Pregnant Women Job Hunting
Looking for work when pregnant
If I had have found out about my pregnancy before I moved from Queensland and a perfectly good job, I probably would have stayed there until later on in the year.
It is very difficult to find work when you are 3 ½ months pregnant.
I moved after having worked 19 months as a bar attendant in QLD, with plenty of confidence that it would be easy to get a job back home in NSW. So far I have been wrong. Perhaps if I wasn’t pregnant, I might have had better luck.
What employer really wants to hire a 23 year old that can only work for four to five months, and have to take days off for doctor visits? Of course there may even be sick days that you can’t escape. You can’t hide the pregnancy from the employer; it gets a bit hard to hide your tummy changing after a few months.
My job network providers along with other people have told me to do just that. Hide it. Don’t tell the employer. They will never know. I have already started to expand around the belly, how will no one know?
What if I don’t say anything and something happens to my unborn child due to a work related accident? What happens if they find out any way? Will I get fired? Will they understand why I said nothing? There are too many questions and too many risks. I don’t know and I don’t want to know because I want to be honest and if employers don’t like that then they are the one’s that are missing out on good people who really want to work.
I still have the option of moving back to QLD and my old job, but the facilities for first born babes are not as readily available as established places and the hospital and care facilities here are much closer and easier for me to get to. And I am sure that my partner wouldn’t want me to move away, not now.
I have a better support group where I live in NSW, which has made things much easier so far.
If only Centrelink or the Government understood the difficulties of finding work whilst being pregnant and knowing that there are not too many employers, no matter what they say, who are willing to employ pregnant women knowing they will only be there for a short time.
Terrie