Trade union lawyer slams Governments Beecroft report as a vicious and calculated attack on the rights of ordinary working people
Jamie Hanley, partner at leading trade union law firm Morrish Solicitors, has today spoken out against the Government’s Beecroft Report, calling it ‘a vicious and calculated attack on the rights of ordinary working people’.
Hanley said:
“Yesterday, the usual political niceties employed by the Tory and Lib Dem partners of the coalition Government were far from evident.
The Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer commissioned Adrian Beecroft, a leading venture capitalist and Tory Party donor, to report on issues surrounding the flexibility of our labour market.
His report was leaked earlier this week and in response to part of it (the proposal to allow employers to dismiss employees irrespective of their performance, effectively striping away the slender employment protection currently in place to protect working people) the Government’s own Business Secretary said “…we don’t need to scare the wits out of workers with threats to dismiss them, it’s completely the wrong approach…”
Our Country already has the third most relaxed labour market in the OECD (after the USA and Canada) and we are the most flexible in Europe – there is no evidence at all to suggest that undermining the rights of ordinary hard working people will help businesses through this recession and difficult trading times.
When you consider that over 90% of businesses in our economy are ‘small businesses’, with over 3.6 million people employed in firms with 10 or fewer staff then these proposals amount to a disastrous blueprint for our economy – taken together Beecroft’s proposals will make it far easier to sack workers and make discrimination harder to outlaw – they turn back the clock on equality and employment rights. With 2.65 million people already out of work, I think that the Government would do better to consider how to stimulate growth in the economy and help employers hire workers, not fire them.”
Jamie Hanley is a Partner at Morrish Solicitors LLP.
For further information, please contact Laura Tatterstall, Head of Communications at [email protected] or 0113 297 9844.
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