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As a non-American I'm always surprised at how quickly people are fired there. I cannot imagine such a severe action been taking in any country I've worked in, t
by rusteh1 5y ago
As a non-American I'm always surprised at how quickly people are fired there. I cannot imagine such a severe action been taking in any country I've worked in, thanks to robust workers rights.
- fsckboy 5y agothere might be a correlation to how quickly companies form, projects start, and innovation progresses in America (entrepreneurship) compared to Europe, and how the robust workers' rights might figure into making companies reluctant to hire a batch of workers that they can't easily terminate.
- hnlmorg 5y agoAny such correlation wouldn't be down to causation imo. I've always assumed the American attitude of "Do first, ask forgiveness later" was the more likely candidate for many of Silicon Valley's success stories. It's also worth noting that there's plenty of innovation happening in Europe too. edit: I'll add a little more detail as to why I don't agree with your theory: in Europe you can still make employees redundant relatively easily. So if a company hires 100 employees then realises it's not cost effective, it can easily make 80 of them redundant. The catch is you cannot rehire for the same roles (basically you cannot make someone redundant to get around firing them), but given the purpose of your thought experiment was to cull staff after initial growth, redundancy works perfectly fine here. Europe also has such as thing as short term contracts. Not contractors, though we obviously have that too, but FTEs that are hired for 6 months / 1 year rather than indefinitely. I'm sure America has this too. So there isn't really any need to hire people with the intention of firing them shortly after. In fact any company that does this would get a pretty bad reputation pretty quickly. That's true for America too. I've also seen people fired at short notice in the UK too so it's not like it can't happen in Europe even with greater worker rights. Heck, I was unfairly fired from one job -- but I hated the job anyway so it wasn't worth my time taking the company to court. Instead I used that energy to find a job I did like.
- fsckboy 5y agoI pointed out that there might be a correlation and described a sensical hypothetical link. you respond definitively claiming that you know the answer, not causation.
- hnlmorg 5y agoChill buddy, I wasn't claiming to know the answer. I was just saying I think your hypothesis is unlikely and gave a counter-theory. That's generally how discourse works and it's definitely not a personal attack. I will say calling your own hypothetical link as "sensical" is a little presumptuous though. The very fact I disagreed in the first place should be evidence that it's sensical to everyone. :)
- fsckboy 5y agoit's not my own hypothetical link, it's widely suggested in microeconomic circles
- hnlmorg 5y agoI heard all sorts of hypothetical links suggested in microeconomic circles. Some of them contradict other hypothetical links and it's hard to really prove these things given the huge number of variables involved. However this particular suggestion still seems rather unlikely to me.
- philovivero 5y agoNotice how the USA is the top country in the world for getting ahead. If you want to work hard and become rich, that's your spot. Places with "robust workers rights"? Not-so-much.
- hyakosm 5y agoSources?
- inter_netuser 5y agoSwitzerland and Luxembourg are way WAY richer per capita than the US, and have much robust employee rights.
- bananabreakfast 5y agoThis is entirely due to their banking sector and not at all to entrepreneurship or innovation.
- inter_netuser 5y ago3rd most globally competitive economy in the world. Sure, yeah. no innovation at all at Sandoz, Nestle, Novartis and Roche, and ~200 other companies in life sciences and another 300 in precision manufacturing. Zero.
- durnygbur 5y agoMany are simply legal predators using their enormous funds for legal lobbying. Selling repackaged water, sweetened water, sparkling sweetened water, coloured sweetened water.
- eertami 5y agoInteresting, because this sounds like wild speculation - yet you've stated it as if it is a cold hard fact. Do you have any sources or statistics to back this up? In 2018 the Swiss financial sector accounted for 9.1% of GDP. For comparison, in 2018 the US financial sector accounted for 7.4% of US GDP. To claim that it is _entirely_ banking is just plain wrong. To insinuate that there is no innovation elsewhere, (but there sure is in good ol' America), is just insulting. >Financial markets in the United States ... In 2018, finance and insurance represented 7.4 percent (or $1.5 trillion) of U.S. gross domestic product[0] >Switzerland’s financial sector ... as a share of gross domestic product (GDP). In 2018, it represented 9.1%[1] [0]: https://www.selectusa.gov/financial-services-industry-united-states https://www.selectusa.gov/financial-services-industry-united... [1]: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/gdp_switzerland-s-financial-sector-losing-importance/44865968 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/gdp_switzerland-s-financial-sec...
