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I'm the GP who brought up this topic. I actually am American and now working at a managerial level in Australia. When I ran into trouble with someone on my team performing at a poor level, I was a bit exasperated with these regulations and how they required me to put him on a performance improvement plan rather than immediately dismiss. I was frustrated, but it forced me to talk it out with him. We did a bit of a reset and had a smoother period. Ultimately issues arose again, but he was able to find a new job in the meantime which is a much better fit for him and moved on amicably. It was a positive result for both parties, definitely not without some stress, but it was achieved because I was forced to have patience -- and we should have patience, because people aren't disposable.

Plenty of white collar businesses in the US use performance improvement plans. But that would be a ridiculous remedy in a business with thin margins like a restaurant - some businesses need the freedom to hire and fire quicker.

Sorry but why should the law have to cater to someone's business model?

Employees are sellers of labor, so proponents of less regulation could ask the same question of you regarding an employee whose business model is doing as little as possible or even damaging the employer but expecting compensation to continue.

They use those plans to avoid discrimination lawsuits, that is really the only reason behind it. HR in the US is totally different too, it's basically "just protect the business from being sued by employees."

No they don't. If they need it their business is terrible and should not exist. I live in the Netherlands and our restaurants do just fine without being allowed to fire at will and without the need for tips to give employees a decent wage. It's called sane labor laws.

It’s a different world. The US is a free country. You are free to work wherever they accept you. A job is not a right: you cannot demand anything that someone else must provide you. And people for the most part are free to start a business pretty much whether it should exist or not regardless of anybody else’s opinions.

And all of this is different from NL or most other European countries how?

Hint: it isn't, we just have sensible protections against wrongful termination.

"sensible" is meaningless. Everyone gets to make up their own def. Parent is correct, the US is a free country, which means beyond some _very_ simple rules we don't try to think for employers, we let the consumers do that. That's the point of a functioning market.

I prominently tell companies why they don't get my business, and Marriott will hear from me next year when I call, waste their time gleefully explaining how I might have used their services but they fired a guy to kowtow to China.

Even better, this is gold on his resume.

In the US we don't pretend we are smarter than other business owners. The socialism route of adding regs to "fix" regs is self defeating. Treating people like fools makes them fools eventually.

Parent is correct, the US is a free country, which means beyond some _very_ simple rules we don't try to think for employers, we let the consumers do that. That's the point of a functioning market.

This assumes a definition of 'functioning market' that not everyone agrees on. In my view the market and the government serve the well-being of the general population. The US is starting to fail miserably in that area, because income inequality is pretty bad and has steadily been growing since the 1970'ies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:G...

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Moreover, the influence of industry lobbying in the US had become enormous and paralyzes democracy. Of course, the industrial complexes and part of the government keeps up the fairytale of 'the US is a free country, if you don't make it, you are not working hard enough, the market is self-regulating', because it is convenient for them. As long as people believe this, they will not object to having no rights and no decent income. If you are a random person, the opportunities of building up a good and secure life are much better in Nothern and Western Europe.

tl;dr: not only the government needs to be kept in check, also the market. Otherwise big companies dictate the policies.

Calling the US "a functioning market" is a bit rich.

The US society and politics are way too heavily tilted towards the employers, the people who already wield an disproportionate amount of power over their employees.

If you actually take the time to voice your displeasure over situations like this, you are an extreme outlier. Most people don't give a shit, and even fewer will even hear of stuff like this happening. Even if they do hear about it, they'll forget in a week or two.

In the end, nothing will actually change. Employers will still exploit the employees for profit, and fire people for absolutely no reason at all, while making potential new employees jump through ever more hoops in the desperate hope for a job.

"exploit the employees for profit, and fire people for absolutely no reason at all"

That is a contradiction, the entire point of a company is to make a profit by providing consumers with something they are willing to pay for. Use all the derogatory words you like, in this case "exploit" seems to mean "employ" (which is pretty odd btw), and "no reason at all" seems to mean "like a tweet".

