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Which is why many companies don’t hire many people in France http://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/knowledge/publications/147348/ten-things-to-know-about-labour-a

Which is why many companies don’t hire many people in France http://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/knowledge/publications/147348/ten-things-to-know-about-labour-and-employment-law-in-france http://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/knowledge/publications/14...

John_KZ 9y ago
This is also why people in France have stable, long-term jobs, instead of being fired by Wallmart every 6 months due to some war veteran scheme that allows them to save 0.1% on employee salaries. In this particular case, if the man wasn't trained appropriately to handle international PR while doing so, the wrongdoing lies with the company. The article itself seems to adopt a certain attitude that I really dislike. For one, I don't believe that the employee clicked accidentally. It really sounds like a lie. Then the arguments alternate between "it's not my job" and "Why should we care about China/other countries? Why should just tell them to f-ck off!". The truth is that both the US and the company seem to have an opinion. The employee, either due to negligence or ignorance, broke that line, and the company faced a backlash. It's not like China is exceptionally evil or something. I hate people trying to vilify entrire countries and politicize everything. It sounds like the author is just looking for a reason to bash China.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire. Imagine that you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. Today, that means your startup is dead and all employees are screwed, but in the US, your startup continues with a much lower valuation. Which is better for the worker? There is no right answer, but in France, there's a startup-killing answer.
  - John_KZ 9y ago
    Startups are a form of volatile research projects that could be done better in a corporate environment. Startups provide precarious and unstable employment, and on average they fail and lead to unemployment. I personally love working on new, potent ideas, but this is not a viable model of development for society. "Gig economy" is getting out of control, and it's better to kill the startups than to let people abuse the legal loopholes they require. If you cannot provide a certain minimum of employment time, you shouldn't hire people. As for short-term contracts, they were misused a lot post-2008, but the situation is much better now and most people won't work under such contracts.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      Hey, I'm all in favor of you working on new ideas, but only within an existing corporate environment. But there's plenty of proof that that's a terrible way to advance society at large.
      - John_KZ 9y ago
        If a number of people(experienced/experts in a field) are willing to volunteer their time and/or capital in exchange for equity/patents/stock, then it's all good. My problem lies with externalizing the cost and risk to employees. If they need something done and they can't guarantee long-term employment, they can buy commercial services for what they need. Engineering firms and temp offices will be happy to send you a secretary, a software solution or a CAD file with what you asked.
        skookumchuck 9y ago
        > My problem lies with externalizing the cost and risk to employees. It's really not your business what other people freely choose to do with their time. Nobody makes anyone work at a startup.
    - katzgrau 9y ago
      Yea I'd disagree. Like the process of evolution, I believe that ideas and the mutation and the proliferation of those ideas are what leads to progress. More seeds.
  - realusername 9y ago
    > A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire. Having a long-term contract where you can be fired at-will any day is effectively the same as cumulating short-term contracts, so instead of a lot of people on short-term contracts, you just have everybody (100%) on short term contracts.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      That's not the case in the US: employees have a lot more protection if they're a part of a "protected class". And, surprisingly enough, it works pretty well. I, personally, have a limited ability to be a part of a protected class, but that appears to work out ok for people like me. I've been fired once, and I got a better job as a result.
      - chefkoch 9y ago
        > I've been fired once, and I got a better job as a result. I'm not sure that's the way it works if your a 49 year old customer care agent from omaha.
    - nicolas_t 9y ago
      There is one big difference. If you have a long term contract in the US where you can get fired at will, you can still get a mortgage. If you're cumulating short term contracts in France, no bank will agree to let you get a mortgage or will make it very difficult. This creates an underclass of people who are unable to buy their own house because of the employment situation
  - jlarocco 9y ago
    > A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire. A lot of American workers are on short-term contracts, too, for nearly the same reasons. > Imagine that you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. Today, that means your startup is dead and all employees are screwed, but in the US, your startup continues with a much lower valuation. Which is better for the worker? There is no right answer, but in France, there's a startup-killing answer. The risk that it will go out of business is part of working for a startup. It doesn't make sense to punish the rest of us to save a handful of startup employees.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      By all means, if a country prefers economic suicide for startups instead of birthing the next Silicon Valley, it's a valid choice.
      - jlarocco 9y ago
        Yeah, that sounds great... economic strife for everybody so that a few well connected college dropouts can get rich on "Uber for Food" or a viral phone game.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    > you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. You dismiss employees equivalent to half of your expenses on economic grounds, and after the appropriate notice period (1 month for employees with 6 months - 2 years tenure [1]) you now have half the expenses. If that's not fast enough, I doubt your startup would have survived for more than 2 months with an instant layoff. [1] http://www.oecd.org/els/emp/France.pdf http://www.oecd.org/els/emp/France.pdf
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      OK, no problem, I am convinced because Europe has tons of successful startups. That works great until the next time I am interviewed by French TV about why the EU doesn't have as many startups as Silicon Valley.
      - yorwba 9y ago
        Surely at-will employment is not all it takes to suddenly have lots of successful startups. Otherwise the US would have a more spread-out distribution of startups, instead of the cluster in Silicon Valley. When you do get interviewed by French TV, I hope you won't pretend like this is a single-cause issue with a simple fix.
        astrange 9y ago
        California's advantages are existing tech employers, wildly risk taking investors, and above average US workers' rights like banning non compete agreements. The EU has the first, none of the second, and I wouldn't know about the third.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - LarryL 9y ago
