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"What does that even mean?" It means you get 15 paid days a year to be sick. Beyond that, you have a certain number by law (I think 60) which you can take unpa
by 0xBDB 3y ago
"What does that even mean?"
It means you get 15 paid days a year to be sick. Beyond that, you have a certain number by law (I think 60) which you can take unpaid without risk of being fired. After that, sickness is theoretically grounds for termination, but very few large employers would do that because of the bad publicity. Also most IT workers here have long-term disability insurance for 'free' from their employers, meaning that they're still making 50 or 60 percent of their usual total comp for as long as they're sick after being fired.
"In Scandinavia, you set a mutual duration of notice for both parties when signing the initial contracts to start working. For IT jobs, the standard is 2-3 months."
I will gladly take a capped number of paid sick days to be able to leave in 2 weeks on good terms, and whenever I want otherwise. I will also take the lower unemployment rate that comes as a result of employers being unafraid to hire because they can easily fire. People seem to think labor flexibility is purely for the benefit of the employer. Not so. Short notice periods are a worker right, one Americans have and Europeans don't.
- Lacerda69 3y agoI guess there are tradeoffs both ways. I will gladly accept that downside(?) of having to give 3 months advanced notice for the upside of not being fired arbitrarily on the spot whenever my employer feels like it.
- dnissley 3y agoThat's not the primary tradeoff -- that would be the reduced likelihood of being hired in the first place.
- ResearchCode 3y agoIt is purely for the benefit of the employer. You can always negotiate a shorter or asymmetric notice period. There does not appear to be any relation between "flexibility" (at-will employment so companies can abuse you) and unemployment rates. Japan has 3% unemployment and stronger labor protections than Europe.
- 0xBDB 3y agoYou could do a study with a lot more data points than that to see if there's a correlation. Which someone has, and there is: "Overall the results of the paper suggest that policies that enhance labor market flexibility should reduce unemployment." https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp1264.pdf https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp1264.pdf
- ResearchCode 3y agoIt wasn't a study, but showing that you can have the strongest labor protections and negligible unemployment. Worth striving for. But there are actual studies, including a few citing yours, that show no such relation. Regardless, a 1.29 point increase in unemployment for not having at-will employment sounds like a bargain to me.