping this part of the workforce to achieve their potential is important to the future UK economy, especially as we prepare to leave the European Union.

They could ask whether they think mothers and fathers should have the same parental leave rights from their first day in a new job, whether they are taking steps to ensure that suitable and affordable childcare is available to every family that needs it, and whether they’re willing to abolish employment tribunal fees to ensure that pregnant women and new mothers who experience discrimination at work are able to seek to justice?

Our manifesto has five key asks for the next government. We’d like to see:

  • Jobs designed and recruited flexibly as the norm rather than the exception – with the government leading by example as an employer;
  • A properly paid period of independent leave that makes time away from work to spend with new children a realistic option for more fathers;
  • A new right to adjustment leave, allowing parents and carers to make arrangements to deal with a new family situation or diagnosis, without leaving their jobs;
  • Abolition of unfair employment tribunal fees which have led to pregnancy and maternity discrimination claims falling by 40% and sex discrimination claims falling by 70%; and
  • A childcare system that means parents only pay what they can afford and are always better off working once they have paid for childcare.

You can read the manifesto here.

 

https://www.workingfamilies.org.uk/

https://twitter.com/workingfamUK

https://www.facebook.com/WorkingFamiliesUK

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