        > why the EU doesn't have as many startups as Silicon Valley I'm french. I can't speak for sure about other EU countries, but I can speak about France. The REAL and main reason why tech startups are less frequent here is cultural. In France we have a HUGE problem with elitism & a widespread negative attitude toward anybody who tries to innovate/change/make things. It's a pervasive problem, I've been MANY times hit HARD by that problem. Initiative is strongly discouraged (even if most people will claim the opposite): no matter what you do, a LOT of people will immediately give you _negative_ critics of all kind, sometimes mind-bogglingly stupid: "it'll never work", "that's not a good idea", etc. The more clueless they are, the most aggresisve they are about it. It's really hard to be motivated in such an environment, and of course it also has a direct impact when you try to find funds or associates... Also, many people, especially the managers & the elites only see the BIG companies as being worth anything, despite the fact that small to medium businesses make the majority of employment & create the most value. Add to that the HUGE problem that managers and all the elite (politics, leaders, whatever), salespeople, and many others, have an extremely TOXIC attitude toward people who DO THINGS. For instance I was given shit many times because while being a team lead I was involved in the programming part. To them, a manager does NOT get his/her hands DIRTY. Which is stupid of course and explains a LOT of the problems we have here. And trust me, this goes very far, there is a real CONTEMPT toward people like me, who are the ones who build the products & services that bring all the money. I've been mocked to my face because of that by people (sales & managers) who have no clue about how to manage a project, a team, and even less a programming project... (And I've worked on HUGE telecom projects, not a couple of PHP pages). Same goes for everybody in my family, who are mostly scientists/engineers. This in turn creates a big dissatisfaction -or worse- in the people who are in the trenches, creating an awful "us versus them" mentality that kills productivity & often creates a very bad work atmosphere. And don't get me started about the awful prejudices against programmers (and everybody involved in computer projects). It's REALLY bad! So bad that I regret choosing that field. Here also there is a huge contempt & all the ridiculous prejudices that you probably know about nerds, programmers, etc. (Of the hundreds of developers/SE I've met, I can count on the fingers of ONE hand the ones who somewhat fit the stereotypes, and those were people with severe mental issues, something not related to the job). Another BIG problem is the "programming is easy" B.S. This leads many managers to think that they can replace experienced people like me with cheap beginners, sometimes in foreign countries, with disastrous results (as I wrote above, I worked in BIG projects, with crushing responsibilities, not the stuff that beginners can handle by themselves even if they are good which was not the case because being cheap, they were not the best, not by a long shot). The huge bureaucracy does not help either, but it's not the most important issue. In case someone points out the few recent initiatives to encourage startups in France, let me repeat what I just wrote: the fundamental issue is ATTITUDE. Until we can fix that, everything else is basically useless.
- sverige 9y ago
  > It's not like China is exceptionally evil or something. China isn't. The Chinese communist government is, though.
realusername 9y ago
From what I've discussed with a lot of small businesses in France, workers-friendly laws are not an obstacle at all and unlike what you can see in the news, it plays almost no part in hiring (the laws are actually very reasonable and it all makes sense). The main obstacle is by far the high taxes.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  You might want to also talk to small businesses in France that deal with with unexpected setbacks -- from what I have observed, this usually ends up with a dead startup.
  - realusername 9y ago
    Not sure what your point is, if you have no money, you are screwed whatever the country.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      In a similar situation, many US startups survive, after laying off of their half their at-will employees. That's my point.
      - realusername 9y ago
        I don't know what perception of the country you have but it's not the Soviet Union you know, having financial issue is a valid reason to fire employees. The US is the only developed place without reasonable workers laws so it's more an exception than anything else.
        greglindahl 9y ago
        In the US, we call this argument "Red Baiting". Sure, let's accuse our opponent of starving 10s of millions of people to death! When there's a financial problem, there are multiple differing opinions as to what's reasonable. But if you want to call the US the "only developed place without reasonable worker laws", you might want to consider Denmark. Because they don't have the opinion you're propagating.
KyeRussell 9y ago
Proponents of a largely deregulated labour market love talking about France. As someone working in Australia—a country with labour laws that are more sane than France (and definitely the U.S.)—instantly bringing up France just tends to stink of a false dichotomy and a line of rhetoric from people that try to justify the U.S.'s unjustifiably unfair labour laws. I suggest that people who aren't familiar with Australia's labour laws have a quick look at https://www.fairwork.gov.au/ https://www.fairwork.gov.au/. There are some problems, but it gives you an idea of practical alternatives to at-will employment. Main relevant takeaways: - Unfair dismissal legislation preventing employers from terminating employees unless they were grossly negligent, malicious, or didn't respond to performance management. - Unfair dismissal claim protection for small businesses provided they can show evidence of following a (very short, fair, and easy to read) code with regards to the employee's termination. It's extremely hard for me to empathise with business owners who openly have issues with these protections. At the very least, it's apparent that this dismissal wouldn't stand in Australia, as it shouldn't. Executives dismissing a support employee—out-of-touch executives who have probably forgotten how important an ongoing income stream is for people on low or even normal incomes—just to save face in a business relationship is in my opinion unjustifiable. Regardless of your view on labour laws I think most people agree on this.
- hueving 9y ago
  >Regardless of your view on labour laws I think most people agree on this. Not if the other option was China shutting down a bunch of Marriott hotels and hundreds of employees losing their jobs instead.
  - fyi1183 9y ago
    See, this is an interesting thing about labor law: it can actually protect both parties. If Marriott was forbidden by law from firing the employee in this situation, then they could much more easily deflect the pressure from China. Make some token gesture and then say, hey, we'd like to do more, but those pesky laws prevent us from doing that. This is a case where everybody wins when there's stronger employee protection.
user5994461 9y ago
A french contract has 1 to 6 months of trial period. New employees can be fired anytime with 24h notice and zero protection.

