Taxes on small to medium businesses are downright confiscatory.
Most French people still see business owners as exploiters of their workers.
In French culture the “boss” is traditionally considered as an asshole.
While I’m not saying there aren’t bad bosses out there, this kind of hostile culture towards management doesn’t really help anything.
Taxes are awful as well, and filing them is a pain, even for a sole trader.
There is a real mindset of "Us vs Them" where "Them" is your boss or manager and you should despise them no matter what.
I have left France 5 years ago due to those issues, I am now much happier in a country where your skills come first and nobody cares what you did before so long as you can do the job that is required of you.
France will most likely never be like that.
When they found I had not been to university - they looked at me like I had just taken a dump on the floor.
Even assuming you have a degree, how are you supposed to get the experience when pretty much all the jobs require previous experience? And no, the trick of applying despite not having experience and making up for it at the interview doesn't work - job requirements are very rigid in France; either you'll get rejected right at the start, or if you do make it through all the interviews they will still reject you at the end once they find out (and possibly even consider you as a fraud for applying anyway despite not having the experience).
It really limits how far and where you can go to whoever your parents and family had connections to.
As an anecdote, even with my current experience (mid-range backend engineer) I would be struggling to get any IT job in France (because I didn't spend 5 years in higher education, which for them would trump my actual experience), and if I do get one by some miracle I'd be paid around the same that an intern would make in my current country (UK).
However, in Small & Medium Businesses, the startup movement has changed that a bit and the diploma is way less important than before.
In terms of mindset, it seems that it is an important part of our culture: Philippe d'Iribarne calls it "The logic of Honor" [1].
To sum up the differences between French and US management (at least, according to Iribarne)[2]:
- French relies on the concept of honor and duty. French employees consider that their honor and rank is way more important than their contract. You must manage with this in mind, and accept to be flexible in order to show consideration. You must also explain what are the limits so that employees will not go over them. Managers must give free space to their employees, being "invisible" when everything works out, respecting their honor, but must also go on the field when it goes wrong in order to show "how it's supposed to be done" and to inspire respect by example.
- US relies on honesty, and on the transparency of a work contract. Managers must control the work on their contractors on a periodic base in order to show interest and respect, as part of the contractual relationship.
=> In France, according to this study, the "Us vs Them" should be accepted by management as long as the companies goes well.
[1] https://www.ecole.org/fr/662/VA021205-ENG.pdf
[2] http://lirsa.cnam.fr/medias/fichier/diribarne2html__12633047...
Now I'm working in the USA where nobody cares. I don't consider myself a rocket scientist, but it's still quite sad for France to see all the comments about other French people that were similarly pushed out.
Last time I went to a meetup in SF about tech work in France, one of the French employers advertising there answered a question about the FR/US wage gap with "we aren't looking for mercenaries", essentially trying to fault workers' character for daring to ask for more. If I ever go back to France, it will be with solid plans on how to work remotely for a foreign company if the situation hasn't changed.
Kidnapping a CEO because the company isn't making any money and shutting its doors is the culmination of an ultra-unionised population.
Don't get me wrong, unions were vital in the 40-70's as there was a clear abuse of the workforce. But today, the workforce can't wrap their heads around how a balance sheet works.
And all those social laws make hiring and firing very hard, which is at the core of startup culture.
I've heard about 'bossnapping' - is it literally as described? How on earth does this not end in bloodshed? If someone tried to kidnap me I would be immediately fighting for my life. Do the Police do hostage rescue? How are people not getting hurt?
My father was the lead of Human Resources (don't know how it translates in English) in a bank.
He was once hold for a night during a strike, with 3 other persons. The union leader told him "It's not you sir, we like you as a person, but it's what you represents that we hold here".
So they ordered pizzas and managed to sleep on coaches and were "freed" the next day. No one was hurt.
He didn't liked it in any way, but what was the point of torching the offices down ?
For the record, it was in the French West Indies, where unions are far more powerful than in metropolitan France.
