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> As a lifetime employee, I don't want better labor protection laws. As a lifetime employee, I know we need better labor protection laws and enforcement. Wage

> As a lifetime employee, I don't want better labor protection laws. As a lifetime employee, I know we need better labor protection laws and enforcement. Wage theft is one of the largest sources of crime in America. https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year/ https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...

eastbound 2y ago
In France I can have a beginner engineer with diploma from a good school at 38k€ (52k€ total cost) or a senior for 70k€ (105k€). But we had Mistral and it’s so bad in the market that Macron asked for 109b€ additional investment to be able to keep France competitive. We also had Daily Motion but it was also second to market, like 0,5% of Youtube size. So yeah labour protection laws give you very cheap engineers with 35hrs per week and 7 weeks of holidays per year. Good luck competing!
- mirekrusin 2y ago
  Exactly France is good example what not to do.
- rednafi 2y ago
  You can’t win every war. Germany is a bit better, but not by a large margin. Wages are higher than in France, but so is the cost of living. That said, Europe isn’t struggling because of labor protection rules but because of its culture. There are 69 countries with 69 different languages, and each of them wants high-paid foreigners to learn their language. I saw the same thing in France, Germany, and Finland. Why on earth would I care about German or French when I speak and write native-level English? Another issue is the vacation culture. Three weeks of vacation is incredibly generous, but people here get even more. I’m switching teams because my current one can’t ship anything—different people are on exceedingly long vacations at different times, and there’s no coordination. Europe is poorer and full of red tape. The fragmentation of languages and regulations doesn’t help. It’s a massive continent, yet the only real tech hubs are in Munich, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London. The rest are just running underpaying sweatshops.
- btreecat 2y ago
  > So yeah labour protection laws give you very cheap engineers with 35hrs per week and 7 weeks of holidays per year. In the US salaries have to be inflated in order to cover the lack of transportation, healthcare, and social services. To claim that all (or even most) issues with wages can be solved with less regulation and enforcement to prevent fraud and abuse doesn't carry water.
- LunaSea 2y ago
  And ChatGPT's billion dollar LLM was beat by a few Chinese engineers and $5M.
lupusreal 2y ago
I think cracking down on wage theft should be a very tractable problem. Wage theft is extremely common in some industries but virtually nonexistent in others. When I worked for "tech companies" it was as a salaried employee and the amount of overtime I did was obscene. Technically not wage theft since I wasn't hourly, but when you start doing 60+ hours a week for a job which is ostensibly 40 hours a week, because management sucks at their own jobs no less, I think it becomes de facto wage theft. And in jobs which actually do hourly, overt wage theft is extremely common in some industries like food service, but there are also industries, or at least companies, in which it is virtually nonexistent. Working as a tech for a manufacturing company, I clock in on the minute, clock out on the minute, never work even a single second without being on the clock, have never been asked to, and have never not been paid for my time on the clock. This is the way it always should be. I think we need to abolish salaried work, at least for anybody who isn't in management, and legally require companies to use timeclocks with auditable logs. And if a manager tells you to work without clocking in, that should be a mandatory prison sentence. Do all this and wage theft should become a relic of the past. (Also, none of this requires it to become a lengthy bureaucratic nightmare to hire or lay off employees, so the concern about companies becoming less nimble and more reluctant to hire at all should not apply. It is possible to have our cake and eat it too.)

eastbound 2y ago

In France I can have a beginner engineer with diploma from a good school at 38k€ (52k€ total cost) or a senior for 70k€ (105k€). But we had Mistral and it’s so bad in the market that Macron asked for 109b€ additional investment to be able to keep France competitive. We also had Daily Motion but it was also second to market, like 0,5% of Youtube size. So yeah labour protection laws give you very cheap engineers with 35hrs per week and 7 weeks of holidays per year. Good luck competing!

mirekrusin 2y ago
Exactly France is good example what not to do.
rednafi 2y ago
You can’t win every war. Germany is a bit better, but not by a large margin. Wages are higher than in France, but so is the cost of living. That said, Europe isn’t struggling because of labor protection rules but because of its culture. There are 69 countries with 69 different languages, and each of them wants high-paid foreigners to learn their language. I saw the same thing in France, Germany, and Finland. Why on earth would I care about German or French when I speak and write native-level English? Another issue is the vacation culture. Three weeks of vacation is incredibly generous, but people here get even more. I’m switching teams because my current one can’t ship anything—different people are on exceedingly long vacations at different times, and there’s no coordination. Europe is poorer and full of red tape. The fragmentation of languages and regulations doesn’t help. It’s a massive continent, yet the only real tech hubs are in Munich, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London. The rest are just running underpaying sweatshops.
btreecat 2y ago
> So yeah labour protection laws give you very cheap engineers with 35hrs per week and 7 weeks of holidays per year. In the US salaries have to be inflated in order to cover the lack of transportation, healthcare, and social services. To claim that all (or even most) issues with wages can be solved with less regulation and enforcement to prevent fraud and abuse doesn't carry water.
LunaSea 2y ago
And ChatGPT's billion dollar LLM was beat by a few Chinese engineers and $5M.

lupusreal 2y ago

I think cracking down on wage theft should be a very tractable problem. Wage theft is extremely common in some industries but virtually nonexistent in others. When I worked for "tech companies" it was as a salaried employee and the amount of overtime I did was obscene. Technically not wage theft since I wasn't hourly, but when you start doing 60+ hours a week for a job which is ostensibly 40 hours a week, because management sucks at their own jobs no less, I think it becomes de facto wage theft. And in jobs which actually do hourly, overt wage theft is extremely common in some industries like food service, but there are also industries, or at least companies, in which it is virtually nonexistent. Working as a tech for a manufacturing company, I clock in on the minute, clock out on the minute, never work even a single second without being on the clock, have never been asked to, and have never not been paid for my time on the clock. This is the way it always should be. I think we need to abolish salaried work, at least for anybody who isn't in management, and legally require companies to use timeclocks with auditable logs. And if a manager tells you to work without clocking in, that should be a mandatory prison sentence. Do all this and wage theft should become a relic of the past. (Also, none of this requires it to become a lengthy bureaucratic nightmare to hire or lay off employees, so the concern about companies becoming less nimble and more reluctant to hire at all should not apply. It is possible to have our cake and eat it too.)