Business
Chamber of Commerce News: Work laws that don't do the job
12th March 2008
Protectionism, not the Poles, hurting British employment, says Ian Vickerage
WHILE having my car cleaned a couple of weeks ago in Newbury, I got into a conversation with a local businessman. He was not too happy with the local scene on a couple of counts: the Park Way development, of course, but more emphatically the increase in the number of Polish people coming to New-bury, as evidenced by the opening of two Polish shops in the town.His views contrast dram-atically with those of the British Chambers of Commerce, whose director David Frost welcomed the announcement in February that 800,000 Eastern Europeans have applied to work in Britain since 2004 with these words: “The comparative success of the UK economy in recent years has been largely due to the influx of willing workers from Eastern Europe.
“Employers up and down the country tell me that they take on migrant workers because their work ethic is so much better than domestic workers.
“The vast majority of these jobs could have been filled by UK residents, but until the Govern-ment gets to grips with this country’s severe skills short-age and increasing welfare dependency culture, businesses will continue to employ migrant workers in large numbers.”
So, why do some British employees have a bad attitude? I put it down to the mass of well-meaning, but wrong-headed legislation which has been put in place over the last 20 years and which is designed to protect employees in the workplace.
This legislation has had a massive effect on labour relations within businesses of all sizes, with more than 100,000 appli-cations now submitted to employment tribunals each year in the UK.
The job of management, which used to be about training and coaching, is now more concerned with the legal definitions of age, sex, religious and race discrimin-ation, which makes it much harder to help motivate employees to have a better attitude towards their work.
The question is why do we need this legislation at all? The job market should be a classic market governed by the usual laws of supply and demand: if an employee is not happy with the job they do, or their pay and conditions, they are at liberty to get a job elsewhere.
Employers should have the same freedom to dismiss an employee if their work is not up to scratch.
The only reason for employ-ment protection laws to exist is if there is an imbalance in the market – that is, if there is a high level of unemployment, a situation which existed 20 years ago, but which certainly does not today.
My company Imago also has a large business in France, a business which is very successful. But it’s well known that the French economy has under-performed over the last 20 years, and that the UK has overtaken them.
It is recognised by the newly-elected President Nicolas Sarkozy that the largest cause of this problem is the protectionist labour market, which has also resulted in a level of French unemployment almost twice that of the UK. In other words, overprotecting jobs causes job losses.
Ian Vickerage
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