7 ms·

So as a non-US citizen, I didn't know about "at-will employment" [1]. Apparently, in some states, companies can fire people "at will" (so without any reason, at

So as a non-US citizen, I didn't know about "at-will employment" [1]. Apparently, in some states, companies can fire people "at will" (so without any reason, at any given moment). As an EU citizen, this sounds utterly horrifying to me. How can the US have that little protection of their workers..? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Insanity 7y ago
Yeah it's quite crazy, and worse for people whom are there on a visa as their visa depends on their employment. And even worse again is that healthcare is tied up to your employer..
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Tax free health insurance is tied up with employer, not healthcare (or health insurance). Anyone can purchase health insurance at healthcare.gov. Recently, the ability to purchase health insurance with pre-tax money has been expanded to self employed, but people who work for an employer that does not offer health insurance are still discriminated against.
  - Insanity 7y ago
    Okay fair enough, but from what I gather from my relatives over there is that this is quite expensive? At least compared to EU
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Yes, this pdf shows how much health insurance costs per month for a person in the state of New Jersey (a higher cost of living state, but not far off New York/California): https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcrates_2020.pdf https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra... The metal levels indicate what portion of your expected healthcare costs the insurance is expected to pay. Bronze is 60%, Silver is 70%, Gold is 80%. At the bottom you will see age rating, so you have to multiply that factor with the premium to get the premium at your age. For example, if you purchase bronze coverage (lets say $250) as a 50 year old in NJ, the factor is 1.78 times $250 = $445 per month divided by 0.6 due to it being bronze = $742 per month is your expected healthcare expenses. Obviously this is not per month, but becomes more accurate amortized over ones' lifetime, as you might go with zero healthcare expenses for years and then get hit with $10,000 easily. Bottom line is eat right, exercise, and either be poor enough to get taxpayer paid healthcare or be rich enough to not care about spending ~$20k per year per couple in their 50s on health insurance premiums plus have ~$30k or so ready for out of pocket costs in case of emergency. If something happens to you at the end of December, the out of pocket will reset Jan 1, so you need to have two years worth of out of pocket costs, and at around $13k or so, I ballpark it at $30k. If I'm in the middle 30% to 80% wealth band of the US, I would plan on killing myself if my prognosis was poor to avoid draining the family's wealth.
      - Insanity 7y ago
        that's just depressing to be honest. :/ EDIT: Follow-up question, the table ends at 64+, how do senior citizens pay for this without having a job?
        lotsofpulp 7y ago
        65+ enter the magical land of Medicare, where the taxpayers start taking care of you and paying for your medical care. But over the years, even that has been chipped down and is extremely confusing, with a combination of means testing and supplementary insurance programs that you need to buy to get "full coverage". But basically, 65+ means if you go to the hospital, and get a $300k bill, it won't ruin your finances as the government picks up the hospital bills. I'm pretty sure. But there's Part A/B/C/D/etc, which cover different things like prescription medicines, non hospital healthcare, etc that are not paid for or partially paid for, and you have to buy supplementary insurance for those. Also, health insurance in the US is not just insurance, it's also buying access to a set of healthcare providers that the insurance has negotiated pricing with, so that you don't get taken advantage of by the healthcare providers who can otherwise charge you whatever they want. As you can see, the US spends a decent portion of its time trying to figure out how to take advantage of the system (i.e. each other) and wring out as much as possible while putting in as little as possible.
        Insanity 7y ago
        Thanks for clarifying, it does sound like a bit of a mess to be honest. Hopefully things change for the better given in light of the current crisis.
  - mgkimsal 7y ago
    > Recently, the ability to purchase health insurance with pre-tax money has been expanded to self employed I've been doing it for 12 years. This isn't 'recent'.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Oops, I got that mixed up with the ability for small business to reimburse employees with tax free money for purchasing health insurance from healthcare.gov
      - mgkimsal 7y ago
