8 ms·

Labor mobility is really low in Europe. In france you can be tied up in litigation (tribunel through appeals) for 10 years easily on an employment termination (

Labor mobility is really low in Europe. In france you can be tied up in litigation (tribunel through appeals) for 10 years easily on an employment termination (my info is from 2016 time frame so may be dated). There is no such thing as at-will employment. Also, noncompete's are weird. If someone is receiving full pay on gardening leave they can work for someone else. If you instead have them work till end of notice period you can usually pay some % of salary (ie, 50%) to totally block their ability to work for any competitor. So you can't fire the horrible workers (without insane headaches) and you CAN block good workers from moving too quickly to competitors (ie, take a year or two out of their working life for a price - which is usually tied to cash salary and is low). All to say - not the fluid labor environment that startups would generally be at home in.

mattmanser 6y ago
France != Europe. This sort of thing doesn't exist in the UK, for example. As for firing people, perhaps France, but not UK. Most jobs have a 3-6 month probation period, with a week's notice either way, and in the first 2 years you can fire anyone for no reason (apart from reasons of race, gender, pregnancy, etc.). After that, by which point it's obvious they can do the job, generally you have to give a progression of verbal, written, last chance warnings to an employee to change their behaviour before you can fire them.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  UK is trying hard not to be a part of Europe it seems :) Anyway I've seen similar laws in several countries in EU, but I talked to a lawyer friend and he said he looked into it (briefly) and couldn't find examples of it being enforced through court in my country (Croatia). As for termination - probation periods exist for sure but passed that it's really hard to get rid of people, the two year thing exists if you give someone extended temporary contract but that really sucks for people because it messes with their credit score etc. I remember working in a company where a woman got hired to work in office A she was then moved to office B because of a reorg (15km away from office A) she refused to accept this - got fired - sued - got pay for the time she was without work, times two in damages and got reinstated to previous position.
  - garbagetime 6y ago
    >UK is trying hard not to be a part of Europe it seems In what sense?
    - stephenhuey 6y ago
      Brexit, perhaps?
    - jlokier 6y ago
      Brexit. It's not just an amicable separation of bureaucracies. If you're in the UK (as I am), the kinds of headlines coming up regularly make it really clear the UK government is trying to not be part of Europe in all sorts of bizarre ways. For example the most recent big deal was the UK has formally decided to break international law by reneging on the UK-EU withdrawal treaty it signed up to less than a year ago. That's a very unusual thing for the UK to do, and it has people up in arms because it means the UK will now not be taken as seriously when it makes future international commitments (including trade deals), and when it is finger-pointing to other nation-states breaking their international commitments in future. It's keener than ever to trash human rights and civil rights enshrined into EU law and show that it wants to take them away from people in the UK, which is a curious turnaround because at one time the UK was a leading champion, drafting the legislation and putting them into place. It is all very tribal and symbolic, and doesn't appear to be rooted in any kind of advantages for the UK or people and businesses within the UK. Costs to businesses are going up (new tariffs on import and export). Trade deals are defaulting to worse terms (there's no good trade deal with the EU). Cooperation on major scientific projects is breaking down. Financial institutions are starting to move headquarters out of London. UK citizens living abroad are losing rights (a UK passport is much less useful than it used to be), and the cost of travel for UK citzens is going up (need more visas, need to pay for medical treatment, can't retire in the EU any more, if you already did you may have to move back and be poor). What it does appear to be rooted in is the UK Brexit leaders being able to see "we did it, as you can see we are visibly not part of Europe any more".
      - garbagetime 6y ago
- donw 6y ago