It's a self regulating system, that's capitalism. Marriott screwed up, and now it's on their permanent record. I'm sure they just lost my business, if I use history as a gauge, and assume I live until I am 90, that's high 4 to low 5 figures in today's $'s.

A mark on their permanent record? It'll be out of the news in less than a week, and people won't give a shit anymore. Hell, I bet you'll have forgotten soon enough.

Do you write down and keep track of all your personal boycotts? Do you check the list every time you make a purchase or pay for a service? Sure, if you're like me, you remember stuff like "Nestle wanted to privatize clean drinking water for profit" and "Coca-Cola paid hitmen to assassinate union leaders", and avoid those companies. But "Mariott once fired a guy for liking a tweet"?

Yeah, no. You'll forget soon enough, just like everyone else. And companies like Mariott are counting on it. I know "the Internet never forgets", but that doesn't matter when it's soon drowned out by a million times more random informational noise. It'll stick around, alright. But only as some random mariottsucks.org website, or as a long-forgotten Facebook group.

They fired a guy for accidentally clicking like on a tweet. If the consequences for that action are so severe, why is it even possible in the situation he was put in? Was he briefed ahead of time that his employment was hanging by a thread, pending a single misclick? In any sensible system, he would have been called for a brief talk with his immediate superior, where he would have been given a warning and explained why it was necessary. He certainly wouldn't have been fired outright for something so minor.

Capitalism self-regulates for maximum profit to the fat cats, maximum work effort squeezed from workers for the absolute minimum possible pay. That's why unions are needed, to balance out the power of the employers, through collective bargaining and solidarity.

> I prominently tell companies why they don't get my business, and Marriott will hear from me next year when I call, waste their time gleefully explaining how I might have used their services but they fired a guy to kowtow to China.

Yes, some guy whose entire job is to field customer complaints will listen to you and then hang up the phone and not report your complaint to anyone.

There is a right to work under the responsibility to protect. Industry structure that produces a permanent underclass is a form of violence, and class warfare.

This is a bizarre take on a business relationship between two free entities.

Is an employee allowed to quit? What about the "violence" it does to the company, investors, and fellow employees? Must they stick around to provide continuity? If so, how is this not indenture?

Am I allowed to fire a painter I hire to paint my house if I think he does poor work? Do I need to document his performance and discuss an improvement plan? Does this change if I own a house big enough to keep him painting for a month? For a year?

Employment represents a contract between two parties. Basic freedom of association and contract law means both parties can enter and leave under the terms they negotiate and have a rational self interest in acting in good faith.

> Is an employee allowed to quit? What about the "violence" it does to the company, investors, and fellow employees? Must they stick around to provide continuity? If so, how is this not indenture?

Grotesque. Many industries in various countries have a reasonable notice period (say, 3 months), which should give the company enough time to adapt. Nobody considers this "indenture".

> Employment represents a contract between two parties. Basic freedom of association and contract law means both parties can enter and leave under the terms they negotiate and have a rational self interest in acting in good faith.

The difference is that one party, most of the time, can manage without the other. On the other hand, the fired employee still needs to pay rent/feed his family. And depending on the economy/location, finding a different job might take some time (if it's possible at all without retraining).

Three months is fascinating. That's a quarter of a year! We live in different worlds.

I've always found two weeks notice to be more than adequate in most cases and then, only as a courtesy to communicate, transfer in flight work, and alter schedules. If I'm truly mad, I'm resigning and dealing with picking up the slack is not my problem. If an employee tells me they're leaving, I want them gone soon anyway because mentally they've already left the team.

In aggregate all the employment just represents society. There is a difference between engaging services and employing someone, and the heavy preference for engaging a human as services is part of the problem. It is no different from engaging a human as a good. If we all play by the same rules, then the contours of the market are not unfairly balanced toward one player. The market and social life are not distinct; contract law should protect all stakeholders as you mentioned.