        gotcha. that's recent, iirc, like... in the last year? weren't many companies already doing 'HSA funding' as a benefit before that? Was it just taxable (but... contribution to a HSA would be deductible for me even if the income is initially taxable, so would seem a wash?). I understand this is the actual insurance though.
        lotsofpulp 7y ago
        HSA’s and related tax benefits are a different topic than paying for the monthly health insurance premiums with pre-tax income. People whose employers offered health insurance got to pay their premiums with pre tax money and contribute to HSA with pre tax money. People whose employers don’t offer health insurance have to pay the premiums with post tax money. But they still get to contribute to HSA with pre tax money.
  - jorblumesea 7y ago
    > Anyone can purchase health insurance at healthcare.gov. But in practice, it's so prohibitively expensive that many people just...don't. Pre or post tax, it's insanely expensive. Europeans would be shocked.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > as their visa depends on their employment You know, it's probably not that a large problem because those are very few people, but this one is completely insane. I have no idea how nobody still found it completely opposite to fundamental freedoms. It just escapes being outright slavery because those people can run away to their home country.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    The visa issue cripples non-citizens' ability to negotiate better salaries. The salary issue affects everyone, citizen and stranger.
commandlinefan 7y ago
On the flip side, European countries had high unemployment even before the Coronavirus recession because employers were reluctant to take on new employees knowing that it's much more difficult to get rid of bad ones there than here.
- fxtentacle 7y ago
  In the US, there's the risk of lawsuits after you fire someone, which I guess creates the same resistance and hurdles to hiring as the added protection in the EU. Plus, my personal experience is that we easily found many OK candidates in the US but had trouble finding one in the EU. That either suggests that the EU has less skilled coders overall, or that the US has a higher rate of people who are unemployed or very unhappy with their current job.
- jaynetics 7y ago
  Well, Germany @ 3% unemployment vs US @ 3.5%? Seems it's somehow possible to employ people even with protections.
  - gullyfur 7y ago
    > Germany @ 3% Did you cherry-pick that one? Spain @ 14.2%, Italy @9.7%, France @8.5%. Spain was actually at 26.2% back in March 2013. https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z8o7pt6rd5uqa6_&met_y=unemployment_rate&idim=country:es:it:fr&fdim_y=seasonality:sa&hl=en&dl=en https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z8o7pt6rd5uqa6_...
    - yokaze 7y ago
      It doesn't invalidate the grandparents point. You can easily find dozens of countries with at will employment, and high unemployment. And I think, Spain has actually less stringent worker protection laws than Germany.
- Oletros 7y ago
  Difficult to get rid of an employee in Spain? No, not at all
boxy310 7y ago
> How can the US have that little protection of their workers..? The US has spent the last 65 years chipping away at unionization rates and other pro-employee protections. The overall rate of unionization in the US peaked in 1954 [1]. [1] http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/0311reuss2.html http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/0311reuss2.html
influx 7y ago
On the flip side, hiring is much easier since the employer doesn't have to go through so much red tape for hires that don't work out. There's tradeoffs to each method.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  If hiring is so easy, why does everyone complain about how hard it is to hire someone competent? Employers inflict on the candidate two rounds of phone screening, a take-home project, two rounds of on-site interviews, psychometric testing, augury from flight of birds, augury from feeding of chickens, a haruspicium, diversity statement and inquiry from the I-ching, and despite all these measures they still complain how hard it is to hire a decent programmer.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    I'm assuming selection bias. You're not going to hear non complaints. Also, the buyer's goal is to buy the best product for the lowest price, and many people are probably offering too low a price for the product they want.
  - edmundsauto 7y ago
    The act of hiring is still very difficult. However, the risk of a poor hire is less. That makes companies less risk averse.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    Imagine how you would treat a really great employee - someone you certainly wanted to retain. Would a person getting that treatment from you quit for a job where 10% of people got fired after the first month?
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  Which is why we see companies willing to take risk on people and not asking for ridiculous qualifications?
