ACCORDING to your article (LET, December 24), "three quarters of local small business bosses believe their workers will abuse new employment laws."

Implicit in the results of the survey, conducted by Business Pages, is that workers will abuse entitlements with regard to parental leave. The report does not say that the entitlement is unpaid, thereby rendering it almost totally meaningless for the massive majority of workers.

Nor does the report indicate that the leave can only be taken in blocks of one week at a time up to a maximum of four weeks in a year, that it does not apply to any child born before December 15, 1999, and that employers can withhold the entitlement for up to six months if they can prove that it will have a detrimental effect on their operation.

Oh, and by the way, they also forgot to mention that any employee must give 21 days' notice to qualify for the unpaid entitlement to parental leave.

More than 60 per cent of employers, the survey said, did not believe that "stress was a valid reason for calling in sick." It may have escaped these local employers' attention, but they should know that the Health and Safety Executive decided in April to launch a discussion document to decide whether or not an Approved Code of Practice should be introduced to deal with stress at work.

Bristol University carried out a survey for the Health and Safety Executive lasting two years. The preliminary findings indicate that one in five of all workers are "very stressed at work." In 1998, the TUC survey of 5,801 safety representatives, of whom more than 50 per cent worked in companies with fewer than 100 employees, revealed, that 77 per cent of safety representatives "cited stress as one of the main hazards of concern to workers at their workplace - 29 per cent more than the next most-frequently cited hazard."

Broken down in size - ie. numbers of employees per workplace - in those with fewer than 50 employees, 73 per cent of the main hazards of concern to safety representatives were overwork or stress; for firms of 50 to 100 employees and of 101 to 200, it was 71 per cent; 201-1,000, 73 per cent and at those with more than 1,000 it was 79 per cent.

Jill Earnshaw who wrote 'Stress and Employer Liability' in 1996 for the Institute of Personnel Directors and stress expert Professor Gary Cooper have stated what they consider to be the key factors for high levels of stress in the workplace in the '90s - "We have all the ingredients of corporate stress: an ever-increasing workload with a decreasing workforce in a climate of rapid change."

It would be useful to know what kind of conditions exist in the workplaces of the employers cited in the report conducted by Business Pages. But will we ever find out?

In the meantime, to all those employees who are not in unions, I have but one work of advice - join. If you want any help, no matter what industry you work in, write to me.

GEORGE S DAVIES, 103 Redearth Road, Darwen, Lancashire, BB3 2AR.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.