Employers must respect rights of pregnant women

Female workers, at a workshop, have expressed displeasure over the stressful conditions they are made to endure during pregnancy at the workplace.

They said uncomplimentary remarks made by their superiors also made them view pregnancy as a form of punishment.

Consequently, they often fear to report some of the health complications they encounter in their pregnancies to their superiors in view of the sort of embarrassment and criticisms that would meet them.

They, therefore, appealed to employers in the formal and informal sector to understand and bear with their emotional, psychological and health challenges, associated with pregnancy.

They suggested that employers should create some nursing centres at the workplace so that they could breastfeed their children there during their break periods to prevent infants from being enrolled at crèche at three months because their mothers were supposed to resume work.

The participants drawn from both public and private organisations, were at a workshop on Maternity Protection at the Workplace in Takoradi, on Thursday.

Mr. Joseph Kingsley Amuah, Industrial Relations Director of the Ghana Employers’ Association (GEA), said Ghana had ratified International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention 183, which highlighted maternal protection for expectant and nursing mothers.

He said it was incumbent upon both public and private employers to comply with the provisions in the ILO Convention on Maternity Protection, which had been reviewed four times so as to meet contemporary working conditions across the world.

He explained that Section 56 and 58 of the National Labour Act 651 required employers to safeguard the protection of expectant and nursing mothers at the workplace and provide them all the benefits associated with childbirth to promote their health and wellbeing.

He stated that maternity protection was a fundamental human right guaranteed under the 1992 Constitution of Ghana, therefore, employers must comply with these rights to avoid a brush with the law.

Mr. Amuah noted that the Labour Act required employers to give 12 weeks maternity leave to nursing mothers and 14 weeks in the event there were abnormal deliveries to enable them to recuperate and breastfeed their babies properly.

He urged women who were discriminated on the grounds of being pregnant or nursing babies to lodge a complaint with the National Labour Commission for the necessary punitive measures to be taken against that employer.

He said maternity protection run from the period of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, therefore, employers must abide by the provisions in the ILO Convention and Labour law to protect nursing women against economic vulnerability.

Mr. Amuah urged employers to adopt appropriate measures to ensure that pregnant women or breastfeeding mothers were not exposed to conditions or work that would be detrimental to their health and that of the baby.

“Pregnant women should not be made to undergo stress or transferred from the place of their residency, therefore, employers must take measures to ensure that maternity was not used as a source of discrimination against women,” he stressed.

The Industrial Relations Director of the GEA, therefore, suggested that some insurance companies must develop insurance package for pregnant women so that employers would not be required to solely bear the cost of financial entitlements of expectant mothers in their employment.