  I honestly think something like this makes a lot more sense. First year or so, you're in a probationary period. Unemployment benefits will kick in, but you and the company are still feeling each other out. After that, you get certain protections, whereby firing you becomes a more lengthy (3-6 month) process with specific regulatory milestones. Speaking from a management perspective, if I have had an employee that has been solidly meeting the bar for a year, I am better off to work with them to remedy performance problems afterwards, then I am to fire-and-replace. Training costs are a thing, and there's also a real benefit to not having your workforce continuously worried about being fired on-the-spot. It is fair for newcomers to "earn their stripes" as it were, to show that they can productively participate in and contribute to the organization, but people that have cleared that hurdle do deserve some protection from bad actors in their management chain. As always, I like to hear from others where they think this doesn't work. :)
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    > Speaking from a management perspective... Why would labor protections be needed if the rational move would be to work with the employee to improve their performance?
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > > Speaking from a management perspective... > Why would labor protections be needed if the rational move would be to work with the employee to improve their performance? Because management isn't necessarily rational?
    - donw 6y ago
      Because people are often irrational. Dilbert's pointy-haired boss resonates with a lot of office workers for a reason. We've all had, or at least heard about, that boss who was utterly incompetent, who masked that incompetence in self-important blustering, and who were physically unable to listen to the rank-and-file. Regulation is and should be there to deal with the abusers, and not with the companies that do, in fact, look out for the long-term welfare of both their employees and their customers.
- donor20 6y ago
  Sorry - I wasn't even thinking of UK. And UK is very different in this area for sure!
DetroitThrow 6y ago
>Labor mobility is really low in Europe Like the other comment mentioned, this is a very France-centric description - in the Netherlands, for example, you can't block workers from leaving their company in this way.
- donor20 6y ago
  In the netherlands you can have them sign a non-compete clause, generally for 1 to 2 years. "This clause prevents them from working for your competitor or from starting a similar enterprise after resigning. A non-solicitation clause forbids your employee to contact your clients after resigning." https://business.gov.nl/regulation/non-compete-clause/ https://business.gov.nl/regulation/non-compete-clause/ In the US, lots of folks have famously started up their own ideas if they are frustrated with a big corp. In California that can't be blocked. Is there something I don't know about NL law (very possible!).
  - tubularhells 6y ago
    Those non competes cannot be enforced under EU law of free movement of labour.
    - alkonaut 6y ago
      Exactly. If I read my contract carefully I'm sure it has clauses saying I can't compete for N months, and that everyting I create on weekends no matter how unrelated (A hobby piece of software, a novel, a pop song...) is immediately the IP of my employer no matter which equipment I use or if anyone asked me to create it. All of that is obviously non-enforcable nonsense.
      - teekert 6y ago
        Hmm I also have that in my Dutch contract. I really don't like the way my current employer handles their market and I'm eager to do it right myself (I feel that with the right technologies I could really build something nice myself.) This part of my contract has kept me from it (the "we own what you make at any time of the day"-clause). I do understand the clause though, it's just to easy to claim you made up some valuable IP outside of office hours. Maybe I should keep a log regarding the actual dev work... With respect to the non-compete clause, it says in my contract that they can keep me from going to a competitor for a year, but they'll pay me for that year. I wonder if they'd ever enforce this.
cscurmudgeon 6y ago
And then, you have Indian government jobs. Indian civil servant finally fired after epic 24-year absence https://money.cnn.com/2015/01/09/news/india-civil-servant-fired https://money.cnn.com/2015/01/09/news/india-civil-servant-fi...
- kamaal 6y ago
  Indian government jobs are just something else altogether, there is literally no accountability, or reward/punishment for good/bad performance. Promotions are almost always based on seniority, nepotism and political influence. The whole system runs on insane levels of corruption at nearly every level. And on top of these are there cream pensions. Its really like the stuff of the dreams/nightmares based on what you get.
  - hemantv 6y ago
