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Do you suggest they keep employees around with nothing to do because of significantly reduced shipping demand? I agree with your point about getting laid off b

Do you suggest they keep employees around with nothing to do because of significantly reduced shipping demand? I agree with your point about getting laid off being awful, but I think this should be solved by the government having a robust social safety net (funded by taxes) so that getting laid off doesn’t cause stress. Fortunately, Denmark already scores high in this area.

mnky9800n 3y ago
Maybe companies can have like a savings account for when they don't make a lot of money, that way if they think they might not make as much then they can cover the difficult times.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Isn't it much better that the employees instead go work somewhere were they're needed? What in the world would be the reason to keep them around doing nothing? Give them better pay when they actually work and then send them on their way.
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    I feel like, > surprise! You are probably needed elsewhere! Is not the way to handle this kind of thing.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      The difficulty is that putting the onus of reallocation on a centralized authority leads to less efficient allocation (e.g. all the problems with command economies). Decentralized people that each make individual choices more quickly and ideally allocate unused labor where it's most needed. ... but to the broader point from sibling threads, the humane solution here is {permit companies to be agile with layoffs} + {fund strong government-provided safety nets for unemployed workers}.
  - interactivecode 3y ago
    Well because clearly the board isn’t great at anticipating market fluctuations, so better keep people around for when demand picks up again. Also its about 10% of employees right, that means if you give the whole company 1 day off every two weeks. Everyone who would have a full workload again. Googles 20% was about double that
- infecto 3y ago
  It would be impossible to craft a rule like this that can be applied effectively. Plus the overhead of each company having to manage it. Much more reasonable to bundle it with corporate taxes and the country to manage the safety net. Ideally this would help the free flow of labor effectively.
- gruez 3y ago
  Okay, but you can't expect companies to keep a buffer out of their own good will. You need the government to do it. Keeping such a buffer at a per company level probably is a bad idea too, because downturns tend to be sectoral. A bigger risk pool (eg. across industries) would be far more robust. Surprise! You just invented unemployment insurance!
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    But why do we need government do to that, if it is insurance why cant it be provided by a insurance company. better, Cheaper, and with out the political corruption that comes with all government programs. Hell we just saw during COVID unemployment "insurance" being used as a political tool to essentially buy votes, by all political parties and organizations. Also used a tool to make authoritarian control of the population palatable Further How many dystopian novels have the trope of the masses being paid not to work... The axiom of a "social safety net" is apt but not the the way people using it believe it to be, the social safety net in practice tends to be like a fishing net, once you get entangled in it, you rarely escape it...
  - interactivecode 3y ago
    Yes you can expect companies to a buffer. It starts by questioning layoffs like this. Because they should have depleted the buffer first before layoffs. If after that layoffs still happen the gov should have a second layer of supports in place. Because indeed like you said if a whole sector has a downturn its difficult for someone to find a new job.
    - Manuel_D 3y ago
      What is the economic rationale behind a company keeping a large portion of its workforce idle? That's a waste of labor. Sure, it's probably a good idea to keep people paid for a while after layoffs to ease their transition to an in-demand job. But that's what unemployment benefits do.
      - interactivecode 3y ago
franczesko 3y ago
"Do you suggest they keep employees around with nothing to do because of significantly reduced shipping demand?" Management should be fired for miscalculated headcount instead.
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  They hired in response to heightened demand. Demand falls, and they should be fired for miscalculated headcount? Sorry, but that hardly makes sense…you might as well say management must be able to see the future.
  - avidphantasm 3y ago
    Maybe they could cut everyone’s hours and keep more people employed? This would make surging to meet future demand spikes much more easy. Novel idea I know.
    - gruez 3y ago
      That's just going to cause all the high performers to jump ship (heh), because they can find a new job that doesn't have cut hours.
      - reg_dunlop 3y ago
        I thought there was decreased demand. Or is that decreased demand for this company only?
        gruez 3y ago
        Companies are run with varying levels of competence, so it's not strange to see the weakest companies lay off first. Adding to the above, better capitalized companies can use this opportunity to poach high performers from weaker companies.
        interactivecode 3y ago
tyingq 3y ago
>Do you suggest they keep employees around with nothing to do because of significantly reduced shipping demand? It's not unheard of in the past to resort to salary cuts, reduced hours, etc, while they bridge some solution or wait out what might be temporary. There's also the notion of better planning. If you suspect, for example, a demand spike is temporary...there are ways to deal with that other than overhiring employees.
