IANAL In other countries, you can't "just let someone go". In Belgium there are CAO's [0], which loosely translates to: Collective Employment Agreements. Basic

IANAL In other countries, you can't "just let someone go". In Belgium there are CAO's [0], which loosely translates to: Collective Employment Agreements. Basically all employment agreements for a whole industry are more or less standardised. On one side there are the employers (of different companies) and the other side are the workers, which are represented by union leaders (perhaps also political representatives). These agreements includes a lot of rules on how employment can be terminated. One example could be that an employer is only allowed to fire an employee for underperformance after given the employee 3 written reports over a period of 3 months and working on a plan to improve their performance. Only after that fails to produce results are you allowed to fire the employee. And you need to keep the documentation as it could be reviewed in court if the employee decides to fight it. (That doesn't happen often). For this reason, often the employer will try to get the employee to quit. Or at least come to a mutual agreement to terminate the employment. In Belgium, it's very hard to fire employees, and I think this is the same for several other European countries. As a result, I haven't heard of many EU companies firing employees during these rough times. At least, not as often as US companies with "at-will employment". The flip-side is that large companies will often have a glut of employees that aren't productive, but can't be fired. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_agreement