Carers' responsibilities amendment The amendment defines 'responsibilities as a carer' as a person's responsibility to care for or support a dependent child or immediate family member who is in need of care and support. Immediate family members as defined in the amendments include a spouse or former spouse of the employee, grandchildren, parents and step-parents of the employee or of their spouse or former spouse. Spouse includes same-sex partners. Almost everyone at some time in their life will have to care for someone at the same time as managing their work, whether it be children, aged relatives or a sick partner. In fact, many employers have already recognised that it makes excellent people management sense to do their best to accommodate their employees' carers' responsibilities.
Employers reap the benefits as well.
Employees who are provided with flexible work arrangements stay with an employer longer, and are more likely to pout in that extra effort into their job. In the longterm, it costs more not to have flexible work arrangements than it does to have them - in staff turnover, lowered morale, lowered productivity, and so on. In general, the new carers' responsibility law works in a similar way to the law on disability discrimination. The new law only asks employers to do what they are able to do to accommodate their employee's carers' responsibilities. It does not force them to do this when an employer can show that it would cause major harm to their business.