- chrisdbanks 3y ago
  Your electricity demands probably change drastically between summer and winter. Do you not use electricity during the winter because you know you won't need as much during the summer? People are a resource just like electric. There needs to be flexibility for elasticity. This is why redundancy exists as a concept. Of course people should be compensated for elastic demand and you can of course always seek to increase your notice period to increase your security.
  - tyingq 3y ago
    Right, and for example, contractors are often a better match for fluctuating demand rather than employees. Or diversification of market offerings to reduce seasonality. Or skill diversification for employees so they can be repositioned during low demand in one area, etc. Or at least being up-front about the temporary nature of the employment and structuring the program to suit that. "Seasonal hires" have a different expectation.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      > contractors are often a better match for fluctuating demand rather than employees Not when it's universal and systemic. > Or diversification of market offerings to reduce seasonality And this is good, but really too much to ask if you are going to require it. > skill diversification for employees so they can be repositioned during low demand in one area This also doesn't work when the changes are global and systemic. But then, most of the layoffs we have seen in the past were rushed things that didn't even bother to evaluate this option. This one cuts me as done in around the shortest timing to make this possible, so we'd need to check if they tried it or not. We also don't know if they were up-front about the temporary nature of those employees. They are certainly not formally temporary because the timing doesn't work here (what is good for the employees anyway), but we don't know if they were warned.
infecto 3y ago
Was unclear in the article but I would be curious if this impacts any workers in Denmark or if this was mostly a cut of the cheap developing nation labor that runs the ship.
Thaxll 3y ago
Those 10k employees woudn't have nothing to do. Do you think every single employee are used at 95% all the time, that the head count reflect 100% of the needed workforce?
- hef19898 3y ago
  Assuming the 10k includes crew, when their vessel isn't used those crew members would have absolutely nothing to do at all in fact.
infecto 3y ago
Just to add to the top of the thread. The solution here is safety nets paid by taxes. "Firing management" is not realistic, humans are generally short sighted and its hard to identify when things are a bubble or not. You cannot put it on the laid off employees to understand the economy well enough and for low paying jobs to have the savings to support boom/bust periods always. Similar to health care, it is useful to have safety nets to allow for the free flow of labor. Now where it gets sticky is you cannot apply it outside of your country so in cases like shipping, the vast majority of their employees who run the ship are from low wage developing countries.
- interactivecode 3y ago
  Yes you can apply it to outside your country. However even though they make big profits they don’t want to. They could just apply the same pay, safeguards and social support to employees of low wage countries that their Danish colleagues receive. Remember that your countries rules about pay, leave and social security are minimums, and your employer is choosing not to give you more than the minimum.
clnq 3y ago
Assuming there is some ebb and flow in demand, they should keep employees around with nothing to do, yes. Moreover, there is natural attrition. They can stop hiring, promote internally, and so on, until they’ve reached their desired head count. The point is that both of these are doable when the company is wildly profitable. And they should be done for the negative secondary effects of layoffs (ruining lives, morale loss, people following their laid off friends out of the company, etc). It seems like these days companies don’t even freeze hiring and grow competencies in house in times like these that much. They just assume (often wrongly) that they’ll quickly hire everyone they need once the demand picks up. But it takes years of training before an employee is fully integrated and has all the institutional knowledge to perform at their peak, and it takes many months to fill difficult positions. Some people who have been around tech for a good number of decades have seen this fashionable layoff footgun used more than once.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  > Assuming there is some ebb and flow in demand, they should keep employees around with nothing to do, yes. Disagree. Especially if they knew they were hired for a surge that would end.
  - McDyver 3y ago
    Then they should have hired contractors for the specific timeframe, no? Otherwise it's just corporate greed: we know we'll have a surge in demand, so we buy new vessels and containers and manpower to last us 2 years; we make huge profits, discard this surplus and blame it on the "new normal" (FTA)
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >Otherwise it's just corporate greed By that logic, every business around us operates on corporate greed since their sole purpose is to increase their profits and bring down costs, not to be a UBI jobs program. Sure, certain large and profitable companies with sizable market caps could easily stomach having even more idle workers coasting all day for great paychecks, with a corresponding reduction in profits and still stay afloat, but why would they?
n4r9 3y ago
If they're making record profits and have already employed decent workers, isn't the optimal strategy surely "find something profitable for them to work on"?
