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It's a sad story that I remember from years ago. I wonder how much the rigid rules that France has on employee firing contribute to this. I am aware of an empl

It's a sad story that I remember from years ago. I wonder how much the rigid rules that France has on employee firing contribute to this. I am aware of an employer's view in a different case where (in a small company) an employee was asked to leave for poor performance. The process dragged for so long that the employee was paid full salary for close to 15 months without ever coming to office during this period. The company closed shop.

WalterBright 7y ago
Generally speaking, the harder it is to fire someone, the more reluctant a company will be to hire someone.
- Iv 7y ago
  I think most French would be happy to switch to a system where it is easy to fire, as long as the social net was good. Thing is, these two things (strengthening the safety net and making the labor laws more flexible) are defended by different parties. The few that have pretended to do this transition ended up just removing labor law protections.
  - brmgb 7y ago
    The great paradox of France is that people keep believing it's hard to fire there while it's not. Every government for the past thirty years have made firing easier. You have an up to eight months window of at-will before the protections kick in and they are mostly severance compensation which rises with the duration of your employment. You have to have a cause but these are plentyful. If you can agree with your employee it's time to part, you don't even need to fire them. There is a legal way to commonly agree to break the contract which closes judicial recourse from the employee. When companies in France complain they can't fire, what they actually mean is that they can't do it for free. Personally it doesn't make me too sad.
    - BrandoElFollito 7y ago
      Past the probation period even if you want to pay firing is not easy. Sure you can use contractual statements (such as that the work can be anywhere in France) but short of harassment there is no easy way out. If you fire someone out means that you are shutting down the position. The court will not be happy if it was a fake shutdown. A middle ground such as the specific laws for first employment (which did not pass) child be a middle ground.
      - Iv 7y ago
        I keep moving one side or the other on this issue. I think there is a philosophical difference in the way companies and employees are seen in France vs US. I often feel (from discussions here, but American friends told me the views are more varied in a representative sample of the US population) that in the US companies are seen as an extension of their owners' will. Do what you want on a whim. Want to close a profitable company to just cash in everything and buy a yacht? You own it, you can do it. In France companies owners that do have employees are more considered like caretakers of a piece of the national production and are expected to be responsible of the piece of economy they grabbed (or, arguable, were allowed to grab). So yes, if you think you can be a worthy contributor to the economy, you are allowed to grab a piece of it and keep a nice part to yourself, but in exchange there are rules for you to be responsible about it, like not creating jobs that may be unsustainable and depriving sustainable companies from labor. In France you can fire employees for reasons, but you need reasons better than a whim. If you have a good reason (the employee broke important rules, or the law, refuses to do their work), it is free. If it is for performances or economic reasons, well you made a hiring mistake and it is going to cost you, but a reasonable amount. I am not sure it is bad. The French economy performs pretty well when you go past the headlines and look at the numbers. I don't think that model is the drag we make it look like.
        BrandoElFollito 7y ago
        I think you are very correct in your analysis. There is also some kind of close relationship between job and personal life (at least in the tech companies I worked in). For instance we will be careful when planning to take into account school holidays. Or the company will make arrangements on day one at school so that parents can be late (the ones who had to bring their children to school). Everybody understand that teachers are a civilization on their own and that a meeting with a parent at 16:30 is normal. So companies adapt. There are many more similar situations.
- philjohn 7y ago
  Got some cold hard facts to back up that assertion?
ridaj 7y ago
In this case, many of the employees were civil servants who were statutorily guaranteed a job as part of the bargain they made with the government decades ago when the company was just a department of the administration. Regardless, I don't think one can blame the rules. Executives in every difficult business would otherwise have an excuse to blame the law. If the company had failed due to management's inability to downsize as needed, the state would have likely have had to recapitalize the company.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  In all telecom companies at some point there was a transition to digitization, reducing the need of employees per subscriber; that is an increase of productivity, not a management failure: if you need only half of the employees to provide the same services, what is the management supposed to do with the other half? At one point manual operators at the switching boards simply become obsolete, what can management do?
  - ridaj 7y ago
    I didn't mean it's a management failure. The company was really put in a precarious position when it was spun off from government without change to employees' job-for-life statutory protections. With lots of debt piled on by previous management, management was not dealt a winning hand. Although the next set of execs managed to continue the turnaround. But yes, otherwise there are many other options besides downsizing, such as retraining or entering new markets geographically or vertically, all of which (to their credit) the same set of folks pursued as well. Similarly silicon valley companies are constantly threatened by obsolescence. I think today Facebook and Google would both be dead if they hadn't retrained a significant share of their workforce on mobile development a few years ago, and machine learning more recently.
hrktb 7y ago
Firing for poor performance is easy enough when you can prove the low performance and reluctance to improve. The more it gets touchy feely, the harder it gets: for instance the goals you set were blurry or contestable, you don’t have any track record of how the employee has been doing until you wanted to fire them, the improvement plan you set up is properly followed but you still want to get rid of them etc. I’ve seen someone basically fired on the spot for critical fault, and another worker let go after a first warning, a 3 month recovery plan and not reaching the goal agreed upon (set on the base of the other employees goal at the same pay level). It’s really not outlandish, and it takes you 3 months to fire your employer, needing 3 months to fire an employee is fair enough.

