Taking Care Not to Crush the Entrepreneurial Butterfly, in All its Ethereal Sublimity

Employers are delicate creatures. Presumably that is why the Government has so far protected those who break the law on the minimum wage from the prosecution, courtroom appearances, exposure in the media and all the other little inconveniences which attend a misdemeanour by a prole. Somehow or other, it appears that this civilised treatment has failed to have much effect; which must come as a bit of a shock to a government which believes that the best way to prevent criminal activity by banks, newspapers and policemen is to allow them to continue undisturbed and unregulated along their merry way. Accordingly, a token Deputy Conservative minister in the cutesily-acronymed Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has announced a token measure: from the autumn, companies which underpay their employees will not only be subject to financial penalties, but will be "named and shamed" as well; and, much like the banks, the police and the scumbag press, will immediately reform themselves, or else be subject to expensive blacklisting by the all-powerful precariat. However, there will be no surge of prosecutions; much less the kind of exemplary sentencing meted out to people who filched bottles of mineral water or posted silly things on Facebook during the riots two years ago. Unlike the proles, who are not wealth creators and whose characters are frequently so coarse-grained as to greet enhanced flexibilitisation with near-total ingratitude, employers are made of finer stuff.