- jcbrand 3y ago
  It's possible to make record profits one year and a loss the next if you don't react early enough to trends.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Pretty much this. Nokia had it's record year of profits the year after the iPhone launched even though the writing was already on the wall. It's easy to go from winner to looser in a snap with no way to turn back and hiring even more people won't help if the ship is heading towards the iceberg with full steam ahead.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    I'm not quibbling with that. I guess I'm questioning whether laying off thousands of people is the best reaction, as opposed to redirecting their efforts.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> government having a robust social safety net (funded by taxes) I don't buy this - not any more. These companies are going to need these employees next year, when demand picks up again. This is pure folly of management. The problem is upper management never pays for their mistakes. I know a company that fired it's last Perl developer and their payment system was written in perl. They literslly couldn't take payment for like 2 months becaus of it. You think the guy that made this decision has lost any sleep? This is like just in time supply chain - lets keep zero stock on hand to 'optimise'. Oh shit, we cant get shipment in time because of disruption/flood/covid. Now we are loosing money. Well, the guy that made the decision doesn't care. What we are seeing across the west, is that companies are destoying the base of skilled middle class employees that they actually need to operate. This is happening on purpose. After the base is destroyed, they will beg for gobernment subsidies to compete. They basically use taxoater money to pad their profit margins
cjbgkagh 3y ago
I think it’s about minimizing agency cost, to encourage workers to work in the interest of the company instead of purely their own interest. This is hard to do even in the best of circumstances. If people see that there is no connection, or even an inverse connection, between working hard and being rewarded they’ll find creative ways not to work hard. I’m sure people currently working on efficiency initiatives are now a lot less motivated from them to succeed. Not saying that they should have kept the employees, they just keep in mind that short term greedy can come at the cost of long term greedy. I think the real problem is often executive compensation incentives short term greedy behaviors at the expense of long term greedy behaviors, so while this decision may not be in the best interest of the company I’m certain it’s in the best interest of the execs. One alternative to hiring/firing would have been for existing staff temporarily work harder with offers of large bonuses. Maybe they tried that as well. This would only be effective in some areas of work so some hiring/firing correlating with demand would still be needed.
amelius 3y ago
> Do you suggest they keep employees around with nothing to do because of significantly reduced shipping demand? Do you suggest anyone other than the employees should decide about that?
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Not GP, but yes, I think the management of the company should decide on company matters like hiring, firing, and budget matters. It’s literally why they are employed.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ptnpzwqd 3y ago
This makes the assumption that the increase in headcount was to cover the surge in demand, and the additional assumption that the additional headcount was needed to satisfy the demand (obviously, some of it might). For technology in particular (which seems to be one of the affected functions), this is hardly the way it works - tech projects are unlikely to be a good way to handle temporary spikes in demand, etc. Even for more specialized non-tech functions the lead time for getting someone productive can be too long to make this a feasible strategy. Maybe also particularly for tech, but I suspect it is much more likely that the "good times" gave the company a large appetite for longer term strategic initiatives/investments, and now that tides have turned that appetite has gone too. There is no way that it has come as a surprise that the market would change eventually, and creating and killing long term initiatives as the market goes up and down is bad planning, bad for the people affected and bad for the company as well.
manonthewall 3y ago
I think they're saying "stop complaining, it's tit for tat, so don't cry anymore big companies that hold 90% of the power"
ricardobayes 3y ago
Spain also, you get a relatively high portion of your salary (80%?) for 2 years if you're fired/laid off.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Wow, that's very generous. In Austria you usually get unemployment 50-60% of your wage for about 6 months depending how many years you worked.
  - ricardobayes 3y ago
    Yes, it is. Another interesting thing from the local employment market is that an employee can't be fired for performance reasons (after the trial period). They can only fire someone for absense, HR problems or part of a group layoff (10% of workforce minimum at once).
AmVess 3y ago
If your solution is "more tax", then your solution is both lazy and stupid.
wheelinsupial 3y ago
I think there is some middle ground. I used to work in manufacturing. During the slow periods, employees with nothing to do were reassigned to projects to improve safety, productivity, quality, plant maintenance, and to help the employees with learning and development. Yes, some employees did get laid off, but the attempt was to invest in the company and people before getting to layoffs. I don't know the shipping industry, so it's possible this isn't feasible.