  - 7y ago
dwaltrip 7y ago
I agree that workers need protection. For most people, there is a large power imbalance that can allow companies to take advantage of their workers. However, things can go too far in the other direction. Imagine a small business having to spend months and months trying to fire someone who isn't doing their job and hasn't been receptive towards coaching or critiques. This could seriously harm the team they work on, not to mention the overall health of the company. I don't know what the best solution is. But there are some complexities here.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Most places allow a probationary period for new employees. In practice, if you have actually done the assessment process and formal critique in a documented way, it's not a problem to get rid of someone who actually isn't working. What you can't do is fire people on a whim or personal anger.
  - dwaltrip 7y ago
    Do you think that those describing difficulties in firing people as well as negative second order effects are significantly overstating these issues? I haven't researched this much myself, but the potential downsides seem fairly plausible to me. Thinking about it more, I suppose I've also had this implicit assumption that at-will employment has contributed to the disproportionate success of startups in America. It seems like it could be the case, but I don't have any hard evidence.
alistairSH 7y ago
But as an employee, you can also quit without notice. It's fair and balanced. </sarcasm> There is the federal WARN Act (1) but it has holes big enough to drive a train through (natural disaster and unforeseeable circumstance exclusions mean it doesn't apply right now). As the sibling noted, potentially the most devastating impact of the jobless claims is loss of medical insurance. We'll likely see tens of thousands of personal bankruptcy filings as a result of this pandemic, many of which will be due to ER/ICU bills. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
- sorokod 7y ago
  See your fair and balanced and raise with The rain it raineth on the just And also on the unjust fella; But chiefly on the just, because The unjust hath the just’s umbrella
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  I thought the bill covered ALL Coronavirus expenses. I can't find a source, so I'm not sure if it does or not. Do you know? I also know that people can use COBRA to keep their employer's insurance if they're laid off, but often this can be too expensive. But are they able to get a new insurance plan or do they just not have insurance if they don't keep their employer's insurance? I get it that people will have other medical issues during this time. But whether it covers Coronavirus related-expenses makes a HUGE difference. Coronavirus is BY FAR the leading cause of hospitalization in the US right now. It's also the leading cause of death. For a month, it's likely to get exponentially worse. It's likely to remain this bad for 2-3 months minimum. Meaning, the costs could be astronomical, and as you pointed out, would DESTROY people not covered by insurance. This could honestly be almost as bad as the Subprime housing crisis. Something like 800k people filed bankruptcy from Subprime. Conservatively, we're likely to see 500k semi-severe hospitalizations. If 30% of them are unemployed, I don't know how that doesn't lead to 150k bankruptcies. YMMV, but I would say that's on the conservative side.
whb07 7y ago
As a EU citizen how do you deal with larger unemployment, most especially seen in sub 30 yo unemployment rates of 10%+? Better mobility and ability to create and destroy has costs and benefits.
rconti 7y ago
How can the US have that little protection? By not passing laws protecting workers, it's quite simple, actually. The implied "why" would be a more fluid workforce. We've all heard the horror stories of companies/industries/nations paralyzed by an unmotivated/unproductive workforce. Hell, we have the same jokes here about jobs in some government agencies and big corporations. The thought is "quick to hire, quick to fire". I don't mind it; I just think the situation where you lose your job AND your health care is insane. I'd like a stronger social safety net. On the other hand, perhaps countries with a stronger social safety net make it harder for companies to fire, so they push the burden back on the companies to keep from stressing social services.
ValentineC 7y ago
> So as a non-US citizen, I didn't know about "at-will employment" "At-will employment" might be a US legal concept, but it's everywhere in Asia. A few first-world economies (like Singapore, where I'm at; perhaps Hong Kong too) have similar (or less) employment protection to keep their reputations as "business-friendly" countries.
petercooper 7y ago
You can do exactly the same in the UK if they've worked for you fewer than two years. You just have to pay their notice period (which is probably just two weeks of salary so hardly much protection).

