Part-time and agency worker rules harm SMBs
Prime Minister Brown announced last week that the flexible working hours enjoyed by the parents of children under 6 and disabled children under 18 will be extended to parents of older children. He also intends to extend permanent employee rights to agency workers after 12 weeks on the job.
The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) warned of an employment nightmare for SMBs. “You can’t have an extension of flexible working and at the same time clamp down on the means by which many small businesses cope with it,” said FSB Employment Chairman Alan Tyrrell.
Tyrell said SMBs had coped well with the 2003 act, but “the fact of their size makes it more difficult and more costly for small businesses to cope with new employment laws than it does for big companies.”
The right to request flexible working was introduced in 2003 for parents of young and disabled children, and was extended to carers of certain adults with effect from April 2007. See the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR) guidance here.
Brown’s proposals are in keeping with the Europe-wide trend to impose civil service employment practises on wealth creators. The proposal on agency workers is a response to pressure from trade unions and French complaints that the UK’s agile labour market give it an “unfair” advantage.
What it will do, of course, is accelerate the outsourcing of jobs to countries that do not share cosy Eurocrat views on what is fair.
Shades of the WEEE directive. The EU is corporatist, which means that all EU regulations are worked out between officials, trade unions and large companies. Of course the fact that many deserving officials retire to consultancies and directorships in the organisations that lobby them is just a coincidence.
