It’s a common trick of corporate lobbyists to refer to Burger King or Walmart as “small businesses.” They conflate the needs of mom-and-pop shops with those of gigantic corporations to get concessions for their backers. But at the negotiating table they happily ignore the needs of actual small businesses. That’s why we need a Small Business Bill of Rights.

This “Bill of Rights” would extend certain protections to smaller, local employers. They would be given leniency for early offenses. Mistakes made by shops of this size are usually innocent rather than the systematic abuses you see from large corporations. Most importantly there should be a designated advocate in government whose only job is to connect small employers to our current incentive programs that seem to only support national companies.

Under no circumstance would this strip away any protections for workers, but it would help ensure that small businesses actually have someone looking out for them in our government.

Laufton Ascencao

Mr. Ascencao is a Democrat running for House District 68.