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Comment by caseysoftware | Hacker News Reader

While 300-700 people sounds massive, it's out of 33,000 or about 1-2%. It's not hard to believe that 1-2% of a company were bad hires, couldn't/didn't deliver, or weren't a great match for the job anymore.

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Admittedly it's a small fraction. To me, while not a communist by any means, I do think that cos. often simply think about he employee-employer relationship as unidirectional: the employee owes the employer but I see more and the company owes society at large to support its workers, where it can. Not saying they should carry inept unqualified workers, but that they should make some effort to place mal-assigned workers. Make it work for everyone, in other words.

Without knowing the details - which we never will - we don't know which of them were just in bad positions for them or if they moved 10, 100, or 1000 to better fitting roles or if there were the "better fitting" roles for this group.

There is some truth there but what you say really only makes sense if you are talking about massive layoffs that would have a major effect on the local labor market.

Projecting responsibility for societal well-being onto for-profit employers is crazy. If we think everyone deserves something, we need to provision it directly as a society.

Corporations are poor stewards of our welfare, and trying to coerce them into this role (i.e. minimum wage, healthcare mandate, obligation to hold on to unneeded workers like you propose here) has the nasty side-effect of inhibiting potentially beneficial transactions (pushes employers towards automation, encourages them to split decent full-time jobs into several shitty part-time jobs to stay below eligibility thresholds, locks the lowest-value workers out of the market entirely, keeps the product category well below its potential i.e. taxis, etc).

If we think people should have at least a certain income (and I do), we need higher taxes and a stronger welfare system, not more labor regulation. If we think everyone deserves good healthcare (and I do) we need single-payer, not an employer mandate. If we think people shouldn't have to face loss of income due to economic conditions, we need to strengthen unemployment insurance, not pressure companies to keep workers they don't want or need.

Going down the path of engineering a perfect society by attaching obligations to the employer-employee relationship just disincentives employers from starting those relationships if they can help it.

I completely agree. It's the single responsibility principle, applied to society. In Italy, for example, the mistake of not following the SRP has produced such an entanglement of the responsibilities of businesses with those of the State that the result is a mess of spaghetti code with exceptions layered upon exceptions, almost impossible to reform and still not providing everyone with the same basic stuff (as an unemployment benefit, for instance).

I don't know how much of this I agree with but I definitely agree with most of it. I also hadn't considered the fact that we have forced businesses into the role of government because our government is underperforming.

If corporations are suddenly liberated from labor regulations they are not going to reverse their decisions and sell the robots to employ more people or make part-time employees full-time. Cost cutting is a war of multiple fronts.

Labor regulation has the same effect as taxes, the money just doesn't go through the government. Higher taxes and no labor regulation would have similar consequences in corporate profit-seeking decisions, because corporations are the ones paying most taxes anyway.

Besides, there is no clean separation between government and corporations, I think it is improbable that taxes are raised after getting rid of labor regulations.

>Labor regulation has the same effect as taxes

Not really: taxes are percentage-based. They turn profitable transactions into marginally less profitable transactions, but stop at zero. Minimum wages and benefits set an absolute floor below which the transaction is not worthwhile.

Even if you're not upset about the loss of low-paying jobs (and that's fair), if we think everyone deserves something, getting it should not depend on finding a job.

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