Australian businesses tend to employ as casuals for cafes and restaurants. No need to fire the person, just reduce shifts till they get the hint (I am not an employer).

Aside from Unions, there is no way of protecting employees where they are interchangeable cogs. Unions have their own problems, but collective action is a pretty good deterrent against 'unjustified' termination.

Plenty of restaurants exist in countries with sane workplace relationship laws, especially when they pay them at least minimum wage!

Agreed we shouldn't cherry pick countries.

One interesting thing about France and Australia is that by the Ease of Doing Business Index over the last decade, France is gaining on but still behind Australia. (FRA: 44 -> 31; AUS: 6 -> 14).

So suppose we agreed France was performing worse economically than Australia over the last decade. Then we might conclude that absolute position matters and liberalization is important. Or we might as likely conclude the complete opposite, that gains on the index don't matter and liberalization isn't important.

And that's not even bringing the Economic Freedom Index into things, which has a radically different ranking based on similar criteria.

It's almost as if a lot of of what people believe about economics on both sides is under-determined by the available evidence.

But eh, maybe that's too cynical. That's just two countries. I'd really like to see some data analysis on how much "ease of doing business" (or some similar metric) matters to GDP--and maybe also to surveys of feelings of job security / satisfaction as well. Looking across most countries, maybe hard patterns would emerge. Or maybe economics is all noise unless you're at Weimar levels of malfeasance, who knows.

South Korea, Georgia, and Macedonia have skyrocketed up the EoDB chart, so I guess for any of us who suspect there's a sufficiently strong link, we have an opportunity to put our money down.

Another relationship to study is between the quasi job-for-life laws we have in France and being the country with the most population under antidepressants in the world.

> France and being the country with the most population under antidepressants in the world.

I was intrigued by this and decided to have a look at the figures and I can't find anything to support your statement. Where do you get your information from?

From Business Insider graphing OECD figures for the number of people per 1000 who take antidepressants shows France to be 50/1000 which is 16th from the top.

http://static3.uk.businessinsider.com/image/56b381f7dd0895c4...

Directly from the OECD site is a page showing the dose consumed per 1000 people. It's very similar to the above, possibly the same data source but they are supposedly measured in different ways.

https://asset.keepeek-cache.com/medias/domain21/_pdf/media23...

They both show France uses a lot less than many other countries,less than half Iceland and bout 2/3rds of the UK, Sweden, Canada and Australia.

>Regardless of your view on labour laws I think most people agree on this.

Not if the other option was China shutting down a bunch of Marriott hotels and hundreds of employees losing their jobs instead.

The parent replied to a comment as a rebuttal against the claim that France's employment laws are what you get when you give employees rights.

They specially stated the false dichotomy, and made a strong argument.

No one here knows if the other option has to be Marriott losing business, so you putting that out there is wrong, and ironically, again a false dichotomy.

Maybe you didn't read the full parent comment?

I was responding to this point, which is specifically about the Marriott case.

>Executives dismissing a support employee—out-of-touch executives who have probably forgotten how important an ongoing income stream is for people on low or even normal incomes—just to save face in a business relationship is in my opinion unjustifiable.

I did, and GP said that firing to save face is unacceptable. While you said

>Not if the other option was China shutting down a bunch of Marriott hotels and hundreds of employees losing their jobs instead.

to which I said we don't know, and you saying so is a false dichotomy because there are often other options.

But that wasn't the other option. They could have fired the executive who was responsible for managing and training the staff (who clearly failed to do so) or the executive that implemented a customer support system that allowed staff to like tweets that could cause significant damage to the company.

Or they didn't have to fire anyone - it's not like China actually gets to see employment records for random staff in Omaha.

See, this is an interesting thing about labor law: it can actually protect both parties.

