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Well that's France, where like in Italy and Germany. it's much more difficult to fire any one person, a department, or N% without much advance notification and
by 1letterunixname 4y ago
Well that's France, where like in Italy and Germany. it's much more difficult to fire any one person, a department, or N% without much advance notification and government approval. For the worker, it's a very good thing.
Americans don't know how bad they have it and don't remember the mass layoffs of the 1980's and 1990's. A time when jobs became scarce because nearly every company was following suit and REAL unemployment, including those who stopped looking for jobs, rose considerably. The REAL labor participation rate in the US is more like 55% rather than 62% due to the rosy and flawed methodology used to count U-1 through U-6. There are millions fewer middle-aged workers now than there were historically. Ageism, discrimination, and other factors discourage workers from seeking to reenter the workforce. Low skill workers have it worst, cannot always move great distances, and cannot always retrain into magical hypothetical jobs that don't exist. Many underemployed people become Uber and Lyft drivers, where there is the perception of freedom but there is net underpayment and abuse (no help with capitalization, depreciation, and maintenance of a vehicle make their effective pay well below that of taxi drivers).
The global situation is the US Fed's fault for giving out free money for years and then suddenly being a Grinch because they don't like "excess consumption" when there have been shortages and supply chain disruptions. US trucking is still a mess.
- whiplash451 4y agoYou can absolutely fire people in France and many companies have done it by the thousands. They just did not happen to have billions in profits at the same time.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoNo doubt helped by the modern neoliberalism* wave of Macron. And raising the retirement age.. and more austerity too? * For anyone unfamiliar with the term: think corporate "Liberal" (conservative lite) inspired by the American Clinton dynasty including Obama and Biden who are pro-neocolonialism, anti-union, anti-worker, and "tough on crime". Macron's type is sometimes seen as a "palatable compromise" compared to the regressive fascist nationalists like Le Pen.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- weaksauce 4y ago> Americans don't know how bad they have it a lot of us are pretty aware... just powerless to change things en masse.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoThat outlook has a name: "learned helplessness". It's the belief of lacking power that is the problem. There is plenty of power that can be had when workers organize. Don't cross taxi unions in France or they'll burn shit down. Cross French farmers and they will clog the highways and streets of Paris. As a global perspective: American employees tend to lack testicular fortitude because they lack hope, knowledge, and self-worth.
- weaksauce 4y agoyeah you can't compare france and the entirety of the us. france is the size of one state in america. the power to change things en masse in america lies in the congress which is outsized controlled by smaller states that want the country to go back to the 1600s. you simply can't understand the power of corporations, common law, and the incredibly conservative supreme court the last 40 years. you know nothing of the scale of america.