    There is no pension except military anymore
    - kamaal 6y ago
      That's only recent. But they have a default NPS enrollment, which is more or less the same.
toomanybeersies 6y ago
Another way to describe "low labour mobility" is "high job stability". It's easy to sit in an ivory tower on a $200k+ silicon valley salary, with a healthy job market if you get the sack, and bemoan the fact that workers have rights and can't be fired because their employer feels like it.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  You can have high labor mobility and high job stability by reducing supply of labor and/or increasing the demand for it.
- donor20 6y ago
  Actually, FANG job stability is surprisingly high - the big corps have gobs of money and are big - so it takes a lot to actually push you fully out the door sometimes. Entry level wages are perhaps $190K (right out of college / entry level) at google and others. There is definitely a job for you at $60K
  - blub 6y ago
    Unless one is somehow inconvenient for the company e.g. involved in employee organization or tweeted some wrongthink. Then they get thrown out faster than they can say "is this legal?".
- blub 6y ago
  Can't believe someone's praising the US job market during the pandemic. Although it must be said that the FAANG & co employees are insulated from the effects of it and maybe unaware of the drama unfolding right now.
Galanwe 6y ago
IANAL, but French, working in the hedge fund industry since a while, and had numerous non-compete clauses over time. Also have had some experience negotiating then from employee and employer perspective. The French landscape is a bit more subtle that what you mention here. The first thing to understand is that everything in your contract is not always 100% legally applicable, and companies play with this idea. The local laws often dictate the overall rationale that a non compete can address, and companies play with that interpretation in the contracts (more on this with examples later) . In practice though, if there was an occasion to defend it in a tribunal, the company's interpretation would definitely be discarded. 90% of the non compete clauses that I had to negociate, either to get out of it myself, or as an employer to hire a talent, revolve around this idea: the clause is legal, but its not possible to enforce really, because the interpretation would be trashed in a tribunal. This is especially true in France where tribunals (prud'hommes) are free, and very favorable to employees. This is also true for other countries though, I had cases in Hong Kong where the landscape is quite similar. Now, it is true that France allows for unusually long non compete clauses compared to other countries. More than 12 month would likely be trashed by a tribunal though. As for the compensation of the clause, I feel like France is actually quite good. If there is a non-compete, then it is mandatory that there is a compensation, and in practice you can expect the tribunal to require at least 40% of the salary. Note that the employee definitely has a great negociation capability here, because the company has to choose whether to apply the non compete up to 2 weeks after the departure of the employee. That means, if you plan on doing something unrelated to your previous job, you can bluff a bit for the clause to be applied, and enjoy a nice bonus of 40% of your old salary on top of your new job. If you plan to work for a competitor, here are some examples of what to look for in your non compete clause: The French non compete has to be limited in space, time, and focus. Limited in space means than it cannot be worldwide, there has to be a list of regions where you are prevented to work, and this list cannot be too long. I had an example with a clause that listed 10 major financial places (US, UK, Germany, etc) and actually the end result was that more than 5 countries and the clause starts to be pretty much unenforceable. For the time constraint, the general assumption is that 12M is the upper possible limit (18M for non poaching). And for the focus, that basically mean that in case of litigation, the company would have to prove that: 1. You have market edge knowledge from the company that would result in an immediate and material advantage to the competitors (this one is very hard to prove for the company, and a lot of negociations revolve around debunking this argument) 2. You are going to work on the exact same subject in your new company, it cannot be just based on your field, it has to be very specific to your role in both companies.
tubularhells 6y ago
The Netherlands in nothing like this, fyi. France is not Europe. It's a flavour of Europe.
mschuster91 6y ago
> There is no such thing as at-will employment. And that is a good thing.