If Marriott was forbidden by law from firing the employee in this situation, then they could much more easily deflect the pressure from China. Make some token gesture and then say, hey, we'd like to do more, but those pesky laws prevent us from doing that.

This is a case where everybody wins when there's stronger employee protection.

Nah, the better outcome is Marriott showing it's hand. Better to know who is running the show, the consumers do just fine sorting it out. PR is extremely powerful and at least in the US many of us are very conscious about voting with our money. The alternative, where influence by people that are antithetical to our core values stays under the radar is much more damaging. My whole family will soon know this story, and they _love_ voting with their money.

How's the NFL doing?

This can work sometimes and may even sound wise, until you realize that a lot of people's character and behaviour is determined by their environment.

So I prefer the direct approach that is known to work by directly helping people do the right thing, over the indirect approach that may or may not work, depending on circumstances.

"direct approach"

Which is? Decide for them?

Can you terminate employees because you need to save money (i.e. laying them off)?

yup, redundancies can be used to dismiss employees. The caveat is that you can't rehire for that role for a certain period of time. This is simply to avoid the problem of companies claiming random employees are no longer needed.

It is not uncommon for smaller employers to fire a manager, and hire a new supervisor though. Same job - different title.

I'm unsure if it's been challenged at the FWC - I doubt it would stand.

You also need to offer other options within the company if they exist.

So if you're reducing the number of staff employed to support "system A", but you have vacant positions supporting "system B", then you you need to offer those positions to any affected staff, or show why those employees would not capable of doing the new job.

You don't have to empathize with a business owners. It's their resources at play. So they simply will do business elsewhere. I don't have to open an office in France. I just don't. It's too much hassle. I open it wherever I want. So if an employee loses out by not being hired by me (or I lose out by not hiring some French awesome person), then so be it. But the point is that the US environment is more friendly for businesses, and as a result we have a lot of them. Maybe other places also have a lot of them too, but if you did a poll all over the world of what country they would want to emigrate to, it would be the US who will lead the worldwide poll.

I would like to see that poll because nobody I know would ever want to emigrate to the US, especially now with that idiot president you have.

On the other hand I see a lot of refugees trying to get to Germany and Sweden which have at least the same if not stricter labour laws.

Reading your comment I feel that you live in a really strange bubble which allows you to think like you do.

> nobody I know would ever want to emigrate to the US

And yet people want to get here so bad they illegally stream over the border by the millions.

> I see a lot of refugees trying to get to Germany and Sweden

It's a lot harder to walk from Europe to the US.

I googled it for you

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...

http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/d...

America has historically been the country most people go to.

Different people are attracted to different potential outcomes. Compensation is a vector, after all. It’s the usual question of risk versus reward. Some will find the perceived safety of generous government protection and benefits desirable, even at the cost of lower remuneration. Others prefer to swing for the fence.

No, that’s wrong. It’s just one of the lies you Americans love to tell each other.

I was trying to find supporting evidence for this (I certainly feel it to be true), Unfortunately I found the opposite[1].

Though this was till 2016, so I wonder if it's changed.

[1]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/these-are-the-countri...

There's a lot of inertia involved in this.

I have launched international hiring processes for PhD studentship positions at my lab. More than once, I have had good candidates who ended up rejecting an offer and going to the US instead because their universities have more prestige.

Sometimes the convenience of these decisions for them was, let's say, highly questionable (although I really hope I'm wrong and wish them the best of luck!). For example, a person from Iran who went there to first be hit by Trump's travel ban, and then the graduate student hike. Here that person would have had a good salary, enough to live well, and no such worries. And even though my university as a whole is ranked worse that the university they ended up in, my group/lab is better on any metric.

I have also had a candidate from an Asian country who really wanted to come here, but their parents wanted their child to go to a "prestigious US university" so they didn't let them.

I do think that if you ask in Europe, almost no one wants to go to the US. At least that's my experience. But in other areas of the world the inertia of the US's reputation is strong.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...

http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/d...