John_KZ 9y ago

This is also why people in France have stable, long-term jobs, instead of being fired by Wallmart every 6 months due to some war veteran scheme that allows them to save 0.1% on employee salaries. In this particular case, if the man wasn't trained appropriately to handle international PR while doing so, the wrongdoing lies with the company. The article itself seems to adopt a certain attitude that I really dislike. For one, I don't believe that the employee clicked accidentally. It really sounds like a lie. Then the arguments alternate between "it's not my job" and "Why should we care about China/other countries? Why should just tell them to f-ck off!". The truth is that both the US and the company seem to have an opinion. The employee, either due to negligence or ignorance, broke that line, and the company faced a backlash. It's not like China is exceptionally evil or something. I hate people trying to vilify entrire countries and politicize everything. It sounds like the author is just looking for a reason to bash China.

greglindahl 9y ago
A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire. Imagine that you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. Today, that means your startup is dead and all employees are screwed, but in the US, your startup continues with a much lower valuation. Which is better for the worker? There is no right answer, but in France, there's a startup-killing answer.
- John_KZ 9y ago
  Startups are a form of volatile research projects that could be done better in a corporate environment. Startups provide precarious and unstable employment, and on average they fail and lead to unemployment. I personally love working on new, potent ideas, but this is not a viable model of development for society. "Gig economy" is getting out of control, and it's better to kill the startups than to let people abuse the legal loopholes they require. If you cannot provide a certain minimum of employment time, you shouldn't hire people. As for short-term contracts, they were misused a lot post-2008, but the situation is much better now and most people won't work under such contracts.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Hey, I'm all in favor of you working on new ideas, but only within an existing corporate environment. But there's plenty of proof that that's a terrible way to advance society at large.
    - John_KZ 9y ago
      If a number of people(experienced/experts in a field) are willing to volunteer their time and/or capital in exchange for equity/patents/stock, then it's all good. My problem lies with externalizing the cost and risk to employees. If they need something done and they can't guarantee long-term employment, they can buy commercial services for what they need. Engineering firms and temp offices will be happy to send you a secretary, a software solution or a CAD file with what you asked.
      - skookumchuck 9y ago
        > My problem lies with externalizing the cost and risk to employees. It's really not your business what other people freely choose to do with their time. Nobody makes anyone work at a startup.
  - katzgrau 9y ago
    Yea I'd disagree. Like the process of evolution, I believe that ideas and the mutation and the proliferation of those ideas are what leads to progress. More seeds.
- realusername 9y ago
  > A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire. Having a long-term contract where you can be fired at-will any day is effectively the same as cumulating short-term contracts, so instead of a lot of people on short-term contracts, you just have everybody (100%) on short term contracts.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    That's not the case in the US: employees have a lot more protection if they're a part of a "protected class". And, surprisingly enough, it works pretty well. I, personally, have a limited ability to be a part of a protected class, but that appears to work out ok for people like me. I've been fired once, and I got a better job as a result.
    - chefkoch 9y ago
      > I've been fired once, and I got a better job as a result. I'm not sure that's the way it works if your a 49 year old customer care agent from omaha.
  - nicolas_t 9y ago
    There is one big difference. If you have a long term contract in the US where you can get fired at will, you can still get a mortgage. If you're cumulating short term contracts in France, no bank will agree to let you get a mortgage or will make it very difficult. This creates an underclass of people who are unable to buy their own house because of the employment situation
- jlarocco 9y ago
  > A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire. A lot of American workers are on short-term contracts, too, for nearly the same reasons. > Imagine that you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. Today, that means your startup is dead and all employees are screwed, but in the US, your startup continues with a much lower valuation. Which is better for the worker? There is no right answer, but in France, there's a startup-killing answer. The risk that it will go out of business is part of working for a startup. It doesn't make sense to punish the rest of us to save a handful of startup employees.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    By all means, if a country prefers economic suicide for startups instead of birthing the next Silicon Valley, it's a valid choice.