mattmanser 6y ago

France != Europe. This sort of thing doesn't exist in the UK, for example. As for firing people, perhaps France, but not UK. Most jobs have a 3-6 month probation period, with a week's notice either way, and in the first 2 years you can fire anyone for no reason (apart from reasons of race, gender, pregnancy, etc.). After that, by which point it's obvious they can do the job, generally you have to give a progression of verbal, written, last chance warnings to an employee to change their behaviour before you can fire them.

reader_mode 6y ago
UK is trying hard not to be a part of Europe it seems :) Anyway I've seen similar laws in several countries in EU, but I talked to a lawyer friend and he said he looked into it (briefly) and couldn't find examples of it being enforced through court in my country (Croatia). As for termination - probation periods exist for sure but passed that it's really hard to get rid of people, the two year thing exists if you give someone extended temporary contract but that really sucks for people because it messes with their credit score etc. I remember working in a company where a woman got hired to work in office A she was then moved to office B because of a reorg (15km away from office A) she refused to accept this - got fired - sued - got pay for the time she was without work, times two in damages and got reinstated to previous position.
- garbagetime 6y ago
  >UK is trying hard not to be a part of Europe it seems In what sense?
  - stephenhuey 6y ago
    Brexit, perhaps?
  - jlokier 6y ago
    Brexit. It's not just an amicable separation of bureaucracies. If you're in the UK (as I am), the kinds of headlines coming up regularly make it really clear the UK government is trying to not be part of Europe in all sorts of bizarre ways. For example the most recent big deal was the UK has formally decided to break international law by reneging on the UK-EU withdrawal treaty it signed up to less than a year ago. That's a very unusual thing for the UK to do, and it has people up in arms because it means the UK will now not be taken as seriously when it makes future international commitments (including trade deals), and when it is finger-pointing to other nation-states breaking their international commitments in future. It's keener than ever to trash human rights and civil rights enshrined into EU law and show that it wants to take them away from people in the UK, which is a curious turnaround because at one time the UK was a leading champion, drafting the legislation and putting them into place. It is all very tribal and symbolic, and doesn't appear to be rooted in any kind of advantages for the UK or people and businesses within the UK. Costs to businesses are going up (new tariffs on import and export). Trade deals are defaulting to worse terms (there's no good trade deal with the EU). Cooperation on major scientific projects is breaking down. Financial institutions are starting to move headquarters out of London. UK citizens living abroad are losing rights (a UK passport is much less useful than it used to be), and the cost of travel for UK citzens is going up (need more visas, need to pay for medical treatment, can't retire in the EU any more, if you already did you may have to move back and be poor). What it does appear to be rooted in is the UK Brexit leaders being able to see "we did it, as you can see we are visibly not part of Europe any more".
    - garbagetime 6y ago
donw 6y ago
I honestly think something like this makes a lot more sense. First year or so, you're in a probationary period. Unemployment benefits will kick in, but you and the company are still feeling each other out. After that, you get certain protections, whereby firing you becomes a more lengthy (3-6 month) process with specific regulatory milestones. Speaking from a management perspective, if I have had an employee that has been solidly meeting the bar for a year, I am better off to work with them to remedy performance problems afterwards, then I am to fire-and-replace. Training costs are a thing, and there's also a real benefit to not having your workforce continuously worried about being fired on-the-spot. It is fair for newcomers to "earn their stripes" as it were, to show that they can productively participate in and contribute to the organization, but people that have cleared that hurdle do deserve some protection from bad actors in their management chain. As always, I like to hear from others where they think this doesn't work. :)
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  > Speaking from a management perspective... Why would labor protections be needed if the rational move would be to work with the employee to improve their performance?
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > > Speaking from a management perspective... > Why would labor protections be needed if the rational move would be to work with the employee to improve their performance? Because management isn't necessarily rational?
  - donw 6y ago
    Because people are often irrational. Dilbert's pointy-haired boss resonates with a lot of office workers for a reason. We've all had, or at least heard about, that boss who was utterly incompetent, who masked that incompetence in self-important blustering, and who were physically unable to listen to the rank-and-file. Regulation is and should be there to deal with the abusers, and not with the companies that do, in fact, look out for the long-term welfare of both their employees and their customers.
donor20 6y ago
Sorry - I wasn't even thinking of UK. And UK is very different in this area for sure!

DetroitThrow 6y ago

>Labor mobility is really low in Europe Like the other comment mentioned, this is a very France-centric description - in the Netherlands, for example, you can't block workers from leaving their company in this way.

donor20 6y ago
In the netherlands you can have them sign a non-compete clause, generally for 1 to 2 years. "This clause prevents them from working for your competitor or from starting a similar enterprise after resigning. A non-solicitation clause forbids your employee to contact your clients after resigning." https://business.gov.nl/regulation/non-compete-clause/ https://business.gov.nl/regulation/non-compete-clause/ In the US, lots of folks have famously started up their own ideas if they are frustrated with a big corp. In California that can't be blocked. Is there something I don't know about NL law (very possible!).
- tubularhells 6y ago
  Those non competes cannot be enforced under EU law of free movement of labour.
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    Exactly. If I read my contract carefully I'm sure it has clauses saying I can't compete for N months, and that everyting I create on weekends no matter how unrelated (A hobby piece of software, a novel, a pop song...) is immediately the IP of my employer no matter which equipment I use or if anyone asked me to create it. All of that is obviously non-enforcable nonsense.
    - teekert 6y ago
      Hmm I also have that in my Dutch contract. I really don't like the way my current employer handles their market and I'm eager to do it right myself (I feel that with the right technologies I could really build something nice myself.) This part of my contract has kept me from it (the "we own what you make at any time of the day"-clause). I do understand the clause though, it's just to easy to claim you made up some valuable IP outside of office hours. Maybe I should keep a log regarding the actual dev work... With respect to the non-compete clause, it says in my contract that they can keep me from going to a competitor for a year, but they'll pay me for that year. I wonder if they'd ever enforce this.