When you're symbolically held in an office for press coverage and you know you'll be fed, and released in a few days, your best course of action is to sit down and play on your phone for 24h.
I'm not pro union, but is that so hard to understand? Are you really going to make a keyboard warrior claim here that you'd stick a fork in the neck of a union member holding you 'hostage' the first opportunity you get?
It's not symbolical if the person is not allowed to leave.
1. you are held hostage in a home invasion. You kill a kidnapper. The police won't arrest you (in the Netherlands - maybe other European countries they will, I don't know many details of all EU countries - but this is just for argument's sake anyway). Most likely you will not be convicted of anything (depending on the exact circumstances).
2. you are held hostage during a strike by a union group. They put you in an office, bring you some water maybe, then lock the door (or let's make it more extreme - let's say they tape your hands together, just like the burglar in the scenario above). You wriggle yourself out, take the knife on the side table that is usually used to cut cake for someone's birthday, and when the door opens, you stab the guy on strike in the eye and run out.
What do you think will happen? Will you be charged and/or convicted in this second scenario?
If there is a (in terms of legal repercussions) difference in outcome between the two scenarios, why do you think that is? Would the defense in the court be 'oh but I was actually being held hostage, this was justified self defense'?
(note that I'm not talking about what 'ought to be' here, I'm talking about 'what is'. I'm not interested in arguing hypotheticals based on legicentric fantasy legal theory. Although one might argue what a person in such a case could reasonably expect to happen, which is a real consideration in a legal argument on self defense.)
If they locked a door I would try to break it down or break a window to get out. They'll either let me leave, or they're going to have to start to use force to stop my leaving, right? At that point they're the ones escalating it. The more force they used to try to stop me leaving, the more force I'd try to match it with.
If they get to the point where they're trying to make me stay using a knife, then yes I would literally stab them to escape, which would be totally reasonable force.
If it's really as 'just a prank bro' as you say, I guess they'd just let me leave at the point where I start breaking things to get out. If they're willing to use violence to keep me then I'm going to try to overmatch that with more violence.
The problem with just sitting there and accepting being captured is that you don't know how far it will escalate, and you have no control any more over what happens to you. You need to resist when you have the chance, not leave it until the point where things turn really ugly.
There were several cases of bosses being stripped recently weren't there? They must have been terrified they were going to be raped. Any reasonable person is going to fight for their life in that situation.
If they tape your hands together it is probably game over anyway, short of you being McGuiver. But before they tape your hands together they will have to resort to force and I'd be more than happy to escalate that gradually right up to the point where they'll fuck off. And if they don't that's their problem, you have a right to defend yourself against attackers with proportional force.
Stabbing someone in the eye sounds like it is a step too far especially since you have the option to threaten with the knife first. Holding someone against their will is not a 'play crime' but a very serious one.
Besides that managers have kids & spouses to get home to as well.
- Weekends (40 hour week)
- Minimum wage
- No child labor
- Workers compensation
- Not being massacred by your employer¹
¹ See, e.g., the Ludlow Massacre, the Thibodaux Massacre, Battle of Blair Mountain.
The economy hasn't stopped developing however. 80 hour work weeks at the factory have been replaced with 40 hour weeks with 20 hours of unpaid overtime. Child labour has been replaced with unpaid internships. Minimum wage often doesn't match increases in inflation and cost of living, not to mention regional changes in cost of living.
Also productivity has practically doubled in the UK since 1980, yet labour laws have largely stayed the same. It could be time to implement 32 hour weeks, or ban unpaid overtime, or raise the minimum wage. All of these require strong unions IMO.
Unions have the economic effect of boosting working-class wages and well-being for people in a particular group: high-skill working class people. They depress wages, increase unemployment, and reduce well-being for the most vulnerable groups, particularly minorities and those with low education. There is no broad positive effect on labor from unions; we know from the data that the benefits accrue to a certain type of worker, and it's nowhere near the lowest classes of worker. These gains are relative, and do not enlarge the pie.
