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In any case anyone wants to read about a EU perspective: Over here in Germany the "trick" of doing an asset deal to get rid of employees (and any benefits they

In any case anyone wants to read about a EU perspective: Over here in Germany the "trick" of doing an asset deal to get rid of employees (and any benefits they may have earned over time) is very risky, and can fire back massively. It's not a black-and-white thing, but the labor courts have check-lists: - Are people at the new company work on the same tasks as they did in the old one? - Are people at the new company still using the old office space, and are seated where they were before? - Are salaries or work contracts near-identical? - ... and then some. If you get a couple of "yes" here, you now are in a world of pain: In this case the whole transaction is regarded as a (not sure if that is a good translation of the German word "verdeckter Betriebsübergang") "hidden transfer of business", and you would suddenly automatically get ALL employees and benefits back, with no easy option to fire anyone afterwards. If someone had been at the previous company for 10 years, it legally would now be also have been employed for 10 years with the new company. This is why the asset deal trick to get rid of employees is only done by very uneducated managers over here :)

tomcam 3y ago
Super informative. I must reveal my bias toward a free market here, but I also remember keenly what it was like to be a powerless employee. Germany appears to have by far the strongest economy in the EU but with higher unemployment than the USA. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the balance there vs the USA? I can imagine compelling arguments for each approach.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Are unemployment benefits better in germany? If they are you’d expect it to be higher than the US, as in the US workers might run out of the social support network sooner and be forced to take any job just to eat and shelter.
  - erinnh 3y ago
    They are. What I was taught in macroeconomics in this topic (excuse me if I get something wrong, it’s been a few years) In general it’s very expected unemployment to „generally“ be higher in Germany. Because it’s harder to fire people here, people also get hired somewhat slower. However in the flip side it’s also expected that during harsh economic times people will be fired less because of how „hard“ it is to hire people. So it’s a trade-off.
    - BonoboIO 3y ago
      Also there programs like „Kurzarbeit“ rough translation would be „Shortened Work“. Where you get 60%-85% of your salary (after tax) without work or with way less ours, if the employer has no work/less work (like covid period). It’s payed mostly by the state. Up to 12 month. Regulations are strict. Prevents layoffs and helps starting the upturn of production like automobile industry, where it takes months or half a year to start ramping up production.
      - carstenhag 3y ago
        Kurzarbeit is funded by unemployment insurance, which you pay when you have a job. It is correct though that during covid, the funds ran a bit empty and the government had to fill it up again with unrelated tax money (afaik)
        BonoboIO 3y ago
        My mistake. You are correct.
  - Fischgericht 3y ago
    I guess unemployment benefits are better in pretty much every other western country compared to the US, so: Yes. If you become unemployed, depending on your age, and how long you have worked etc, you get between 12 and 24 months about 60% of your previous salary before dropping into social security. There are various programs to get people back into jobs depending on what caused their unemployment - help on re-settling in case the loss of job being caused by your profession no longer being asked for in the region you live in, training to move to a different profession, help if your job loss is related to health issues (for example burn-out). The system is optimized into trying to find out the cause of job losses, and work to counter that. The 5% unemployed are mostly cases which are impossible to solve due to someone being too old to be re-trained and/or not willing or being able to move to where the jobs are. Right now the job market in Germany is mostly defined by a shortage of labor in various areas, which is why there is a strong desire to make sure that immigrants are allowed to enter the work-force quicker. For example trains no longer run in any way reliably in Germany due to a massive shortage on workers in that industry.
- uuddlrlrbaba 3y ago
  I'm not sure if this is factored into your unemployment numbers, but in the USA its very common for all adults to need to work in order to make ends meet. Whereas in a stronger economy with employment laws protecting employees it'd be much more possible for a family to live comfortably off a single income, making for a lot more "unemployed" adults.
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    >> live comfortably off a single income, making for a lot more "unemployed" adults. Unemployment stats explicitly only count those looking for work, so this actually misrepresents the other way; it doesn't include those people who have given up but given a choice would be working.
    - philipov 3y ago
      I don't think it's that clear cut. Another interpretation is that someone could afford to be "looking for work" for longer while supported by their partner's income. People would be able to afford to shop around for a better job, which would leave more people in the "looking for work" pool for when a good opportunity comes around. They would be less desperate to accept the first offer they get. We shouldn't rush to judgement of what this policy represents or misrepresents based on just-so stories informed by a different society.