    - jlarocco 9y ago
      Yeah, that sounds great... economic strife for everybody so that a few well connected college dropouts can get rich on "Uber for Food" or a viral phone game.
- yorwba 9y ago
  > you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. You dismiss employees equivalent to half of your expenses on economic grounds, and after the appropriate notice period (1 month for employees with 6 months - 2 years tenure [1]) you now have half the expenses. If that's not fast enough, I doubt your startup would have survived for more than 2 months with an instant layoff. [1] http://www.oecd.org/els/emp/France.pdf http://www.oecd.org/els/emp/France.pdf
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    OK, no problem, I am convinced because Europe has tons of successful startups. That works great until the next time I am interviewed by French TV about why the EU doesn't have as many startups as Silicon Valley.
    - yorwba 9y ago
      Surely at-will employment is not all it takes to suddenly have lots of successful startups. Otherwise the US would have a more spread-out distribution of startups, instead of the cluster in Silicon Valley. When you do get interviewed by French TV, I hope you won't pretend like this is a single-cause issue with a simple fix.
      - astrange 9y ago
        California's advantages are existing tech employers, wildly risk taking investors, and above average US workers' rights like banning non compete agreements. The EU has the first, none of the second, and I wouldn't know about the third.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - LarryL 9y ago
      > why the EU doesn't have as many startups as Silicon Valley I'm french. I can't speak for sure about other EU countries, but I can speak about France. The REAL and main reason why tech startups are less frequent here is cultural. In France we have a HUGE problem with elitism & a widespread negative attitude toward anybody who tries to innovate/change/make things. It's a pervasive problem, I've been MANY times hit HARD by that problem. Initiative is strongly discouraged (even if most people will claim the opposite): no matter what you do, a LOT of people will immediately give you _negative_ critics of all kind, sometimes mind-bogglingly stupid: "it'll never work", "that's not a good idea", etc. The more clueless they are, the most aggresisve they are about it. It's really hard to be motivated in such an environment, and of course it also has a direct impact when you try to find funds or associates... Also, many people, especially the managers & the elites only see the BIG companies as being worth anything, despite the fact that small to medium businesses make the majority of employment & create the most value. Add to that the HUGE problem that managers and all the elite (politics, leaders, whatever), salespeople, and many others, have an extremely TOXIC attitude toward people who DO THINGS. For instance I was given shit many times because while being a team lead I was involved in the programming part. To them, a manager does NOT get his/her hands DIRTY. Which is stupid of course and explains a LOT of the problems we have here. And trust me, this goes very far, there is a real CONTEMPT toward people like me, who are the ones who build the products & services that bring all the money. I've been mocked to my face because of that by people (sales & managers) who have no clue about how to manage a project, a team, and even less a programming project... (And I've worked on HUGE telecom projects, not a couple of PHP pages). Same goes for everybody in my family, who are mostly scientists/engineers. This in turn creates a big dissatisfaction -or worse- in the people who are in the trenches, creating an awful "us versus them" mentality that kills productivity & often creates a very bad work atmosphere. And don't get me started about the awful prejudices against programmers (and everybody involved in computer projects). It's REALLY bad! So bad that I regret choosing that field. Here also there is a huge contempt & all the ridiculous prejudices that you probably know about nerds, programmers, etc. (Of the hundreds of developers/SE I've met, I can count on the fingers of ONE hand the ones who somewhat fit the stereotypes, and those were people with severe mental issues, something not related to the job). Another BIG problem is the "programming is easy" B.S. This leads many managers to think that they can replace experienced people like me with cheap beginners, sometimes in foreign countries, with disastrous results (as I wrote above, I worked in BIG projects, with crushing responsibilities, not the stuff that beginners can handle by themselves even if they are good which was not the case because being cheap, they were not the best, not by a long shot). The huge bureaucracy does not help either, but it's not the most important issue. In case someone points out the few recent initiatives to encourage startups in France, let me repeat what I just wrote: the fundamental issue is ATTITUDE. Until we can fix that, everything else is basically useless.
sverige 9y ago
> It's not like China is exceptionally evil or something. China isn't. The Chinese communist government is, though.