- themdonuts 5y agoHonestly I could see this happening in Europe, mainly when such high profiles are involved. Even with robust workers rights this still happens a lot. If the company wants you out they'll get their way. Employees can always dispute at the employment court, but it's overwhelming so few do so and companies leverage that.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoI never understood it either. It's usually the wrong, honest, helpful employees that get fired first. I'm not a loyal employee. I do most jobs just good enough to get by, and alway looking for a angle to extract more money out of an organization. (It was easier before being surveiled with cams). I always like a few coworkers, and we become friends, but despised the corporation, and everyone in charge. But I'm never fired. I'm usually shocked over the person they fire.
- richev 5y agoIt's facilitated by "at will" employment contracts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
- willhinsa 5y ago...and how not quickly higher-ups are fired† for malfeasance! † Or never fired, like Eric Schmidt!
- bagacrap 5y agoif after ~2 years of failing to respond to performance improvement plans is "quickly" then I don't want to know what's slow.
- refurb 5y agoMeh, I’ve worked in countries where it’s hard to fire and that brings its own problems.
- sys_64738 5y agoIt's the at-will employment where employer or employee can cancel the relationship without cause. In ENG you have crazy lengths of time to give notice like 2-3 months. Not a very pleasant experience for the employee. You also see attempts by European employers to AVOID taking on permanent workers. E.g. in ENG it used to be 2 years of contracting required a FTE contract but they'd cancel the contract three months shy. You also have terrible zero hours contracts in ENG.
- smartician 5y agoWhat's ENG?
- GuB-42 5y agoI think that many companies prefer to fire their employees immediately in exchange for money, typically what the employee would have been paid if he stayed for the notice time. It is expensive, but often better than dealing with a disgruntled employee for 2 months.
- aerosmile 5y agoAs a European, I was also surprised to find out that the US has a very low unemployment rate compared to what I am used to. Then I moved to the US, and on a few occasions found myself in a position to be able to consider hiring a lot of people very quickly (and hence taking on a substantial amount of risk, both for the company and those employees). I can definitely tell you that if the US had the same workers rights as Europe, I wouldn't have hired nearly as many people - not even close, less than half for sure. In one instance it was the wrong call to hire so quickly, and all other instances it was the right call and generated value for both sides. I know that in Europe you can let people go if the company is experiencing financial difficulties and all that, but there's no question that the commitment to any new European employee you hire is higher than in the case of their US counterpart. And it would be foolish to assume that by increasing the decisioning barrier there wouldn't be some kind of an action-reaction happening in the market. As an employer, you never have 100% certainty that a new initiative will pay off - there's always this doubt in the back of your mind. Well, if the cost of failure is higher in one case than another, you are simply going to initiate fewer bets and will also give fewer people an opportunity to benefit from them (and those bets that you do initiate, you will approach more carefully and with fewer people). Does this explain the entire gap in unemployment? Of course not. But I really do think it is a factor. So what's better - a bulletproof job that fewer people have, or a more risky proposition that more people can get access to? I don't think I have an answer to this, but I certainly don't think that the answer is always in increasing the decisioning barriers.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThis fits my perception as well having worked in Europe.
- johannes1234321 5y agoIt is part of the reasoning. Another part is that Europe generally has better unemployment benefits and health care not tied to employment. This drives people to take worse jobs in the U.S. In addition you have to ensure you look at comparable statistics on who is counted as unemployed. This is toften tied to receiving unemployment benefits or being able to work etc. so different statistics might count based on different criteria.
- sneak 5y agoIt's crazy to me as someone who believes in mutually consensual relationships in all things (including business and trade) that doing something last week is implicit requirement that one does the same thing next week, and that withdrawing consent to additional future trade is seen as a "severe action". "A job" is really a fictional abstraction. Every day one works is additional services-for-money. Either party should rightfully be able to say "no thanks, that's enough, tomorrow is a new day" at any time.
- teawrecks 5y agoThis is a fine mentality when you're running a lemonade stand, but gets complicated when you're talking about a person's livelihood in a country where something like 60% of people are living paycheck to paycheck. If ONLY we lives in a society that valued itself over the profits of a few individuals.
- sneak 5y agoIt's nothing to do with livelihood and everything to do with the liquidity of the labor market. If a person can get another job immediately, you aren't harming them by declining to continue to be a customer. In fact, you employing them is no power over them at all (unless you were overpaying them relative to their market value).
- octodog 5y ago> If a person can get another job immediately This does not happen in reality. There are transactional costs involved in job searching plus additional costs that come from onboarding.
- sneak 5y agoIt regularly happens in reality. I know people who have walked out of one job, crossed a street, and walked in to another less than a half hour later. With construction, bartenders, kitchen and waitstaff, bussers, and security it is ridiculously common. It becomes more common the lower skill the job becomes, as the fungibility of the worker increases.