mnky9800n 3y ago

Maybe companies can have like a savings account for when they don't make a lot of money, that way if they think they might not make as much then they can cover the difficult times.

carlosjobim 3y ago
Isn't it much better that the employees instead go work somewhere were they're needed? What in the world would be the reason to keep them around doing nothing? Give them better pay when they actually work and then send them on their way.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  I feel like, > surprise! You are probably needed elsewhere! Is not the way to handle this kind of thing.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    The difficulty is that putting the onus of reallocation on a centralized authority leads to less efficient allocation (e.g. all the problems with command economies). Decentralized people that each make individual choices more quickly and ideally allocate unused labor where it's most needed. ... but to the broader point from sibling threads, the humane solution here is {permit companies to be agile with layoffs} + {fund strong government-provided safety nets for unemployed workers}.
- interactivecode 3y ago
  Well because clearly the board isn’t great at anticipating market fluctuations, so better keep people around for when demand picks up again. Also its about 10% of employees right, that means if you give the whole company 1 day off every two weeks. Everyone who would have a full workload again. Googles 20% was about double that
infecto 3y ago
It would be impossible to craft a rule like this that can be applied effectively. Plus the overhead of each company having to manage it. Much more reasonable to bundle it with corporate taxes and the country to manage the safety net. Ideally this would help the free flow of labor effectively.
gruez 3y ago
Okay, but you can't expect companies to keep a buffer out of their own good will. You need the government to do it. Keeping such a buffer at a per company level probably is a bad idea too, because downturns tend to be sectoral. A bigger risk pool (eg. across industries) would be far more robust. Surprise! You just invented unemployment insurance!
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  But why do we need government do to that, if it is insurance why cant it be provided by a insurance company. better, Cheaper, and with out the political corruption that comes with all government programs. Hell we just saw during COVID unemployment "insurance" being used as a political tool to essentially buy votes, by all political parties and organizations. Also used a tool to make authoritarian control of the population palatable Further How many dystopian novels have the trope of the masses being paid not to work... The axiom of a "social safety net" is apt but not the the way people using it believe it to be, the social safety net in practice tends to be like a fishing net, once you get entangled in it, you rarely escape it...
- interactivecode 3y ago
  Yes you can expect companies to a buffer. It starts by questioning layoffs like this. Because they should have depleted the buffer first before layoffs. If after that layoffs still happen the gov should have a second layer of supports in place. Because indeed like you said if a whole sector has a downturn its difficult for someone to find a new job.
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    What is the economic rationale behind a company keeping a large portion of its workforce idle? That's a waste of labor. Sure, it's probably a good idea to keep people paid for a while after layoffs to ease their transition to an in-demand job. But that's what unemployment benefits do.
    - interactivecode 3y ago

franczesko 3y ago

"Do you suggest they keep employees around with nothing to do because of significantly reduced shipping demand?" Management should be fired for miscalculated headcount instead.

boeingUH60 3y ago
They hired in response to heightened demand. Demand falls, and they should be fired for miscalculated headcount? Sorry, but that hardly makes sense…you might as well say management must be able to see the future.
- avidphantasm 3y ago
  Maybe they could cut everyone’s hours and keep more people employed? This would make surging to meet future demand spikes much more easy. Novel idea I know.
  - gruez 3y ago
    That's just going to cause all the high performers to jump ship (heh), because they can find a new job that doesn't have cut hours.
    - reg_dunlop 3y ago
      I thought there was decreased demand. Or is that decreased demand for this company only?
      - gruez 3y ago
        Companies are run with varying levels of competence, so it's not strange to see the weakest companies lay off first. Adding to the above, better capitalized companies can use this opportunity to poach high performers from weaker companies.
        interactivecode 3y ago

tyingq 3y ago

>Do you suggest they keep employees around with nothing to do because of significantly reduced shipping demand? It's not unheard of in the past to resort to salary cuts, reduced hours, etc, while they bridge some solution or wait out what might be temporary. There's also the notion of better planning. If you suspect, for example, a demand spike is temporary...there are ways to deal with that other than overhiring employees.

