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Comment by PunchTornado | Hacker News Reader

fake dilemma. you can fire state employees in France but it is much harder and you have to have good reasons.

most large businesses don't have good reasons to fire a huge chunk of their workforce, except for delivering more money to rich shareholders.

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Apparently their jobs had become obsolete. Why exactly should their employment continue? Framing it as "delivering more money to shareholders" is so misguided.

Their salaries would be paid by the public anyway, factored into the price of the company's product.

Isn't it also humiliating to be paid for useless work? I think it can be better for the "victim" to be fired, too, so that they can find a more useful occupation.

How do people actually feel avout paying people for doing useless work? I personally find it quite enraging at times.

Where in the article is the "taking it up with the government" part? Shouldn't government take part of the blame?

Companies often hire new employees instead of retraining existing ones.

Yes. You can fire a state employee in France but the departure bonus is big and it cost money.

Consequently it is much better for shareholders to push them to leave by making their life miserable, and it's exactly what they did....

Delivering money to shareholders is a good reason. That’s the entire reason these enterprises exist. Everyone hired knows that’s the deal when you applied to work at a company. If you dont agree with that, don’t take the job.

The people being harrassed had been hired by a public service, not a company succumbing to the cult of "shareholder value" as the sole metric of a company's worth.

I didn't say I agreed with the harassment. I said that firing someone to improve return on investment is a perfectly acceptable reason to fire someone.

You said that they signed up to a shareholder value driven organisations, so should accept layoffs as part of such a company, but they didn't join a private company, they joined a public service that was later privatised.

Public vs private shouldn't matter here. Public institutions exist to provide services to taxpayers. Taxpayer money should be put to the highest and best use. If the job of some government employee is no longer the highest and best use of that taxpayer money, they should be let go. Taxpayers have no obligation to pay people indefinitely for labor that they no longer need or value.

taxpayers ~= shareholders

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