More laws won’t improve employment
June 2, 2008
The Business Secretary, John Hutton, has made a speech in which he stated that the ‘end of an era’ of new employment legislation has arrived, and that the UK needs employment strategies that protect the rights of employees without decreasing the flexibility of the labour market. This clearly related to the new rights for agency workers that was agreed last week, which many people feel will damage UK businesses due to the decrease in labour flexibility. Hutton talked about the opinion that new laws automatically protect employees, and said this was not necessarily the case.
I have to say that to some extent I do agree with Hutton on this. Perhaps I’m naive, and because I’ve not worked in a large number of organisations, I’ve been lucky enough to avoid the experience of ‘rogue’ employers that these laws are there to prosecute. But I do feel that sometimes the large amount of legislation does have a negative effect on employment opportunities. For example, I wrote ages ago about comments made by Sir Alan Sugar about how employers should be able to ask at an interview what plans female applicants have for children and how they would cope with full time work as well as childcare. His argument was that discrimination law restricted women from getting jobs because the employer isn’t able to ask these questions, so often the woman would be turned down on the assumption that she would cause issues later on when she had children. Whilst I think this is a ludicrous thing to say, it does show how employers think about these issues when recruiting. I have had conversations with managers who have been reluctant to recruit some people due to the fear that, should they turn out to be a bad decision, it wouldn’t be straightforward to get rid of them. Now I know as well as the next HR person that these attitudes are bad for business and are in complete opposition to the purpose the legislation was created for, but there’s no denying that these feelings are common in management teams, and re-education will only go so far to resolving the issue.
There’s also the problem that there have been many cases that appear to be completely unfair on the employer simply because of the restrictive legislation. For example, a dismissal case where the employee is able to successfully claim unfair dismissal due to a procedural error on the employer’s part, when the employee had been proven to be stealing from the company. Yes, in that situation compensation would be reduced, but it still looks pretty bad to a manager outside of the legal or human resources professions. Sometimes I think employment claims are getting a bit like personal injury claims – more ‘dodgy’ claims like this one means that the genuinely victimised or unfairly dismissed employees lose credibility in their claim and this means the law is not doing what it is meant to do.
Whilst I know there are definitely unscrupulous employers out there for whom the law is intended, it does sometimes restrict the activities of others due to the perceived risks in recruitment, or the need to spend months going through a process with a poor employee when both parties know they’re just in it for the sake of legislation. We know the statutory dispute resolution procedures are due to be repealed as they haven’t been as successful as planned, so why introduce loads more legislation now when we haven’t even managed to get that right?
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