chrisdbanks 3y ago
Your electricity demands probably change drastically between summer and winter. Do you not use electricity during the winter because you know you won't need as much during the summer? People are a resource just like electric. There needs to be flexibility for elasticity. This is why redundancy exists as a concept. Of course people should be compensated for elastic demand and you can of course always seek to increase your notice period to increase your security.
- tyingq 3y ago
  Right, and for example, contractors are often a better match for fluctuating demand rather than employees. Or diversification of market offerings to reduce seasonality. Or skill diversification for employees so they can be repositioned during low demand in one area, etc. Or at least being up-front about the temporary nature of the employment and structuring the program to suit that. "Seasonal hires" have a different expectation.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > contractors are often a better match for fluctuating demand rather than employees Not when it's universal and systemic. > Or diversification of market offerings to reduce seasonality And this is good, but really too much to ask if you are going to require it. > skill diversification for employees so they can be repositioned during low demand in one area This also doesn't work when the changes are global and systemic. But then, most of the layoffs we have seen in the past were rushed things that didn't even bother to evaluate this option. This one cuts me as done in around the shortest timing to make this possible, so we'd need to check if they tried it or not. We also don't know if they were up-front about the temporary nature of those employees. They are certainly not formally temporary because the timing doesn't work here (what is good for the employees anyway), but we don't know if they were warned.

infecto 3y ago

Was unclear in the article but I would be curious if this impacts any workers in Denmark or if this was mostly a cut of the cheap developing nation labor that runs the ship.

Thaxll 3y ago

Those 10k employees woudn't have nothing to do. Do you think every single employee are used at 95% all the time, that the head count reflect 100% of the needed workforce?

hef19898 3y ago
Assuming the 10k includes crew, when their vessel isn't used those crew members would have absolutely nothing to do at all in fact.

infecto 3y ago

Just to add to the top of the thread. The solution here is safety nets paid by taxes. "Firing management" is not realistic, humans are generally short sighted and its hard to identify when things are a bubble or not. You cannot put it on the laid off employees to understand the economy well enough and for low paying jobs to have the savings to support boom/bust periods always. Similar to health care, it is useful to have safety nets to allow for the free flow of labor. Now where it gets sticky is you cannot apply it outside of your country so in cases like shipping, the vast majority of their employees who run the ship are from low wage developing countries.

interactivecode 3y ago
Yes you can apply it to outside your country. However even though they make big profits they don’t want to. They could just apply the same pay, safeguards and social support to employees of low wage countries that their Danish colleagues receive. Remember that your countries rules about pay, leave and social security are minimums, and your employer is choosing not to give you more than the minimum.

clnq 3y ago

Assuming there is some ebb and flow in demand, they should keep employees around with nothing to do, yes. Moreover, there is natural attrition. They can stop hiring, promote internally, and so on, until they’ve reached their desired head count. The point is that both of these are doable when the company is wildly profitable. And they should be done for the negative secondary effects of layoffs (ruining lives, morale loss, people following their laid off friends out of the company, etc). It seems like these days companies don’t even freeze hiring and grow competencies in house in times like these that much. They just assume (often wrongly) that they’ll quickly hire everyone they need once the demand picks up. But it takes years of training before an employee is fully integrated and has all the institutional knowledge to perform at their peak, and it takes many months to fill difficult positions. Some people who have been around tech for a good number of decades have seen this fashionable layoff footgun used more than once.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
> Assuming there is some ebb and flow in demand, they should keep employees around with nothing to do, yes. Disagree. Especially if they knew they were hired for a surge that would end.
- McDyver 3y ago
  Then they should have hired contractors for the specific timeframe, no? Otherwise it's just corporate greed: we know we'll have a surge in demand, so we buy new vessels and containers and manpower to last us 2 years; we make huge profits, discard this surplus and blame it on the "new normal" (FTA)
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >Otherwise it's just corporate greed By that logic, every business around us operates on corporate greed since their sole purpose is to increase their profits and bring down costs, not to be a UBI jobs program. Sure, certain large and profitable companies with sizable market caps could easily stomach having even more idle workers coasting all day for great paychecks, with a corresponding reduction in profits and still stay afloat, but why would they?

n4r9 3y ago

If they're making record profits and have already employed decent workers, isn't the optimal strategy surely "find something profitable for them to work on"?

