Today's Mums and Dads seem to think they have a fundamental human right to be parents and employees – including the inalienable right to work only until school lets out, without ever missing a promotion. Increasingly, US courts and juries are siding with them, feeding a whole new breed of job discrimination lawsuit: litigation over "family responsibility discrimination"... US workers who care for dependants – from the new baby to the senile Grandma to the nephew with autism – are suing their employers much more frequently than before: according to a report from the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California's Hastings College of Law, such suits shot up by 400 per cent over the past decade. And now the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal job-bias watchdog, has issued guidelines to help America's bosses pick their way across the minefield where life intersects with work, without falling into the trap of "caregiver discrimination"... No boss should be allowed to tell a Mum in advance that she has "too much on her plate": but if she repeatedly fails to do her job because she has too many kids, or too few babysitters, she should not expect childless colleagues to pick up all the slack all the time. The laws of discrimination have not totally suspended the laws of economics. There is no fundamental human right to be a Mum in the workplace.