Women who have been dismissed from their jobs because they were pregnant are receiving the equivalent of a year's salary in line with Labour Court recommendations, the Equality Authority said yesterday.
In the past month alone, awards ranging from €5,000 to €15,000 have been paid out to women who were discriminated against by their employers because they were pregnant.
"The Labour Court is sending out a strong unequivocal message that discrimination against pregnant workers will not be tolerated, and employers who discriminate will have to pay substantial compensation," said Mr Niall Crowley, the authority's chief executive.
While legal protection against gender discrimination in the workplace had been in place since 1977, the recent awards by the Labour Court "provided meaningful remedies" for women who had been dismissed from their jobs because of pregnancy, he said.
The awards should serve as a "real deterrent" to employers from this type of discrimination, the authority warned yesterday.
The number of cases of discrimination against women has been at "a fairly consistently high level"since 1999 and shows no signs of abating, Mr Crowley told The Irish Times yesterday.
Complaints of pregnancy-related descrimination are accounting for 10 per cent of all Equality Authority casework files under the Employment Equality Act.
"Pregnancy-related discrimination is definitely the biggest issue. It is a persistent and widespread problem," he said.
Small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and non-unionised businesses were the biggest culprits, being responsible for the majority of pregnancy discrimination cases,according to the authority.
Out of 400 companies surveyed by the authority to see who had equality policies in place, fewer than 50 per cent had some form of written equality policy.
"The biggest gap was among the small to medium enterprises who didn't have any formal policies in place," said Mr Crowley.
Last month €15,000 was awarded to a woman who was informed by the hotel she worked for that her employment was being terminated by reason of redundancy. This turned out not to be the case as extra staff were recruited shortly afterwards.
The judge concluded that it was "reasonable to infer from this that even if a redundancy situation existed" the employer had decided to make her redundant rather than offer her redeployment elsewhere in the hotel.
In another case, a woman was dismissed when she was absent from work due to pregnancy-related illness. The restaurant employer took her to have "abandoned" her job.
Awarding her €12,000, the Labour Court said: "A prudent employer acting reasonably would at least have sought to ascertain the true position before treating the complainant's employment as having come to an end".
"These are very significant awards and an important step in stamping out pregnancy-related discrimination in particular," said Mr Crowley. These recent cases reflected a pattern of high awards to women discriminated against.