(EDIT: Downvoting me doesn't make the economics literature less conclusive on this point, and there's no reason why we should expect it to be otherwise. The labor struggle is an intra-class struggle between the more-employable working-class subset and the less-employable, which is exactly what you'd predict looking at who makes up the groups.)
But one by one:
>"Unpaid" internships are good -- they allow people who don't provide much value to learn and build their capital
Unpaid internships are not available to anyone who doesn't have the necessary capital to go without income for a year or so. Which is very few people, and mainly the rich. Or people who can take internships near their parents home provided their parents earn enough to support them and provided they're not in an abusive family situation which is still far too exclusive.
>People who want to work more than 40 hours should be allowed to work more than 40 hours, and should be allowed to make agreements with their employer that don't double their expense per hour at 40 hours.
Sure, but that's still paid overtime, I was talking about unpaid. And a lot of the time it's not a case of "people who want to work more than 40 hours" it's "people who have to work 40 hours". I didn't get a choice at my last job, I either did it or I got fired, and that was with the EU working time directive (it wasn't very effective)
>The minimum wage is just a price floor, and doesn't actually determine wages for more than an extremely small margin of workers, and raising it can increase unemployment among the most vulnerable populations.
A fifth of the UK workforce earned less than the living wage in 2017 [1] and the living wage here isn't that much higher than the minimum wage. I wouldn't describe that as a small margin. All those workers would benefit from increasing the minimum wage. Furthermore regarding increasing unemployment, this isn't a valid argument: it's well established in quite a few countries that minimum wage is not enough to actually live on, so if a business cannot afford to pay the minimum wage people need to survive then they are not an effective business. I really can't emphasise that enough. If people are unemployed because of reasonable increases in minimum wage, it is entirely the fault of the business owners for not being profitable, not the fault of minimum wage law.
>Unions have the economic effect of boosting working-class wages and well-being for people in a particular group: high-skill working class people. They depress wages, increase unemployment, and reduce well-being for the most vulnerable groups, particularly minorities and those with low education. There is no broad positive effect on labor from unions; we know from the data that the benefits accrue to a certain type of worker, and it's nowhere near the lowest classes of worker. These gains are relative, and do not enlarge the pie.
Source please.
>The labor struggle is an intra-class struggle between the more-employable working-class subset and the less-employable, which is exactly what you'd predict looking at who makes up the groups
IMO plain wrong. The labour struggle is between workers and owners of capital, in fact pitting the working class against each other has been a tactic those in power have used for millennia.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-populati...
But some want the potential (low probability but out-sized) upside at no risk and strain.
The fact of the matter is that when you make progress in an area you can’t just sit back and relax. You have to continue to work hard to prevent regression, especially when there are strong economic pressures in that direction. This is why unions are as important today as they were in the mid-19th century.
My favorite example, that does a wonderful job of pointing out the absurdity of this endless stacking, is the Twitter account A Crime a Day:
Who is going through and removing all of that trash? Nobody, it's perpetually expanding.
They almost never actually remove large bills like Dodd Frank from the system, they stack more cruft forever on top. If you want to roll back a section, you add 20 more pages of cruft to do it.
...That doesn't seem to fit the general "frivolous law" theme...
eg
"18 USC §1465 makes it a federal crime to produce an obscene, lewd, lascivious, or "filthy book" for sale in interstate commerce."
"10 USC §2674(c) & 32 CFR §234.11(a) make it a federal crime to drink alcohol at the Pentagon without written authorization."
"40 USC §6307 & 36 CFR §520.4(h) make it a federal crime to play a ball game at the National Zoo, except in an officially-designated ball game area."
"21 USC §§331, 333, 343(g) & 21 CFR §139.150(b) make it a federal crime to sell "egg noodles" that aren't ribbon-shaped."
"18 USC §46(b) makes it a federal crime to knowingly barter for out-of-state water chestnuts."
