Dear Member, 

Welcome to this week's edition of our SFA e-zine. 

In this week’s update, we have a case about a personal injury claim and an employee’s responsibilities to take reasonable care. In this article you will learn what the employee’s obligations are under the Safety, Health and Welfare Act.

Despite our protests, the government is set to increase minimum wage in the near future to €9.80. The SFA has deemed this unacceptable when small firms are struggling with other rising costs. Read the article to see some of the SFA efforts to stop the increase.

This is the last chance to book a spot for the SFA Diversity webinar tomorrow at noon. The Irish workforce has changed significantly in the last twenty years. We can see this diversity in small businesses up and down the country whereby people of all walks of life work together. This webinar will give you a brief overview of what is diversity, what does it look like and how it can be strengthened within your business.

Ireland’s competitiveness is under threat according to the National Competitiveness Council (NCC) due to an over-reliance on a small number of highly productive exporting companies. Read the article for a full report regarding the risks of an over-reliance on a single sector of the economy.

As part of SFA Affinity, each week we are highlighting some of the amazing offers available to

members. This week we have the spotlight on Law Online – an online legal document service.  

Enterprise Ireland is offering a new tool, the export scorecard, to help small business assess their own competitiveness in international markets. Read the article to find out more about the tool and try it out for yourself.  

As always, we’d love to hear from you about any queries you may have, issues you wish to have raised with Government or other stakeholders and your ideas on how we can improve the business environment for us all. Please contact me on tel: 01 605 1602 or e-mail: sven@sfa.ie or tweet: @SFA_Irl or visit: www.sfa.ie.

Kind regards, 

Sven Spollen-Behrens

SFA Director