There is nothing you can do

When I did employment advice training with the CAB many years ago we were told by the trainer that employment law could be summarised thus:

The employer can do what they like, when they like, to whom they like.

In practice, back at the Bureau, when employees came for advice about seeking redress for unfair dismissal we had to tell the majority that there was nothing they could do. Unless they had worked for an employer for two or more years then there was quite literally no recourse for them in law. There were not many people walking through the doors of the CAB who could not be helped in some way. That almost all the people we could not help were people dealing with employment problems did not sit easily with me then and still doesn’t today. 

Since that time the law was changed so that the qualifying period was reduced to one year.  The current Tory-led government is changing the law again so that the qualifying period will be yet again be two years and, moreover, there will be for the first time a cost in making a claim to an Employment Tribunal. The rhetoric surrounding this is all about how this will help to boost the economy, how the business sector is hamstrung because of the onerous burden placed upon them by not being able to dismiss employees at will.

George Osborne said at the Conservative Party Conference in October 2011: "We respect the right of those who spent their whole lives building up a business, not to see that achievement destroyed by a vexatious appeal to an employment tribunal. So we are now going to make it much less risky for businesses to hire people.”

This only really works if all small business owners are exemplary employers, the very definition of probity, and their workforce is nothing but a pool of potential troublemakers.  There is a definite Victorian era whiff to the fear surrounding workers having rights. Perish the thought!  Whatever next? Equal pay for women? Equal access to education and healthcare?

General secretary of the Unite union, Len McCluskey said: "'[Osborne] is a chancellor who wants to make it easier to hire and fire at will while making it harder for workers to challenge bad bosses.”

When George Osborne et al argue that the impact of public sector job losses will be softened by the growth of the private sector we should all feel afraid of the erosion of workers’ rights. I would suggest a unionised public sector is a far safer environment for a worker to be in than a small, unaccountable, private sector firm where health and safety laws are ignored and bad employment practice is rife with business owners encouraged by the actions of the government of the day to consider this to be bureaucratic nonsense strangling growth with red tape.

There are few enough employment rights without taking away those from the most vulnerable. It is disingenuous in the extreme to suggest that in an employer/employee relationship there isn’t just one party with the power, and it isn’t the employee.