Insanity 7y ago

Yeah it's quite crazy, and worse for people whom are there on a visa as their visa depends on their employment. And even worse again is that healthcare is tied up to your employer..

lotsofpulp 7y ago
Tax free health insurance is tied up with employer, not healthcare (or health insurance). Anyone can purchase health insurance at healthcare.gov. Recently, the ability to purchase health insurance with pre-tax money has been expanded to self employed, but people who work for an employer that does not offer health insurance are still discriminated against.
- Insanity 7y ago
  Okay fair enough, but from what I gather from my relatives over there is that this is quite expensive? At least compared to EU
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Yes, this pdf shows how much health insurance costs per month for a person in the state of New Jersey (a higher cost of living state, but not far off New York/California): https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcrates_2020.pdf https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra... The metal levels indicate what portion of your expected healthcare costs the insurance is expected to pay. Bronze is 60%, Silver is 70%, Gold is 80%. At the bottom you will see age rating, so you have to multiply that factor with the premium to get the premium at your age. For example, if you purchase bronze coverage (lets say $250) as a 50 year old in NJ, the factor is 1.78 times $250 = $445 per month divided by 0.6 due to it being bronze = $742 per month is your expected healthcare expenses. Obviously this is not per month, but becomes more accurate amortized over ones' lifetime, as you might go with zero healthcare expenses for years and then get hit with $10,000 easily. Bottom line is eat right, exercise, and either be poor enough to get taxpayer paid healthcare or be rich enough to not care about spending ~$20k per year per couple in their 50s on health insurance premiums plus have ~$30k or so ready for out of pocket costs in case of emergency. If something happens to you at the end of December, the out of pocket will reset Jan 1, so you need to have two years worth of out of pocket costs, and at around $13k or so, I ballpark it at $30k. If I'm in the middle 30% to 80% wealth band of the US, I would plan on killing myself if my prognosis was poor to avoid draining the family's wealth.
    - Insanity 7y ago
      that's just depressing to be honest. :/ EDIT: Follow-up question, the table ends at 64+, how do senior citizens pay for this without having a job?
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        65+ enter the magical land of Medicare, where the taxpayers start taking care of you and paying for your medical care. But over the years, even that has been chipped down and is extremely confusing, with a combination of means testing and supplementary insurance programs that you need to buy to get "full coverage". But basically, 65+ means if you go to the hospital, and get a $300k bill, it won't ruin your finances as the government picks up the hospital bills. I'm pretty sure. But there's Part A/B/C/D/etc, which cover different things like prescription medicines, non hospital healthcare, etc that are not paid for or partially paid for, and you have to buy supplementary insurance for those. Also, health insurance in the US is not just insurance, it's also buying access to a set of healthcare providers that the insurance has negotiated pricing with, so that you don't get taken advantage of by the healthcare providers who can otherwise charge you whatever they want. As you can see, the US spends a decent portion of its time trying to figure out how to take advantage of the system (i.e. each other) and wring out as much as possible while putting in as little as possible.
        Insanity 7y ago
        Thanks for clarifying, it does sound like a bit of a mess to be honest. Hopefully things change for the better given in light of the current crisis.
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  > Recently, the ability to purchase health insurance with pre-tax money has been expanded to self employed I've been doing it for 12 years. This isn't 'recent'.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Oops, I got that mixed up with the ability for small business to reimburse employees with tax free money for purchasing health insurance from healthcare.gov
    - mgkimsal 7y ago
      gotcha. that's recent, iirc, like... in the last year? weren't many companies already doing 'HSA funding' as a benefit before that? Was it just taxable (but... contribution to a HSA would be deductible for me even if the income is initially taxable, so would seem a wash?). I understand this is the actual insurance though.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        HSA’s and related tax benefits are a different topic than paying for the monthly health insurance premiums with pre-tax income. People whose employers offered health insurance got to pay their premiums with pre tax money and contribute to HSA with pre tax money. People whose employers don’t offer health insurance have to pay the premiums with post tax money. But they still get to contribute to HSA with pre tax money.
- jorblumesea 7y ago
  > Anyone can purchase health insurance at healthcare.gov. But in practice, it's so prohibitively expensive that many people just...don't. Pre or post tax, it's insanely expensive. Europeans would be shocked.
marcosdumay 7y ago
> as their visa depends on their employment You know, it's probably not that a large problem because those are very few people, but this one is completely insane. I have no idea how nobody still found it completely opposite to fundamental freedoms. It just escapes being outright slavery because those people can run away to their home country.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  The visa issue cripples non-citizens' ability to negotiate better salaries. The salary issue affects everyone, citizen and stranger.

commandlinefan 7y ago

On the flip side, European countries had high unemployment even before the Coronavirus recession because employers were reluctant to take on new employees knowing that it's much more difficult to get rid of bad ones there than here.

fxtentacle 7y ago
In the US, there's the risk of lawsuits after you fire someone, which I guess creates the same resistance and hurdles to hiring as the added protection in the EU. Plus, my personal experience is that we easily found many OK candidates in the US but had trouble finding one in the EU. That either suggests that the EU has less skilled coders overall, or that the US has a higher rate of people who are unemployed or very unhappy with their current job.
jaynetics 7y ago
Well, Germany @ 3% unemployment vs US @ 3.5%? Seems it's somehow possible to employ people even with protections.
- gullyfur 7y ago
  > Germany @ 3% Did you cherry-pick that one? Spain @ 14.2%, Italy @9.7%, France @8.5%. Spain was actually at 26.2% back in March 2013. https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z8o7pt6rd5uqa6_&met_y=unemployment_rate&idim=country:es:it:fr&fdim_y=seasonality:sa&hl=en&dl=en https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z8o7pt6rd5uqa6_...
  - yokaze 7y ago
    It doesn't invalidate the grandparents point. You can easily find dozens of countries with at will employment, and high unemployment. And I think, Spain has actually less stringent worker protection laws than Germany.
Oletros 7y ago
Difficult to get rid of an employee in Spain? No, not at all

boxy310 7y ago

> How can the US have that little protection of their workers..? The US has spent the last 65 years chipping away at unionization rates and other pro-employee protections. The overall rate of unionization in the US peaked in 1954 [1]. [1] http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/0311reuss2.html http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/0311reuss2.html

influx 7y ago

On the flip side, hiring is much easier since the employer doesn't have to go through so much red tape for hires that don't work out. There's tradeoffs to each method.

