She Was a Headline Once
A follower shared this story with me, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it and wanted to share it with you too.
My mum worked for the same major High Street bank from the day she left university until the day she retired.
She’d already been with them for eight years before I was born (in the late 1980s), and after maternity leave she returned to work. Two years later, after my brother was born, she took a six-year career break to raise us - something her employer supported. They were so supportive, in fact, that she kept a clipping from The Guardian featuring an article in which she was interviewed about how wonderfully supportive her employer was. The bank even provided a comment. They went so far as to say she could return at the same pay grade she had left.
But when the career break ended (with my brother and me settled in primary school and the mortgage looming), everything had changed. When she asked to return, that earlier “support” disappeared. They said, ‘You can return at the same grade and work part-time, or you can be demoted and work full-time.’
Full-time and demotion meant more take-home pay, so that’s what she chose.
However, her pension - which was non-contributory and opted her out of part of the state pension for National Insurance savings - relied on continuous service. The career break reset her service date, wiping out the years before she went on maternity leave with my brother.
In the end, she lost ten years of state pension and ten years of her employer pension, as well as taking a demotion from her supposedly ‘supportive’ employer.”
A “supportive” policy that looked brilliant in The Guardian, and devastating in real life.
A woman celebrated for balancing motherhood and work - right up until she actually tried to.
A company that couldn’t just quietly undo the promise; it rewrote her history.
Her service. Her pension. Her progress. Gone.
She still keeps that newspaper clipping -yellowed now, folded in half - proof that once upon a time, she was a headline.