      - buffington 3y ago
        I think the point the GP was trying to make was that when you see official unemployment numbers from the US government, those numbers are derived from the number of people actively seeking unemployment benefits (which includes job training, job placement, and payments). Those numbers don't include anyone who doesn't officially apply for benefits, which would naturally exclude all sorts of people who are not employed.
    - stonemetal12 3y ago
      I know that is how it is defined in the US. Does the same apply for Germany?
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  You should read about Germany’s ridiculously high unemployment numbers of the early 2000s and how Schroeder got rid of it by basically getting rid of bunch of labor protections. All to say there are two sides to this coin
  - Fischgericht 3y ago
    However, the party he was affiliated with, the social-democratic party, these days believes that this was the biggest mistake they have ever made. This is because it turned out that punishing people for not having a job might motivate some to take on jobs that are below their qualification, but that it does not solve the actual underlying issue - having people qualified for the jobs there are, in the regions those jobs are in. Due to this, even under the rule of the conservative christian-democratic party, things then moved into the opposite direction again, with the organization that is supposed to bring people into jobs getting reformed massively. We now have lots of excellent programs that are focused on re-training people and help fix the causes of them having lost their jobs.
    - dilyevsky 3y ago
      Now back to Agenda 2030
- bigbacaloa 3y ago
  [dead]
- lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  What is this "free market" you describe? Am I free to occupy any building I like, or does your "free" market include a concept of a "property" and entire government bureaucracies and men with guns to enforce such concepts? Does your "free market" make a distinction between "I expect this property to still be mine tomorrow" and "I expect this job to still be mine tomorrow"? Does you "free market" allow for individuals to "organize" as a "corporation" and does the "corporation" provide legal immunities for civil liabilities and personal debts (that "personal property" concept). If so does your "free market" allow for other individuals to "organize" as a "union" - and does that "union" provide various legal guarantees and immunities etc. "Free market" people love the corporation but hate the union. One is a legal fiction for rich people and one is a legal fiction for poor people.
  - thinkerswell 3y ago
    Go watch a few Milton Friedman videos and you’ll have answers to those questions, though you may not like the answers.
    - civilitty 3y ago
      A lobotomy works just as well.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    >Free market" people love the corporation but hate the union. One is a legal fiction for rich people and one is a legal fiction for poor people. Neither should have special legal privileges beyond those guaranteed to individuals. This would go a long way to resolving the issues with both.
  - epivosism 3y ago
    By definition unions have local monopolies and can't be attacked. In a well-run truly free economy, corporations don't have that. my view of the power distributions and their results * company town, one company enslaving all workers <=== bad * town with many companies, competing for workers. incentivizes all to good behavior <=== good * town with many companies, each with a union that locks down behavior and can't be attacked <=== somewhat bad, blocks change, can be taken over by corrupt unions, but can also give benefits. as in your comment, though, people become extremely dogmatic about this and it becomes rational to be "union forever right or wrong" rather than actually thinking about the best way to organize things. i.e. police unions being insanely defensive and stubborn, and not enforcing any quality controls on cops. * one/zero companies, one national union - i.e. CCP. When put into place, doesn't work, and when not well-controlled devolves to basically worker enslavement. Most of the history of modern China, and lots of historical USSR were like this. At other times they simulated stage 2 where there was competition on both worker and employer sides, and they had good results (80s-90s) To your point about house ownership being protected by law, but job ownership not being, I think it's a matter of contracts. Selling someone and helping them own it forever is fairly trivial since it's independent (the house can decay and nobody has to pay for it, water may run out etc). But providing a job forever is another story since it clearly requires continued input of a certain quality from the worker, as well as an assumption about stability of the company, part of the economy. So it's quite easy to enforce property ownership since there are basically no guarantees (air quality, noise, availability of food, etc etc may all die out but the person still owns the land). But for a job there's no way that anyone can ensure that it will always be profitable or useful to pay a person (who ages) to do a thing.
- diob 3y ago
  I'd rather have less jobs, with better benefits / pay.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    By this do you mean that you would rather be unemployed than employed with less benefits, or that you would rather other people be unemployed while you get good benefits?
    - bmicraft 3y ago
      I think a more generous way to put it would be, they'd rather unemployed people get good benefits than have to work a back-breaking job with a wage that isn't better than said benefits.