HarryHirsch 7y ago
If hiring is so easy, why does everyone complain about how hard it is to hire someone competent? Employers inflict on the candidate two rounds of phone screening, a take-home project, two rounds of on-site interviews, psychometric testing, augury from flight of birds, augury from feeding of chickens, a haruspicium, diversity statement and inquiry from the I-ching, and despite all these measures they still complain how hard it is to hire a decent programmer.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  I'm assuming selection bias. You're not going to hear non complaints. Also, the buyer's goal is to buy the best product for the lowest price, and many people are probably offering too low a price for the product they want.
- edmundsauto 7y ago
  The act of hiring is still very difficult. However, the risk of a poor hire is less. That makes companies less risk averse.
- michaelt 7y ago
  Imagine how you would treat a really great employee - someone you certainly wanted to retain. Would a person getting that treatment from you quit for a job where 10% of people got fired after the first month?
SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
Which is why we see companies willing to take risk on people and not asking for ridiculous qualifications?
- 7y ago

dwaltrip 7y ago

I agree that workers need protection. For most people, there is a large power imbalance that can allow companies to take advantage of their workers. However, things can go too far in the other direction. Imagine a small business having to spend months and months trying to fire someone who isn't doing their job and hasn't been receptive towards coaching or critiques. This could seriously harm the team they work on, not to mention the overall health of the company. I don't know what the best solution is. But there are some complexities here.

pjc50 7y ago
Most places allow a probationary period for new employees. In practice, if you have actually done the assessment process and formal critique in a documented way, it's not a problem to get rid of someone who actually isn't working. What you can't do is fire people on a whim or personal anger.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  Do you think that those describing difficulties in firing people as well as negative second order effects are significantly overstating these issues? I haven't researched this much myself, but the potential downsides seem fairly plausible to me. Thinking about it more, I suppose I've also had this implicit assumption that at-will employment has contributed to the disproportionate success of startups in America. It seems like it could be the case, but I don't have any hard evidence.

alistairSH 7y ago

But as an employee, you can also quit without notice. It's fair and balanced. </sarcasm> There is the federal WARN Act (1) but it has holes big enough to drive a train through (natural disaster and unforeseeable circumstance exclusions mean it doesn't apply right now). As the sibling noted, potentially the most devastating impact of the jobless claims is loss of medical insurance. We'll likely see tens of thousands of personal bankruptcy filings as a result of this pandemic, many of which will be due to ER/ICU bills. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

sorokod 7y ago
See your fair and balanced and raise with The rain it raineth on the just And also on the unjust fella; But chiefly on the just, because The unjust hath the just’s umbrella
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
I thought the bill covered ALL Coronavirus expenses. I can't find a source, so I'm not sure if it does or not. Do you know? I also know that people can use COBRA to keep their employer's insurance if they're laid off, but often this can be too expensive. But are they able to get a new insurance plan or do they just not have insurance if they don't keep their employer's insurance? I get it that people will have other medical issues during this time. But whether it covers Coronavirus related-expenses makes a HUGE difference. Coronavirus is BY FAR the leading cause of hospitalization in the US right now. It's also the leading cause of death. For a month, it's likely to get exponentially worse. It's likely to remain this bad for 2-3 months minimum. Meaning, the costs could be astronomical, and as you pointed out, would DESTROY people not covered by insurance. This could honestly be almost as bad as the Subprime housing crisis. Something like 800k people filed bankruptcy from Subprime. Conservatively, we're likely to see 500k semi-severe hospitalizations. If 30% of them are unemployed, I don't know how that doesn't lead to 150k bankruptcies. YMMV, but I would say that's on the conservative side.

whb07 7y ago

As a EU citizen how do you deal with larger unemployment, most especially seen in sub 30 yo unemployment rates of 10%+? Better mobility and ability to create and destroy has costs and benefits.

rconti 7y ago

How can the US have that little protection? By not passing laws protecting workers, it's quite simple, actually. The implied "why" would be a more fluid workforce. We've all heard the horror stories of companies/industries/nations paralyzed by an unmotivated/unproductive workforce. Hell, we have the same jokes here about jobs in some government agencies and big corporations. The thought is "quick to hire, quick to fire". I don't mind it; I just think the situation where you lose your job AND your health care is insane. I'd like a stronger social safety net. On the other hand, perhaps countries with a stronger social safety net make it harder for companies to fire, so they push the burden back on the companies to keep from stressing social services.

ValentineC 7y ago

> So as a non-US citizen, I didn't know about "at-will employment" "At-will employment" might be a US legal concept, but it's everywhere in Asia. A few first-world economies (like Singapore, where I'm at; perhaps Hong Kong too) have similar (or less) employment protection to keep their reputations as "business-friendly" countries.

petercooper 7y ago

You can do exactly the same in the UK if they've worked for you fewer than two years. You just have to pay their notice period (which is probably just two weeks of salary so hardly much protection).