"16 U.S.C. §§707(a), 718g & 50 C.F.R. §91.14 make it a federal crime to submit an entry in the Federal Duck Stamp contest that you copied from a picture on the internet."
I looked up "21 USC §§331, 333, 343(g) & 21 CFR §139.150(b) make it a federal crime to sell "egg noodles" that aren't ribbon-shaped."
21 USC §331 is just about regulating fraud in commerce. It starts:
"The following acts and the causing thereof are prohibited:
(a) The introduction or delivery for introduction into interstate commerce of any food, drug, device, tobacco product, or cosmetic that is adulterated or misbranded.
You could show that to someone a couple thousand years ago, and nothing would prevent them from understanding the purpose of it. You could probably get someone from the time of Hammurabi to understand the concept.
21 CFR §139.150(b) doesn't make it illegal to sell egg based pasta that isn't ribbon shaped, it defines "egg noodles" as such, as opposed to tubular shapes which are not "egg noodles". Standards to facilitate commerce are normally considered legitimate even by libertarians who wish to radically shrink the federal government. So unless you are an anarchist or particularly wish to abolish egg noodles or inhibit commerce in them, I don't understand where you're coming from.
I suppose no political organizations are necessary in places where there are decent and enforced laws, not even political parties, but that's not how humans work. Decent laws aren't the result of generosity from those in power - decent labor law isn't a result of corporate altruism - but of political struggles between different elements of society. Democracy doesn't work magically; it works by the people who have a seat at the table competing and negotiating. Those without a seat are ignored - their obvious needs, their priorities (you can always identify those without a seat: the others say about their needs: 'they're exaggerating; it's not that big a deal'), and needs that only they have the experience to know or anticipate. Individual factory workers don't have a seat, but their union does.
The rest of the parent is just hyperbole.
In economies where minimum entitlements are sufficient to protect workers from exploitation, unions serve no useful purpose at all, they are simply leveling mechanisms. Meaning the do not protect workers from getting less than their worth, they simply pull people down and prevent people from advancing themselves beyond the average. Worst of all they make it nearly impossible to fire the incompetent, which itself seems like exploitation to me, forcing the component to pick up the slack of those who aren’t.
They serve the purpose of making sure workers get their legal entitlements.
For example, Unions right in Australia are tackling the problem of underpayment of legally mandated wages “wage theft” and have succeeded in getting a state government to adopt as policy the treatment of deliberate underpayment as a criminal matter with criminal penalties.
Sounds like you agree with me. In a democracy, unions are just about the least efficient way you could possibly address inadequate enforcement of labor laws. If all you want is a workers lobby group, then why do you think the best way to achieve that is with organisations that exploit people with collective bargaining agreements, and enforce a tyranny where nobody can be fired? Want to know why it’s so impossible to fire a corrupt cop? Unions. Want to know why incompetent teachers can last a whole career defrauding our children? Unions.
There’s no rational connection between wanting to better enforce labor laws that are already on the books and wanting unions. Democracies offer many far superior ways to address such issues.
Not only that, you seek to put words in my mouth about exploitation and tyranny.
I'd also like to point out that beyond your (in my view) irrational distaste for unions, you have a very US-centric view of what a union is. Those of us looking from the outside in are constantly bemused by people like you.
Please only respond to the things I actually say, not the things that you think I will say in the caricature you have built.
According to who? By what standard? And regardless of their current state, shouldn't workers get as much as they can for themselves, just like everyone else? Corporations sure do everything they can for themselves; IMHO even enlightened self-interest, such as net neutrality or reasonable tax laws, is not a limitation.
You clealy have no idea about what you're saying. For your comment to make any sense you need to believe that any worker acting exclusively by himself has the resources to enforce those laws agains any company and suffer no repercussion during the process. This idea is utterly absurd.
Meanwhile, unions do offer specialized legal services and do pressure managers to not overreach or overstep their authority, and do so as a proxy to any employee and even while preserving his anonymity if needed.