realusername 9y ago

From what I've discussed with a lot of small businesses in France, workers-friendly laws are not an obstacle at all and unlike what you can see in the news, it plays almost no part in hiring (the laws are actually very reasonable and it all makes sense). The main obstacle is by far the high taxes.

greglindahl 9y ago
You might want to also talk to small businesses in France that deal with with unexpected setbacks -- from what I have observed, this usually ends up with a dead startup.
- realusername 9y ago
  Not sure what your point is, if you have no money, you are screwed whatever the country.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    In a similar situation, many US startups survive, after laying off of their half their at-will employees. That's my point.
    - realusername 9y ago
      I don't know what perception of the country you have but it's not the Soviet Union you know, having financial issue is a valid reason to fire employees. The US is the only developed place without reasonable workers laws so it's more an exception than anything else.
      - greglindahl 9y ago
        In the US, we call this argument "Red Baiting". Sure, let's accuse our opponent of starving 10s of millions of people to death! When there's a financial problem, there are multiple differing opinions as to what's reasonable. But if you want to call the US the "only developed place without reasonable worker laws", you might want to consider Denmark. Because they don't have the opinion you're propagating.

KyeRussell 9y ago

Proponents of a largely deregulated labour market love talking about France. As someone working in Australia—a country with labour laws that are more sane than France (and definitely the U.S.)—instantly bringing up France just tends to stink of a false dichotomy and a line of rhetoric from people that try to justify the U.S.'s unjustifiably unfair labour laws. I suggest that people who aren't familiar with Australia's labour laws have a quick look at https://www.fairwork.gov.au/ https://www.fairwork.gov.au/. There are some problems, but it gives you an idea of practical alternatives to at-will employment. Main relevant takeaways: - Unfair dismissal legislation preventing employers from terminating employees unless they were grossly negligent, malicious, or didn't respond to performance management. - Unfair dismissal claim protection for small businesses provided they can show evidence of following a (very short, fair, and easy to read) code with regards to the employee's termination. It's extremely hard for me to empathise with business owners who openly have issues with these protections. At the very least, it's apparent that this dismissal wouldn't stand in Australia, as it shouldn't. Executives dismissing a support employee—out-of-touch executives who have probably forgotten how important an ongoing income stream is for people on low or even normal incomes—just to save face in a business relationship is in my opinion unjustifiable. Regardless of your view on labour laws I think most people agree on this.

hueving 9y ago
>Regardless of your view on labour laws I think most people agree on this. Not if the other option was China shutting down a bunch of Marriott hotels and hundreds of employees losing their jobs instead.
- fyi1183 9y ago
  See, this is an interesting thing about labor law: it can actually protect both parties. If Marriott was forbidden by law from firing the employee in this situation, then they could much more easily deflect the pressure from China. Make some token gesture and then say, hey, we'd like to do more, but those pesky laws prevent us from doing that. This is a case where everybody wins when there's stronger employee protection.

user5994461 9y ago

A french contract has 1 to 6 months of trial period. New employees can be fired anytime with 24h notice and zero protection.