WalterBright 7y ago

Generally speaking, the harder it is to fire someone, the more reluctant a company will be to hire someone.

Iv 7y ago
I think most French would be happy to switch to a system where it is easy to fire, as long as the social net was good. Thing is, these two things (strengthening the safety net and making the labor laws more flexible) are defended by different parties. The few that have pretended to do this transition ended up just removing labor law protections.
- brmgb 7y ago
  The great paradox of France is that people keep believing it's hard to fire there while it's not. Every government for the past thirty years have made firing easier. You have an up to eight months window of at-will before the protections kick in and they are mostly severance compensation which rises with the duration of your employment. You have to have a cause but these are plentyful. If you can agree with your employee it's time to part, you don't even need to fire them. There is a legal way to commonly agree to break the contract which closes judicial recourse from the employee. When companies in France complain they can't fire, what they actually mean is that they can't do it for free. Personally it doesn't make me too sad.
  - BrandoElFollito 7y ago
    Past the probation period even if you want to pay firing is not easy. Sure you can use contractual statements (such as that the work can be anywhere in France) but short of harassment there is no easy way out. If you fire someone out means that you are shutting down the position. The court will not be happy if it was a fake shutdown. A middle ground such as the specific laws for first employment (which did not pass) child be a middle ground.
    - Iv 7y ago
      I keep moving one side or the other on this issue. I think there is a philosophical difference in the way companies and employees are seen in France vs US. I often feel (from discussions here, but American friends told me the views are more varied in a representative sample of the US population) that in the US companies are seen as an extension of their owners' will. Do what you want on a whim. Want to close a profitable company to just cash in everything and buy a yacht? You own it, you can do it. In France companies owners that do have employees are more considered like caretakers of a piece of the national production and are expected to be responsible of the piece of economy they grabbed (or, arguable, were allowed to grab). So yes, if you think you can be a worthy contributor to the economy, you are allowed to grab a piece of it and keep a nice part to yourself, but in exchange there are rules for you to be responsible about it, like not creating jobs that may be unsustainable and depriving sustainable companies from labor. In France you can fire employees for reasons, but you need reasons better than a whim. If you have a good reason (the employee broke important rules, or the law, refuses to do their work), it is free. If it is for performances or economic reasons, well you made a hiring mistake and it is going to cost you, but a reasonable amount. I am not sure it is bad. The French economy performs pretty well when you go past the headlines and look at the numbers. I don't think that model is the drag we make it look like.
      - BrandoElFollito 7y ago
        I think you are very correct in your analysis. There is also some kind of close relationship between job and personal life (at least in the tech companies I worked in). For instance we will be careful when planning to take into account school holidays. Or the company will make arrangements on day one at school so that parents can be late (the ones who had to bring their children to school). Everybody understand that teachers are a civilization on their own and that a meeting with a parent at 16:30 is normal. So companies adapt. There are many more similar situations.
philjohn 7y ago
Got some cold hard facts to back up that assertion?

ridaj 7y ago

In this case, many of the employees were civil servants who were statutorily guaranteed a job as part of the bargain they made with the government decades ago when the company was just a department of the administration. Regardless, I don't think one can blame the rules. Executives in every difficult business would otherwise have an excuse to blame the law. If the company had failed due to management's inability to downsize as needed, the state would have likely have had to recapitalize the company.

AdrianB1 7y ago
In all telecom companies at some point there was a transition to digitization, reducing the need of employees per subscriber; that is an increase of productivity, not a management failure: if you need only half of the employees to provide the same services, what is the management supposed to do with the other half? At one point manual operators at the switching boards simply become obsolete, what can management do?
- ridaj 7y ago
  I didn't mean it's a management failure. The company was really put in a precarious position when it was spun off from government without change to employees' job-for-life statutory protections. With lots of debt piled on by previous management, management was not dealt a winning hand. Although the next set of execs managed to continue the turnaround. But yes, otherwise there are many other options besides downsizing, such as retraining or entering new markets geographically or vertically, all of which (to their credit) the same set of folks pursued as well. Similarly silicon valley companies are constantly threatened by obsolescence. I think today Facebook and Google would both be dead if they hadn't retrained a significant share of their workforce on mobile development a few years ago, and machine learning more recently.

hrktb 7y ago

Firing for poor performance is easy enough when you can prove the low performance and reluctance to improve. The more it gets touchy feely, the harder it gets: for instance the goals you set were blurry or contestable, you don’t have any track record of how the employee has been doing until you wanted to fire them, the improvement plan you set up is properly followed but you still want to get rid of them etc. I’ve seen someone basically fired on the spot for critical fault, and another worker let go after a first warning, a 3 month recovery plan and not reaching the goal agreed upon (set on the base of the other employees goal at the same pay level). It’s really not outlandish, and it takes you 3 months to fire your employer, needing 3 months to fire an employee is fair enough.