In fact, if anything you've said made any sense then unpaid overtime or unpaid weekend work would be unthinkable, but instead it's the norm in some abusive companies without any union.
Yes because that’s how laws work, it’s up to the individual to enforce them...
Literally no laws work this way.
Again, you clearly have no idea about what you're talking about. It's quite obvious that a law means nothing if you have no way to enforce it or if there are serious repercussions if you try. The moment a lone employee acting alone creates a problem for his immediate supervisors or higher ups, he singles himself out as a target. In jurisdictions that follow an at-will employment doctrine, where any employee can be immediately fired without any justification, then any employee that raises any problem to the company's managers can be fired just for being a nuisance.
That's not what I said at all. Please don't attribute to me a claim I never made.
> It is employers role to comply with the law, the department of labor enforces it. You don’t need your employers permission to report law violations to the department of labor.
Again, you keep missing the point. What I've said is quite obvious: an employee acting alone has very few, if any, resources to go against his employer, and in the rare cases an employee goes against his employer then even if he wins he is left wide open to repercussions. I don't understand how you failed to get the point I've made when I've mentioned the effect that at-will employment doctrines has on this.
In addition to that, it is also trivially easy for an employ to launch a civil suit. Any case with even an ounce of merit will attract lawyers willing to work on commission.
Even further, you have offered no justification at all for why you think unions are necessary to enforce the law, instead only resorting to the fallacious line of reasoning that it is up to employees to argue with their employers for minimum entitlements.
Lawyer here. Your second sentence is incorrect: (1) Litigation is far more expensive that you seem to realize; most rank-and-file employees can't afford it – when my wife, also a lawyer, and I were younger, we used to joke that we couldn't afford us. (2) The default rule in the U.S. is that each party pays its own attorney fees unless otherwise stated in a specific statute or in a contract. The availability of class actions helps plaintiffs' lawyers achieve cost savings and increase the likelihood of getting paid, but the conservative wing of the Supreme Court just helped put the kibosh on that by ruling that employers could avoid class actions by insisting on one-at-a-time arbitration, which results in massive duplication of costs. (3) An individual employee's likely damage award is almost never enough to entice a lawyer into taking the case on a contingent-fee basis, i.e., where the lawyer only gets paid if the employee prevails. (4) Consequently, it's extremely difficult for an employee to find a lawyer to take on a garden-variety case against her employer.
In addition you get all the "retirement" packages where former politicians are hired by the companies they were supposed to regulate.
Why shouldn't the employees have the same right?
You can't take something that works in Switzerland out of that context and then apply it to some other country with the arguement 'it works in Switzerland'.
Not necessarily. Economic development can be limited to the owners of the companies whilst exploiting the employees. That is what gave rise to unionization, it was a reaction to abusive practices.
That unions later on became self sustaining and that they work against the interest of some of the people that are employed (seniority system for instance) has nothing to do with why they exist in the first place.
This is often heard but there is little truth to it. The more developed a market is, the larger the opportunities for employees to move to other jobs, and therefore exploitation is a problem that goes away by itself. Many countries in South East Asia have close to zero unions yet benefit from very high living standards and reasonable working hours (at least very much equivalent to the US).
If the "union" theory had any truth in it, then you would expect unions to be everywhere in the world before and during economic development to lead social conditions improvement. Yet social/working conditions improve regardless of unions presence.
You can't really blame legislation for needing more than 6-8 months to realize that an employee is not a good fit.
It can indeed hinder start-ups a little because of uncertainty in any new ventures.
But keep in mind that the vast majority of workers are not working in a startup environment. Relaxing a law to fit the legitimate needs of a small number of start-ups with an even smaller proportion of the work force at the detriments of the vast majority doesn't seem like a good idea.
