I, as an expat, am absolutely grateful and have changed my tune on the “European welfare state” trope to “this just makes sense”. I got let go from a Berlin based fintech and got 3 months pay plus a small severance. They did this likely because funding fell apart during the pandemic but it could have also been to cull people that they didn’t need but they did do right by us.
I'm absolutely amazed at how people in the US are so against severance being mandatory.
It's just vastly better organized in a way that (largely) protects consumers from capitalism where it doesn't belong.
“I like free money” is hardly a good argument to support statements like “it just makes sense”.
That's not an argument also, Germany is actually doing very well for everyone ( civilians, business, healthcare, innovation, ...)
They are almost launching their contact-tracing app, while the poor, that need it, in the US get 1200$ in the next 3-6 months, lol.
The rich get 1.700.000 $ though, that's "normal". Good job! /s
Perhaps you were talking about the federal state saying that states have to look for their own medical supplies? That's nice
Employment is a transaction, like any other. Doing some business yesterday is no guarantee of business tomorrow.
You'll forgive us for not being convinced by your argument.
Except that you can't later withdraw your consent. You said that was "a violation of consent".
Which is it?
Employment contracts in the US (if they exist at all and aren’t simply an implicit agreement, so-called “at will” in most states) don’t generally provide for severance. Almost every one I’ve ever read allows for either party to opt out at any time without penalty, or explicitly states what the remaining liabilities would be in the instance that one of the parties did end the transaction.
If you don’t have a written, signed contract, you cannot assume future consent to perpetuating or extending a transaction. There wasn’t any explicit future-consent.
The existence of a written, signed contract changes that.
I'm sorry but there's plenty of both liabilities and obligations in the event of early termination. Have a look at your telco contract if you don't believe me
This is just a bad-faith attempt at using the language for sexual and interpersonal consent to pretend that businesses and workers are on an equal footing and have no obligations to their staff.
Making employers responsible for severance pay is a way of aligning costs with information asymmetry, and also trying to make employers at least a little sensitive to the impact their whims can have on real people's lives.
It’s interesting though, how would you go about establishing a proof?
I always enjoy Hans Rosling going through the stats, if you’ve time it’s well worth it https://youtu.be/FACK2knC08E
Hint: they do.
The argument that the regulatory burden on small businesses can be bad for economic growth does have some real validity - the great work on this is Hernando De Soto's The Other Path on Peru. However, that's an argument for making the tradeoff in an informed way and exempting small businesses (something the EU is extremely bad at!), while being against severance pay in its entirety is just a profit-before-humans talking point.
It's also important that people can get unemployment benefits for at least 6 months after losing their job. I'm not sure how that works in the US. I'm guessing it changes per state like everything else in the US.
So all employees effectively pay for layoffs, which goes against you if you're not the one that gets laid off.
(I am very much in favor of mandatory severance and generally other kinds of safety nets.)
Or you could say that the company needs to save the profit generated by your position until it equals your anticipated severance before paying dividends from that profit. So it’s still a drag on profits, but it has nothing to do with other employees.
Sounds like a very acceptable compromise. I'm happy to chip in. I'm also happy that I pay taxes for universal healthcare so that I can take advantage of that when I'm in a disadvantaged position, but that's me.
When you're employing people you're not already thinking about their future exit. You hire based on your growth, so you're usually optimistic about the future and thinking about employees being long term. If not you hire contractors, who you can lay off easily.
Part of this is that you can't just fire people without good cause and without following a process. There are probationary periods to allow the hire to be let go if they don't work out in the first 6 months or so, but after that you're into a long "managing them out of the business" process that may or may not end up with a pay off.
+1 for the contractors thing. If there is already an expiration date for these people, then make them a contractor or reach out to a staffing firm.
I'm sure you already know, but in the UK you can be fired for any non-protected reason within the first 2 years of employment. I think UK companies are typically less cavalier than their US counterparts when it comes to firing, but in the frist 2 years, the employee protections are similar to US at-will states.
1 - If you make it too hard to let people go, companies will be less willing to hire. (You’ve added a cost to the employee)
2 - If you make the cost of severance too high, it will kill companies that might otherwise have a chance to squeak through.
There are plenty of good arguments on the other side (companies offloading social costs to the govt, etc) but these two are consistent with economic theory on labor supply and demand.
So have you run a business where you had to hire employees?
This creates a never-ending hamster-wheel of hiring-firing - not good for the employee and not good for the company.
Also, if paying 1 month of severance is too much for a company, then perhaps it is not run well and should be allowed to fail?
I agree that no severance sucks. Although keep in mind that in theory, higher salaries should equal hire savings. The average developer in SF makes more than the average developer in Berlin (how much more... maybe 2X)? If you could make 100% more & forego a severance package, would you?
It's not a real world choice, I'm just trying to offer context that one way to look at higher salaries is that you are getting cash more cash upfront instead in lieu of having a stronger social safety net. And people who work crap jobs just don't have a safety net, which is another conversation.
In France if you earn 50k/month, your boss actually pays you ~100k. 50k is going in your pocket, and the other 50k goes to a centralized fund which pays for healthcare, pensions, and unemployment compensations ; things you would have paid for yourself otherwise.
People in France complains a LOT about those 50k that are "lost" but in fact there are "forced savings", or "indirect salary", what they don't realize is that not having a centralized compulsory saving system end would up costing them so, so much more.
Of course, just because you could doesn't mean you actually should sue. For one thing, as a tech worker you're probably better off just finding a different job; if you're someone from a different profession who has a harder time finding jobs (or you're pregnant or sick or something), it's different of course.
I am just saying this because I was fired (together with my whole team) recently for very dubious reasons and while I did get severance, I am not sure it would have been actually legal (especially after it turned out the reasons they gave us were largely bullshit). But in the end it wouldn't have been worth it going into a legal argument.
Unfortunately I already signed the termination agreement. Honestly it’s probably better I just find a new role even though I think legally it’s a bit suspicious given the history of the company to experience mass layoffs.
Whether the ${COUNTRY} social model is sustainable is another question.
There are plenty of apparently reasonable ${PEOPLE} that argue it is not.
${PEOPLE} = "americans"
it seems to compile as well...
Europe has problems, but they've had their periods of extreme expansion and contraction and learned their hard lessons.
The new average emissions target for new cars in the EU is 95g CO2/km. That's equivalent to 4.1 l/km (57.4 mpg) of gas or 3.6 l/km (65.3 mpg) of diesel. That's already ambitious on paper, but manufacturers are soon required to have cars record the actual consumption of their fleets on the road.