- Fischgericht 3y ago
  Unemployment rate in Germany is about 5%, so comparable. As with many labor protection laws, it is a mixed bag. Basically the regulation I have mentioned tries to separate the cases of "true asset deal" vs. "fake asset deal". That works most of the times, but sometimes an asset deal that was supposed to serve a genuinely good cause (one business trying to sell off a technology to another) to later got flagged as a transfer of business by courts, causing companies to go bankrupt, with ALL jobs being lost. Being an employer myself, I once got bitten with wrongly getting flagged when trying to rescue the technology my shareholders had financially run into the ground, but a higher court later corrected that and decided that the motivation of the asset deal had been proper.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tomcam 3y ago

Super informative. I must reveal my bias toward a free market here, but I also remember keenly what it was like to be a powerless employee. Germany appears to have by far the strongest economy in the EU but with higher unemployment than the USA. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the balance there vs the USA? I can imagine compelling arguments for each approach.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
Are unemployment benefits better in germany? If they are you’d expect it to be higher than the US, as in the US workers might run out of the social support network sooner and be forced to take any job just to eat and shelter.
- erinnh 3y ago
  They are. What I was taught in macroeconomics in this topic (excuse me if I get something wrong, it’s been a few years) In general it’s very expected unemployment to „generally“ be higher in Germany. Because it’s harder to fire people here, people also get hired somewhat slower. However in the flip side it’s also expected that during harsh economic times people will be fired less because of how „hard“ it is to hire people. So it’s a trade-off.
  - BonoboIO 3y ago
    Also there programs like „Kurzarbeit“ rough translation would be „Shortened Work“. Where you get 60%-85% of your salary (after tax) without work or with way less ours, if the employer has no work/less work (like covid period). It’s payed mostly by the state. Up to 12 month. Regulations are strict. Prevents layoffs and helps starting the upturn of production like automobile industry, where it takes months or half a year to start ramping up production.
    - carstenhag 3y ago
      Kurzarbeit is funded by unemployment insurance, which you pay when you have a job. It is correct though that during covid, the funds ran a bit empty and the government had to fill it up again with unrelated tax money (afaik)
      - BonoboIO 3y ago
        My mistake. You are correct.
- Fischgericht 3y ago
  I guess unemployment benefits are better in pretty much every other western country compared to the US, so: Yes. If you become unemployed, depending on your age, and how long you have worked etc, you get between 12 and 24 months about 60% of your previous salary before dropping into social security. There are various programs to get people back into jobs depending on what caused their unemployment - help on re-settling in case the loss of job being caused by your profession no longer being asked for in the region you live in, training to move to a different profession, help if your job loss is related to health issues (for example burn-out). The system is optimized into trying to find out the cause of job losses, and work to counter that. The 5% unemployed are mostly cases which are impossible to solve due to someone being too old to be re-trained and/or not willing or being able to move to where the jobs are. Right now the job market in Germany is mostly defined by a shortage of labor in various areas, which is why there is a strong desire to make sure that immigrants are allowed to enter the work-force quicker. For example trains no longer run in any way reliably in Germany due to a massive shortage on workers in that industry.
uuddlrlrbaba 3y ago
I'm not sure if this is factored into your unemployment numbers, but in the USA its very common for all adults to need to work in order to make ends meet. Whereas in a stronger economy with employment laws protecting employees it'd be much more possible for a family to live comfortably off a single income, making for a lot more "unemployed" adults.
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  >> live comfortably off a single income, making for a lot more "unemployed" adults. Unemployment stats explicitly only count those looking for work, so this actually misrepresents the other way; it doesn't include those people who have given up but given a choice would be working.
  - philipov 3y ago
    I don't think it's that clear cut. Another interpretation is that someone could afford to be "looking for work" for longer while supported by their partner's income. People would be able to afford to shop around for a better job, which would leave more people in the "looking for work" pool for when a good opportunity comes around. They would be less desperate to accept the first offer they get. We shouldn't rush to judgement of what this policy represents or misrepresents based on just-so stories informed by a different society.
    - buffington 3y ago
      I think the point the GP was trying to make was that when you see official unemployment numbers from the US government, those numbers are derived from the number of people actively seeking unemployment benefits (which includes job training, job placement, and payments). Those numbers don't include anyone who doesn't officially apply for benefits, which would naturally exclude all sorts of people who are not employed.