cscurmudgeon 6y ago

And then, you have Indian government jobs. Indian civil servant finally fired after epic 24-year absence https://money.cnn.com/2015/01/09/news/india-civil-servant-fired https://money.cnn.com/2015/01/09/news/india-civil-servant-fi...

kamaal 6y ago
Indian government jobs are just something else altogether, there is literally no accountability, or reward/punishment for good/bad performance. Promotions are almost always based on seniority, nepotism and political influence. The whole system runs on insane levels of corruption at nearly every level. And on top of these are there cream pensions. Its really like the stuff of the dreams/nightmares based on what you get.
- hemantv 6y ago
  There is no pension except military anymore
  - kamaal 6y ago
    That's only recent. But they have a default NPS enrollment, which is more or less the same.

toomanybeersies 6y ago

Another way to describe "low labour mobility" is "high job stability". It's easy to sit in an ivory tower on a $200k+ silicon valley salary, with a healthy job market if you get the sack, and bemoan the fact that workers have rights and can't be fired because their employer feels like it.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
You can have high labor mobility and high job stability by reducing supply of labor and/or increasing the demand for it.
donor20 6y ago
Actually, FANG job stability is surprisingly high - the big corps have gobs of money and are big - so it takes a lot to actually push you fully out the door sometimes. Entry level wages are perhaps $190K (right out of college / entry level) at google and others. There is definitely a job for you at $60K
- blub 6y ago
  Unless one is somehow inconvenient for the company e.g. involved in employee organization or tweeted some wrongthink. Then they get thrown out faster than they can say "is this legal?".
blub 6y ago
Can't believe someone's praising the US job market during the pandemic. Although it must be said that the FAANG & co employees are insulated from the effects of it and maybe unaware of the drama unfolding right now.

Galanwe 6y ago

IANAL, but French, working in the hedge fund industry since a while, and had numerous non-compete clauses over time. Also have had some experience negotiating then from employee and employer perspective. The French landscape is a bit more subtle that what you mention here. The first thing to understand is that everything in your contract is not always 100% legally applicable, and companies play with this idea. The local laws often dictate the overall rationale that a non compete can address, and companies play with that interpretation in the contracts (more on this with examples later) . In practice though, if there was an occasion to defend it in a tribunal, the company's interpretation would definitely be discarded. 90% of the non compete clauses that I had to negociate, either to get out of it myself, or as an employer to hire a talent, revolve around this idea: the clause is legal, but its not possible to enforce really, because the interpretation would be trashed in a tribunal. This is especially true in France where tribunals (prud'hommes) are free, and very favorable to employees. This is also true for other countries though, I had cases in Hong Kong where the landscape is quite similar. Now, it is true that France allows for unusually long non compete clauses compared to other countries. More than 12 month would likely be trashed by a tribunal though. As for the compensation of the clause, I feel like France is actually quite good. If there is a non-compete, then it is mandatory that there is a compensation, and in practice you can expect the tribunal to require at least 40% of the salary. Note that the employee definitely has a great negociation capability here, because the company has to choose whether to apply the non compete up to 2 weeks after the departure of the employee. That means, if you plan on doing something unrelated to your previous job, you can bluff a bit for the clause to be applied, and enjoy a nice bonus of 40% of your old salary on top of your new job. If you plan to work for a competitor, here are some examples of what to look for in your non compete clause: The French non compete has to be limited in space, time, and focus. Limited in space means than it cannot be worldwide, there has to be a list of regions where you are prevented to work, and this list cannot be too long. I had an example with a clause that listed 10 major financial places (US, UK, Germany, etc) and actually the end result was that more than 5 countries and the clause starts to be pretty much unenforceable. For the time constraint, the general assumption is that 12M is the upper possible limit (18M for non poaching). And for the focus, that basically mean that in case of litigation, the company would have to prove that: 1. You have market edge knowledge from the company that would result in an immediate and material advantage to the competitors (this one is very hard to prove for the company, and a lot of negociations revolve around debunking this argument) 2. You are going to work on the exact same subject in your new company, it cannot be just based on your field, it has to be very specific to your role in both companies.

tubularhells 6y ago

The Netherlands in nothing like this, fyi. France is not Europe. It's a flavour of Europe.

mschuster91 6y ago

> There is no such thing as at-will employment. And that is a good thing.