New initiatives are needed to encourage employers to comply with existing laws and actively pursue fairness at work, according to Professor Paul Edwards, from the Industrial Relations Research Unit at Warwick Business School.

In a recent paper Edwards says: “Enforcing employment laws properly is part of the answer, but encouraging employers voluntarily to see the organisational benefits of justice is more important.

“It is not that employers lack the will to increase justice. It is more that the means of doing it are not well known, and there are few ways of making it better known. If you run a small business, without a human resource department, the thing that is most likely to help you improve the quality of work you offer is not a complex new law with a hundred pages of explanatory guidance, but a meeting with people in much the same boat and your own workers.”