The government is looking seriously at legislating to set minimum rights to notice and redundancy payments when a business fails or downsizes. It's a good idea. While 80% of employees in collective agreements have redundancy protection, 80% of workers aren't collectivised - and only 20% of them have any entitlement to redundancy. So this would be a significant improvement in workers' rights. It could also significantly reduce the impact of the recession on ordinary people if enacted quickly enough.
There's an obvious question of why its taken Labour nine years to get round to this, but I'm just glad they're finally moving on it. The question is whether they'll get to implement it - because it sure as hell won't be happening under National.
The full report of the Public Advisory Group on restructuring and redundancy (and the accompanying cabinet paper) canbe found here.
