Press Release No. 38/2016 IG Metall sees an urgent need for improvements to the amendment of the Maternity Protection Act

Frankfurt am Main – IG Metall has generally welcomed the amendment to the 60-year-old Maternity Protection Act. Changes in women’s career paths and new working conditions have made it urgently necessary to further develop existing provisions of maternity protection law. However, the draft bill as presented requires revisions to ensure a modern and systematic framework for maternity protection law. “The amendment must not result in the primary goal of maternity protection law—the protection of pregnant and breastfeeding women and their (unborn) children—being pushed into the background,” said Christiane Benner, Second Chair of IG Metall, on Monday in Frankfurt. The union representative welcomed the fact that occupational safety and health regulations will in the future also apply to pregnant high school students, interns, and college students.

IG Metall sees a need for improvement in the planned regulations regarding night work, Sunday work, and work on public holidays. “The fact that employers will in the future be able to agree on working hours up to 10 p.m. with women through individual contracts calls into question important protective standards for mothers and their unborn children. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture who has a better chance of asserting their interests in such negotiation processes,” criticized Hans-Jürgen Urban, executive board member of IG Metall. In effect, he said, this new regulation would lead to a reduction in the existing level of protection. He pointed out that the new regulation also contains provisions that deviate from the current Occupational Safety and Health Act and actually place pregnant women in a worse position than other employees: “It is absurd that, for pregnant and breastfeeding women of all people, occupational safety measures do not have to be taken as early as possible, but only when a so-called ‘unacceptable’ hazard arises,” said Urban. In modern occupational safety, the principle today is that preventive measures to protect employees’ health must be taken even in the case of lower-level hazards. The revised version of the law not only creates a two-tiered occupational safety framework at the expense of pregnant and breastfeeding women, but also leads to significant contradictions and implementation problems in practice.