Quote: Scarlet Pimpernell "If he reduces employment protections to make us more competitive at the expense of the work force than the EU will not offer us a deal anyway.'"
The EU has more power on that one because the potential cost savings to businesses from slashing EU employment regulations are not going to be enough to counter the costs the EU can apply from forcing the UK to accept their standard 'rest of the world' tariff levels. The UK won't be able to use employment rights to draw inward investment away from the EU.
If they really wanted to reduce the cost of employment they would do away with the minimum wage, which is a UK government thing and has never been an EU policy. Sajid Javid seems to want to increase this!
The employment rights that were in EU law that the UK would be able to strip away are in:
- Working Time regulations: biggest one being annual leave entitlement, other than that the right to rest breaks and rules on how many hours you can do in a certain period. You could allow more extreme long-hours of working, but most industries don't use those anyway.
- Agency Worker regulations: require firms to treat temporary staff the same as permanent staff, you could remove these but again it will only benefit certain businesses and isn't going to be a huge dividend to firms.
- Rules around redundancies: this covers stuff like being required to consult with the workforce before redundancies. Again lots of firms might prefer this but it's not going to be a saving that drives investment decisions.
- Maternity rights: mostly small businesses that would welcome the removal of these, not the ones who would be potentially looking to relocate from the EU
- Discrimination protections: you can make it easier to fire people on the basis of things that are currently protected characteristics but again this isn't going to be a big ticket money spinner.
A lot of those kind of deregulations would just attract negative publicity that outweigh their value to businesses, and would help Labour brand the Tory party as the 'nasty party'.