Year: 2001
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: All enterprises operate in a regulated environment.However, employers' understanding of specific regulations and the effects on enterprise are subject to debate.An area that has provoked controversy over the past 20 years or so, is employment rights, particularly given the raft of new legislation since 1997.Drawing on a telephone survey of over 1000 small employers, plus faceto-face interviews, the paper presents new evidence and thinking on owner-managers' knowledge and perceived effects of employment rights in small firms.Particular attention is paid to maternity and parental leave, working time regulations and the national minimum wage.The paper argues that knowledge of employment rights varies according to a range of factors including enterprise size, sector, workforce composition, relevance of particular rights and employer history of involvement in employment disputes.Awareness and knowledge of rights rises when employers are at risk to having to meet these rights.Owners of micro-enterprises were less likely to display detailed knowledge suggesting a general size threshold in awareness levels.The paper also analyses the perceived effects of employment rights on small firms.This has attracted a great deal of attention over the past five years.The paper reports on which types of enterprise are more at risk to reporting positive and negative effects and in relation to which particular rights.However, given the ignorance of employers on employment rights, it also questions the validity of other research which report with some precision the cost of employment rights.Instead, it is argued that many business owners have a predisposition to criticise regulations and many of these reported effects are based on perception rather than experiential effects.When put into context, the results show a rise in the importance of employment regulation as a constraint in business performance over the past 20 years.However, the paper also argues that this effect is uneven within the small business population.
Authors: Robert Blackburn, Mark Hart
Language: English
Topic: Labor Law and Work Dynamics
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W19264793