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Comment by ghayes | Hacker News Reader

On the employee side, I think the alternative is Two week's notice. Not exactly "slaves," but with some structure for how to resign.

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In Europe, a month is typical for junior, professional jobs, with this increasing to three months for senior positions.

You can, of course, not turn up to work. But that might well make you "unreliable" if you ask for a reference later. But it's not a problem, since a new employer giving a three month notice period will expect you to be on one at present.

(The notice period during the first 6 or 12 months is often less, eg 2-4 weeks.)

In Europe, it is much higher than a month in many countries.

E.g. in Norway it is near impossible to give less than 3 months notice for permanent positions without providing additional compensation, no matter how junior the position, except for a typically 6 month trial period.

Before I'd moved to the UK, I'd never even seen an employment contract with less than 3 months.

In practice, shorter notice is often mutually agreed on with or without compensation when both sides agree it suits them, but it's very common to serve out the full 3 months.

This is true of my position in Germany as well, but from what I understand it rarely works out like that. Unless you are leaving a company at a critical juncture they likely don't want to keep an unmotivated employer there for three months. I can mutually agree with my employer to leave early if necessary.

In Norway you can mutually agree to leave early, but the employer can generally not force you to leave to the extent that there have been cases where people have insisted on coming to work against the employers will because the saw it as problematic for their professional reputation if they were forced to leave. Generally courts would tend to be sympathetic to employee concerns in cases like that unless there are very compelling reasons to keep them out (e.g. lets say they were dismissed after a violent attack on another employee or after being found stealing secrets fro the employers).

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