jcbrand 3y ago
It's possible to make record profits one year and a loss the next if you don't react early enough to trends.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Pretty much this. Nokia had it's record year of profits the year after the iPhone launched even though the writing was already on the wall. It's easy to go from winner to looser in a snap with no way to turn back and hiring even more people won't help if the ship is heading towards the iceberg with full steam ahead.
- n4r9 3y ago
  I'm not quibbling with that. I guess I'm questioning whether laying off thousands of people is the best reaction, as opposed to redirecting their efforts.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> government having a robust social safety net (funded by taxes) I don't buy this - not any more. These companies are going to need these employees next year, when demand picks up again. This is pure folly of management. The problem is upper management never pays for their mistakes. I know a company that fired it's last Perl developer and their payment system was written in perl. They literslly couldn't take payment for like 2 months becaus of it. You think the guy that made this decision has lost any sleep? This is like just in time supply chain - lets keep zero stock on hand to 'optimise'. Oh shit, we cant get shipment in time because of disruption/flood/covid. Now we are loosing money. Well, the guy that made the decision doesn't care. What we are seeing across the west, is that companies are destoying the base of skilled middle class employees that they actually need to operate. This is happening on purpose. After the base is destroyed, they will beg for gobernment subsidies to compete. They basically use taxoater money to pad their profit margins

cjbgkagh 3y ago

I think it’s about minimizing agency cost, to encourage workers to work in the interest of the company instead of purely their own interest. This is hard to do even in the best of circumstances. If people see that there is no connection, or even an inverse connection, between working hard and being rewarded they’ll find creative ways not to work hard. I’m sure people currently working on efficiency initiatives are now a lot less motivated from them to succeed. Not saying that they should have kept the employees, they just keep in mind that short term greedy can come at the cost of long term greedy. I think the real problem is often executive compensation incentives short term greedy behaviors at the expense of long term greedy behaviors, so while this decision may not be in the best interest of the company I’m certain it’s in the best interest of the execs. One alternative to hiring/firing would have been for existing staff temporarily work harder with offers of large bonuses. Maybe they tried that as well. This would only be effective in some areas of work so some hiring/firing correlating with demand would still be needed.

amelius 3y ago

> Do you suggest they keep employees around with nothing to do because of significantly reduced shipping demand? Do you suggest anyone other than the employees should decide about that?

sokoloff 3y ago
Not GP, but yes, I think the management of the company should decide on company matters like hiring, firing, and budget matters. It’s literally why they are employed.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ptnpzwqd 3y ago

This makes the assumption that the increase in headcount was to cover the surge in demand, and the additional assumption that the additional headcount was needed to satisfy the demand (obviously, some of it might). For technology in particular (which seems to be one of the affected functions), this is hardly the way it works - tech projects are unlikely to be a good way to handle temporary spikes in demand, etc. Even for more specialized non-tech functions the lead time for getting someone productive can be too long to make this a feasible strategy. Maybe also particularly for tech, but I suspect it is much more likely that the "good times" gave the company a large appetite for longer term strategic initiatives/investments, and now that tides have turned that appetite has gone too. There is no way that it has come as a surprise that the market would change eventually, and creating and killing long term initiatives as the market goes up and down is bad planning, bad for the people affected and bad for the company as well.

manonthewall 3y ago

I think they're saying "stop complaining, it's tit for tat, so don't cry anymore big companies that hold 90% of the power"

ricardobayes 3y ago

Spain also, you get a relatively high portion of your salary (80%?) for 2 years if you're fired/laid off.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Wow, that's very generous. In Austria you usually get unemployment 50-60% of your wage for about 6 months depending how many years you worked.
- ricardobayes 3y ago
  Yes, it is. Another interesting thing from the local employment market is that an employee can't be fired for performance reasons (after the trial period). They can only fire someone for absense, HR problems or part of a group layoff (10% of workforce minimum at once).

AmVess 3y ago

If your solution is "more tax", then your solution is both lazy and stupid.

wheelinsupial 3y ago

I think there is some middle ground. I used to work in manufacturing. During the slow periods, employees with nothing to do were reassigned to projects to improve safety, productivity, quality, plant maintenance, and to help the employees with learning and development. Yes, some employees did get laid off, but the attempt was to invest in the company and people before getting to layoffs. I don't know the shipping industry, so it's possible this isn't feasible.