Last week the Chancellor delivered his spring statement – setting out spending commitments for the next six months. But there was nothing in the Chancellor’s mini-budget to support working mums, despite the fact that recent TUC research found that one in three parents of pre-school age children spend more than a third of their pay on childcare – a staggering amount when households across the country are struggling to cover soaring energy bills.
And there are other challenges facing women in the labour market. Nearly two in five (38%) key workers are paid less than £10 an hour, and most of them are women. Around 2.5 million women key workers earn under £10 an hour.
One in 10 (1.4 million) women workers earn too little to get any sick pay. And TUC research shows that BME women are twice as likely to be on a zero hours contract than their white male counterparts.
Mums took on the lion’s share of caring responsibilities during the pandemic when schools closed. Now they’re more likely to have to take time off work to care for their children when they get Covid-19. Many are being forced to sacrifice hours and pay to do so.
And too many women are stuck in low-paid, insecure jobs with few rights and no sick pay. They deserve so much more.
This Mother’s Day, the TUC wants the government to introduce five key measures to help mums stay in work and support their families:
But ministers cannot stop there. The TUC says the gender pay gap opens when women become mothers, which then feeds into the gender pensions gap later in life.
Government must look at fundamental reforms to equalise care between men and women. A striking omission from the spring statement was the lack of any mention of childcare.
Without access to affordable childcare many families will be forced into further hardship and many mums will be forced out of the labour market.
And the Governments evaluation of shared parental leave is long overdue.
The TUC says ministers must:
Women have fought hard for their rights and progression in the world of work, but more than a decade of austerity, compounded by the pandemic and now the wages and bills crisis risks turning the clock back on progress towards women's equality at work and in wider society. If the government is serious about women's equality then it must get serious about its policy interventions.
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