It just seems like common sense doesn’t it? No “leave”, paid or otherwise, should count toward seniority or one’s pension.
Why is that hard to understand?
If you don’t work during a given period and your company is kind enough to grant you leave (paid or unpaid) AND hold your job for you, that time SHOULD NOT count toward seniority within that Company nor be pensionable...because YOU DID NOT WORK.
In the FDNY, when one takes an extended “leave”, their seniority, as expected and is right, STOPS, then resumes when they begin working again.
If an engineer leaves a job for a year or two to rear children then comes back, it is RIGHT and JUST that all those workers hired at the same time, who did NOT take leaves, move ahead of that worker on the seniority list.
Then it also stands to reason that should such lost time should NOT count toward one’s pension either.
The recent Supreme Court ruling was at least a partial victory for this common sense approach the workplace, in that the high court overturned a lower court’s decision that said decades-old maternity leaves should count in determining pensions.
Four AT&T Corp. employees who took maternity leave between 1968 and 1976 had sued the company to get their leave time credited toward their pensions. Their pregnancies occurred before the 1979 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which barred companies from treating pregnancy leaves differently from other disability leaves.
Not counting time NOT worked is not at all the same as “discriminating against pregnant women”!
Just another example of a well-intentioned law becoming “an ass.”
Why is that hard to understand?
If you don’t work during a given period and your company is kind enough to grant you leave (paid or unpaid) AND hold your job for you, that time SHOULD NOT count toward seniority within that Company nor be pensionable...because YOU DID NOT WORK.
In the FDNY, when one takes an extended “leave”, their seniority, as expected and is right, STOPS, then resumes when they begin working again.
If an engineer leaves a job for a year or two to rear children then comes back, it is RIGHT and JUST that all those workers hired at the same time, who did NOT take leaves, move ahead of that worker on the seniority list.
Then it also stands to reason that should such lost time should NOT count toward one’s pension either.
The recent Supreme Court ruling was at least a partial victory for this common sense approach the workplace, in that the high court overturned a lower court’s decision that said decades-old maternity leaves should count in determining pensions.
Four AT&T Corp. employees who took maternity leave between 1968 and 1976 had sued the company to get their leave time credited toward their pensions. Their pregnancies occurred before the 1979 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which barred companies from treating pregnancy leaves differently from other disability leaves.
Not counting time NOT worked is not at all the same as “discriminating against pregnant women”!
Just another example of a well-intentioned law becoming “an ass.”