And I've seen people getting fired when redundant and/or toxic for the company. The administration will keep an eye on you if you fire more than a dozen employees per year (for a 1500 employees company), when firing "en masse" (ironically named "plan de sauvegarde de l'emploie") an employers has some obligations like giving opportunities for training, maybe finding another position in the firm, firing people close to retirement with some compensation until their actual retirement (pre-retraite).
Lastly, this protection goes both ways, if you, as an employee, you end-over your resignation, you must remain in the company for 3 months, that way the employer has time to find a replacement and schedule a knowledge transfer in good conditions.
Not my experience in the jurisdictions where I've worked, but certainly a widespread belief among many French people.
>>Relaxing a law to fit the legitimate needs of a small number of start-ups..<<
I think the French labour laws need to be relaxed for the good of the French economy, not just for start-ups. The current system benefits those already in employment by entrenching their positions, but to the detriment of younger people seeking work.
The average national rate in Europe is around 18%, and 21% for the EU.
France is competing with this:
Austria 25%, Spain 25%, Netherlands 25%, Italy 24%, Norway 23%, Denmark 22%, Sweden 22%, Portugal 21%, Slovakia 21%, Estonia 20%, Finland 20%, Iceland 20%, Russia 20%, Poland 19%, UK 19%, Czech 19%, Switzerland 18%, Ireland 12.5%
Armenia 20%, Belarus 18%, Ukraine 18%, Romania 16%, Lithuania 15%, Albania 15%, Moldova 12%, Bulgaria 10%, Hungary 9%
Staying up in the 30s would put France at a severe disadvantage vs the rest of the EU and Europe. Germany will also be forced to lower its rate eventually.
The world average was near 40% ~35 year ago. The rate in the US came close to matching with the world average in the late 1980s. After that, the world average began declining consistently while the US remained high. When the world average is 22% and you're at 35%, you have a problem.
https://investinestonia.com/business-in-estonia/taxation/
Estonia's corporate income tax rate is not essentially zero, unless you plan to never distribute any profit. Otherwise it's 14-20%. It would be unusual for most businesses to never distribute profit.
Last year Estonia collected something like €368m in corporate income taxes. Or €283 per capita. Equal to about 4% of their budget. Not a huge sum, also not anywhere close to zero. In the US for 2018, corporate income taxes will be about 5% to 6% of tax revenue (4% to 5% of the budget). The US corporate income taxes collected, broken down on a per capita basis, will be around $650 to $700 for 2018, for comparison.
You can plainly see that Estonia collects corporate income taxes:
https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-estonia.pdf
The primary unusual thing Estonia does, is not tax profit until distribution.
As for the budget share, a significant part of that is going to be govt-owned corporations that are used as cash-cows, for example the energy production / distribution monopolies, national lottery, Tallinn Port etc. Last month's news - this year they contributed 157MEUR dividends: https://www.aripaev.ee/uudised/2018/04/19/riik-votab-ettevot...
In the end, "regular" companies end up paying less than you imagine. I think it could be a sign that the policy is working - companies are investing into the future and "paying it forward". Or they are doing creative feats like taking out profits as loans to parent companies, which is also known to happen, specifically the big Scandinavian banks here.
Specifically for startups, it is going to make a big difference if you do not need to pay yearly corporate tax at an arbitrary date (in relation to your business) and can a) postpone this until profitability or b) never pay a dime if your idea never pans out. You can even steer your company towards an exit without ever having to think about it.
Many people I know personally only distribute as much profit as they need for themselves. It is not double taxed with personal income tax, so it is spending money already after paying the corporate tax. This has lead to a debate as to whether this actually constitutes "entrepreneur salary" with entrepreneurs therefore paying less taxes than employees (the salary taxes are much higher: http://palk.crew.ee).
That is why for a startup you can "essentially" forego thinking about it. When you do, you know you have made it :)
The question I have is whether you're required to claim a salary (instead of capital gains) as a sole employee of your corporation if you're a full tax resident there.
This might be too specific for HN discussion, but feel free to email me.
The actual average in France is 23% (in 2016, it's probably lower now) so nothing really extraordinary. The maximum rate is also being progressively brought down from 33% to 25%.
