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Comment by mdavis6890 | Hacker News Reader

The companies behavior was indeed poor, but I wonder how many people realize that laws that make it hard to reduce your workforce lead to this bad behavior.

Business needs change all the time, and being able to adjust your workforce in response is critical. Not being able to do that can be very costly for both the business owners and employees in the long run, or even the short run if the business has revenue or cash-flow problems.

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Alternatively, companies need to accept that being able to adjust your workforce is costly and account for that. This is not something new for them. Revolut knew damn well what the labor laws looked like when they opened their Poland offices.

Following laws and regulations is part of the cost of doing business. There's no need to make excuses for companies that fail at doing this.

If the bad behavior is skirting the labor reduction laws, we should get rid of the labor reduction laws to reduce bad behavior?

This argument doesn't make sense to me.

You see, you cannot skirt a law if there is no such law.

Sounds like all they had to do was give people proper departure operations, and although they would have not saved as much expense, they would have avoided looking like amoral jerks and maybe even avoided a bunch of labor lawsuits in various places.

Just treat people decently, and you don't have to be painted as callous bastards.

Maybe companies which build their business on a high employee turnover and are incapable of any long-term planning shouldn't exist in the first place?

I think people who crave stability should purchase it with their own money (for example, by saving or buying some sort of employment insurance). Forcing businesses to fulfill their fantasies is a terrible idea both morally and economically. Even if you think everyone needs a big institutional daddy to care for them, simply paying unemployment benefits would likely work a lot better than penalizing the employers for adapting to changing conditions (effectively incentivizing them to keep unproductive employees).

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