Joeli Brearley

I had dinner with Hillary Clinton, Julia Gillard and 20 other incredible women on Friday. This is the only evidence I have that it wasn’t a dream.

I come bearing good news - statutory parental leave pay, including maternity allowance is being uprated inline with inflation. Hurrah! From 1st April 2023 it will be £172.43 a week (obviously, this is still not enough to live on, but in this climate, it’s better than expected).

My timeline across social media is full of people telling me that having a child is a lifestyle choice and we should just suck it up. One man was so outraged with us stating what we had paid on childcare costs he said I make him sick (or rather ‘ you people!!’) - because I was expecting the tax payer to scoop up the cost for the care of my child.
I would understand this argument if it was my dog, or a pet Iguana. I chose to get an iguana and so I should really be solely responsible for its care. But the thing is, the iguana won’t grow up to become our future workforce, it won’t contribute to your pension or wipe your bum when your old and wrinkly. I am yet to meet an iguana that could do any of those things. Childcare is early education, it’s not babysitting. We would be furious at the notion that kids had to pay to go to school because we understand that educating our kids benefits us all. The first 1001 days of a child’s life are the most important to their future yet we give families such little support during this time.
And then, of course, there’s the work thing. You can’t leave a baby at home whilst you trot off to work. We expect mothers to work, we live in a society where the majority of households need two incomes to survive, yet we simultaneously make it almost impossible for many mothers to work. All we are asking for is the infrastructure to enable us to financially contribute to both our family & the economy.. which could be really bloody helpful during a skills crisis and a cost of living crisis.

Other countries have got the memo on this, whilst we have the second most expensive childcare in the developed world. Canada just invested $30 billion in their childcare sector so it costs no more than $10 a day to the user. They did this because they crunched the numbers & found that for every $1 they invested they got between $1.50 - €2.80 back into the economy.

It’s not blooming rocket science is it?! So Rishi Sunak, are you listening to us?! We know you’re ambitious, but will you be ambitious for women too?!

On Saturday we will be marching through the streets to demand our voices are heard!!

#marchofthemummies #childcare

For the love of cod! 🐟
It’s messages like this from the government that encourage companies such as @lloydsbankinggroup to revoke previous ‘working from home’ agreements. Can we all please take a bloody breather and look at the evidence? Companies that enable employees to work in a way that works for them reap the benefits. Why should we drag our sorry ass into an office unless we absolutely need to be there? For a potential ‘water cooler’ moment? - I don’t know about you, but my water cooler moments have been pretty uneventful. They involve putting a bottle under a tap and filling it with… water. Surely, surely, we can all be a bit more innovative and think of ways to network, make friends, have creative conversations without forcing everyone to do a mega commute every single blasted day?! Hello rail strikes, extortionate petrol costs… childcare!!!! Not to mention our poor crumbling planet.

And yes, I know working from home isn’t the right thing for everyone and that many of us are in jobs where you can’t work from home - but it does work for some people and for many of those people it is the difference between remaining in employment or not. So why don’t we go WILD and try to build an economy and a labour market that works for everyone?!

We did alright at the Third Sector Awards. Winning every award we were nominated for including:
* Small Charity of the Year
* Comms Campaign of the Year
* Small Charity, Big Impact
A hat trick for the lasses! PTS is powered by working mums who all work flexibly and remotely. We fit work around our lives, not the other way around.
So, here’s an idea - if you want to build an award winning organisation which creates extraordinary impact & has a global reputation, then maybe you should be thinking about how to employ, retain & promote more mums. And if you want to be part of this mission then get a wriggle on and join us as a member

https://lnkd.in/eGgZ5_vj

Here is why maternity pay is not excessive - 4 in 10 new mums are forced to return to work after 12 weeks maternity leave, or less, because the pay is so 💩. Personally, I’m furious about this! After 12 weeks i could barely get dressed every day, let alone go to work. Mothers need time to heal, parents need time to bond, babies need time to be babies. For the love of god - we all just need time to be human beings and the only way we get that time is if parental leave is paid at a rate we can live on. 76% of mothers say they have had to rely on some form of debt or withdraw money from their savings due to low rates of statutory maternity pay.

We are working with the Government on the new parental leave and pay review, pushing for all parental leave pay to increase to the national living wage as a minimum. Watch this space, lasses ❤️

Thanks to our pals @women_in_data for supporting us with this research.

I know this doesn’t sound exciting, but I promise you it is. The Legal services Board has done a call for evidence on the misuse of NDAs, and, as we all know, there’s a helluva lot of misuse going on. These dudes (the LSB) are the oversight regulators for legal services in England in Wales so, if we want something done about the fact that women and minoritised groups are experiencing discrimination, bullying & harassment and then they are gagged - well, these are the folk to sort it out.
If you have signed an NDA to silence you after you got shafted by your employer then please consider completing a submission to the inquiry - we’ve synthasised the details and popped them on our website because we are nice like that:

https://lnkd.in/ehjgCgD3

#nda #gaggingclause #discrimination #harsssment