The status of a job for government is tha tyou CAN'T be fired ! Whatever stupid thing you do, whatever you work or not, you can't loose the job.
It's also less payed than a job in a private company, and you almos know exactly what will be your income on the last year you'll work, but it's safe.
And for big companies, the union are mandatory, so it's almost the same. Hard to be fired.
And that's why beeing an entrepreneur in France is so hard and not understand by most people. Why take risks ?
Brazilian here. It seems that we have a lot in common.
However, entrepreneurship and self made man/business culture has been getting increasingly popular (mostly at São Paulo) although lawmakers have not been following the trend.
edit: formatting.
My major fear living in Paris is losing my apartment while being between jobs or even still in the trial period.
1. If your contractor has just you as a client for a long time, if you stop the mission he can sue you for « economical dependance »
2. The real estate market does not let you rent without a solid employee contract, making it very hard to independent contractors to find a house.
The important market is not in contractors but rather in « contractors supporters », basically buying contractors time and selling it to big corporations.
These « middlemen » take the juridical risk, which make the big corporations accepting the contractors, and help the contractors finding missions.
These middlemen also take fees on missions.
Here in the UK, if your contractor works for you for a long time the government could argue that they're a "disguised employee". This a type of tax dodge, so they will come down on them like a ton of bricks, and might come after you as well.
>The real estate market does not let you rent without a solid employee contract, making it very hard to independent contractors to find a house.
My previous employer found this out the hard way, as they tried to get a developer to work in Paris for a few months. But because he was employed by the London office and not the French one, they didn't want to give him a French work contract. The whole thing fell through when the developer did a lot of research (which I feel the company should have done before making the offer) and said he wasn't going to move unless they helped him with all of the paperwork to make it fully legal. The company realised how much work was involved and then said he didn't have to come, haha. They also looked at renting AirBnB rooms for the whole period but Paris is clamping down on AirBnB so it wasn't worth it.
>These « middlemen » take the juridical risk, which make the big corporations accepting the contractors, and help the contractors finding missions.
Yeah, contractor recruiters are very big in IT here, especially in London. Most IT contractors use recruiters because they do all of the legwork, and also take most of the risk. But the government is starting to put a lot of pressure on them because they are so worried about disguised employment (which to me seems like a non-issue anyway).
This kind of thing is a subtle form of protectionism at the local level, IMO; it makes it hard for people to move about the country for work, let alone from outside.
This is before we get into the question of immigration rules with circular dependencies ..
The current trend is to externalize ALL the computer-related work, which is crazy as in the companies I've worked at, we (contractors) were in charge of the "crown jewels" of the company; without us, nothing would have worked. Nothing. So, yes, we are easier to fire (by simply stopping a contract), but our knowledge is lost, so the productivity takes a HUGE hit everytime (and don't ask me about documentation or knowledge transfer, those are considered a loss of time by the management!)
There are laws against it, to prevent the "disguised worker" phenomenon, but those laws are useless and ignored or there are work-arounds. The truth is, when you stay for more than 3 years in the same job (like I did), it's obvious that you ARE acting as a regular salaried worker.
Nowadays, it's much more difficult to find a job at a company than it was 20 years ago (or more). Consulting/contracting companies have replaced all those workers. with HUGE negative consequences on productivity, loyalty & workers' attitude.
In the -big- telecom companies I've worked at, as a contractor, you had 50% to 80% of contractors in the teams!
About 15 years ago, I worked in a BIG telecom company, who stopped ALL their contracts before the end of the year (to have numbers that looked "good"). All activity ground to a halt, because the people who "did stuff" were the contractors. Nothing was done during the 3 months period it took to rehire (mostly the same people). Salaried coworkers who were there during that period told me that the corridors were empty, and that it felt really weird to come and work in mostly empty buildings... Of course, they lost many people who had started other contracts. A smaller company would probably have gone bankrupt.