  - stonemetal12 3y ago
    I know that is how it is defined in the US. Does the same apply for Germany?
dilyevsky 3y ago
You should read about Germany’s ridiculously high unemployment numbers of the early 2000s and how Schroeder got rid of it by basically getting rid of bunch of labor protections. All to say there are two sides to this coin
- Fischgericht 3y ago
  However, the party he was affiliated with, the social-democratic party, these days believes that this was the biggest mistake they have ever made. This is because it turned out that punishing people for not having a job might motivate some to take on jobs that are below their qualification, but that it does not solve the actual underlying issue - having people qualified for the jobs there are, in the regions those jobs are in. Due to this, even under the rule of the conservative christian-democratic party, things then moved into the opposite direction again, with the organization that is supposed to bring people into jobs getting reformed massively. We now have lots of excellent programs that are focused on re-training people and help fix the causes of them having lost their jobs.
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    Now back to Agenda 2030
bigbacaloa 3y ago
[dead]
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
What is this "free market" you describe? Am I free to occupy any building I like, or does your "free" market include a concept of a "property" and entire government bureaucracies and men with guns to enforce such concepts? Does your "free market" make a distinction between "I expect this property to still be mine tomorrow" and "I expect this job to still be mine tomorrow"? Does you "free market" allow for individuals to "organize" as a "corporation" and does the "corporation" provide legal immunities for civil liabilities and personal debts (that "personal property" concept). If so does your "free market" allow for other individuals to "organize" as a "union" - and does that "union" provide various legal guarantees and immunities etc. "Free market" people love the corporation but hate the union. One is a legal fiction for rich people and one is a legal fiction for poor people.
- thinkerswell 3y ago
  Go watch a few Milton Friedman videos and you’ll have answers to those questions, though you may not like the answers.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    A lobotomy works just as well.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  >Free market" people love the corporation but hate the union. One is a legal fiction for rich people and one is a legal fiction for poor people. Neither should have special legal privileges beyond those guaranteed to individuals. This would go a long way to resolving the issues with both.
- epivosism 3y ago
  By definition unions have local monopolies and can't be attacked. In a well-run truly free economy, corporations don't have that. my view of the power distributions and their results * company town, one company enslaving all workers <=== bad * town with many companies, competing for workers. incentivizes all to good behavior <=== good * town with many companies, each with a union that locks down behavior and can't be attacked <=== somewhat bad, blocks change, can be taken over by corrupt unions, but can also give benefits. as in your comment, though, people become extremely dogmatic about this and it becomes rational to be "union forever right or wrong" rather than actually thinking about the best way to organize things. i.e. police unions being insanely defensive and stubborn, and not enforcing any quality controls on cops. * one/zero companies, one national union - i.e. CCP. When put into place, doesn't work, and when not well-controlled devolves to basically worker enslavement. Most of the history of modern China, and lots of historical USSR were like this. At other times they simulated stage 2 where there was competition on both worker and employer sides, and they had good results (80s-90s) To your point about house ownership being protected by law, but job ownership not being, I think it's a matter of contracts. Selling someone and helping them own it forever is fairly trivial since it's independent (the house can decay and nobody has to pay for it, water may run out etc). But providing a job forever is another story since it clearly requires continued input of a certain quality from the worker, as well as an assumption about stability of the company, part of the economy. So it's quite easy to enforce property ownership since there are basically no guarantees (air quality, noise, availability of food, etc etc may all die out but the person still owns the land). But for a job there's no way that anyone can ensure that it will always be profitable or useful to pay a person (who ages) to do a thing.
diob 3y ago
I'd rather have less jobs, with better benefits / pay.
- lolinder 3y ago
  By this do you mean that you would rather be unemployed than employed with less benefits, or that you would rather other people be unemployed while you get good benefits?
  - bmicraft 3y ago
    I think a more generous way to put it would be, they'd rather unemployed people get good benefits than have to work a back-breaking job with a wage that isn't better than said benefits.
Fischgericht 3y ago
Unemployment rate in Germany is about 5%, so comparable. As with many labor protection laws, it is a mixed bag. Basically the regulation I have mentioned tries to separate the cases of "true asset deal" vs. "fake asset deal". That works most of the times, but sometimes an asset deal that was supposed to serve a genuinely good cause (one business trying to sell off a technology to another) to later got flagged as a transfer of business by courts, causing companies to go bankrupt, with ALL jobs being lost. Being an employer myself, I once got bitten with wrongly getting flagged when trying to rescue the technology my shareholders had financially run into the ground, but a higher court later corrected that and decided that the motivation of the asset deal had been proper.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]