Andrea Leadsom Tried To Abolish All Worker’s Rights For Small Companies In 2012

The woman who could be our next Prime Minister wanted to help businesses owners exploit their employees. It's not enough that the minimum wage isn't enough for anyone to live on and that so many companies opt to pay unskilled workers and graduates as little as they possibly can. No, let's introduce borderline slavery!
http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/uk_577b6c78e4b0f7b55795bc7b?edition=uk

and positive discrimination is illegal in the UK.

Yeah this isn't as bad as it sounds. As Lib says - if you are a one-person small business you don't have any of those rights so it is tough if you take on a second person to then have to guarantee them especially while you are getting going.

One thing Andrea Leadsom is doing in that speech, is being absolutely explicit in what she means and why. She's not just going on to the usual rambling speech about "red tape strangling our businesses" to get cheers, she's being explicit on her policy suggestions even though some people will regard them controversial.

I think that's a good quality and would be a good quality in a leader, if she stood up and said, "how about we do X, Y and Z, this would help achieve this objective" then everyone could have a good debate and not have one distorted in political sleight of hand.

To be honest I have got fed up of Cameron and Osborne, they just stand up in the Commons thinking its a joke, point scoring against Labour and throwing out various carefully picked stats to make it sound like everything is rosy in the garden of Britain, which as the shock referendum result showed, is far from the truth.

Workers have contractual rights agreed with their employer, so let's not misrepresent this. It's also notable that many of the people in these small start-ups are self-employed (not even to get into the position of contractors) and don't have these rights.

Perhaps the state should take some of the risk in these circumstances. It's not like we don't subsidise business anyway.

Yes, although she wasn't talking about self-employed people, or the original founders of the company, but employees specifically - I think this was aimed at Tory-voting small business people who have a few low waged employees helping them out.

It's true that rigidities in the labour market at that level inhibit employers from hiring, which is why small businesses are excluded from a lot of regulation anyway, she just wanted to take that a step further and exclude them from things like meeting redundancy obligations.

Very large numbers of people work in businesses like that, so it's a harsh neoliberal measure.

When redundancy and maternity rights were first given, the costs of them for micro-businesses was born by the public purse.

When redundancy and maternity rights were first given, the costs of them for micro-businesses was born by the public purse.

When did that change?

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It hasn't changed for maternity pay.

For redundancy, employees whose redundancy payments are not met by the small business can apply to the government for reimbursement under the NI scheme.

Andrea Leadsom was proposing destroying all of these things and even the national minimum wage in small businesses, who represent the biggest share of minimum wage workers.

She's a Chile-style extremist neoliberal singing from the same hymn sheet as Gove but with a vicious streak.

I don't really see it as extreme as that. Realistically how many companies are there with three or less employees, and more to the point, how long do these companies stay that way? Given how many business's fail in their first three years should we not be taking every step possible to nurture their growth?

The third issue on which I urge the Government to go further is regulation and red tape for businesses. The absolute, top priority, as Her Majesty said, is to get our economy going again, and nowhere more so than in the very small business sector. We must give young people and others who cannot find a job a direct and clear incentive to create one for themselves by starting a business.