ANEW mother who suffered from pre-natal depression after losing her job a week after she discovered she was pregnant has been awarded more than GB POUNDS18,000 compensation by an employment tribunal.
Karen Smith, 26, a trainee sales administrator with Premier Systems (Scotland) Ltd, which manufactures and installs automatic doors, discovered she was expecting her first child on March 4 last year. She was dismissed a week later. A Glasgow employment tribunal has now ruled that her dismissal because of her pregnancy was automatically unfair and that she had been discriminated against on the grounds of her sex.
She said yesterday: "I am just glad I stood up to them and defended myself. Obviously my pregnancy was tarnished and it was really, really hard at the beginning but it has all worked out well in the end."
Miss Smith, who worked at the company's Wishaw office from June 2004 until her dismissal, told the tribunal she was extremely excited when she discovered she was pregnant and told her boss, sales executive Mr Patrick Montague, when she was only five or six weeks' pregnant.
As she was leaving work on Friday, March 11, she was called into a meeting with the human resources director. She was told she was not forceful enough on the telephone.
Miss Smith told the tribunal that she had been at a meeting with Mr Montague earlier that day and no issue had been raised about her performance. But she was told she had to go.
During her pregnancy she suffered panic attacks and her medical adviser considered she was suffering from pre-natal depression.
The company said Mr Montague had been concerned for some time about her performance. It said he was concerned about her high levels of sickness absence and complained she took long lunch hours. Mr Montague said he had no idea she was pregnant.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article