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Comment by throwaway9870 | Hacker News Reader

I used to work at a large US tech company known for making a lot of acquisitions. One time I was assisting with one and was having drinks with the VP coordinating a lot of this growth and he explained he would never acquire a French company because of the labor laws. Now, he was a German, so take that with a grain of salt :) However, the key point here is the same story we see repeated all the time: simple things such as labor laws protecting employees can backfire in unexpected ways.

I am not claiming I have the answer or the French laws are wrong, just presenting a data point. Nevertheless, this is HN, so I expect people how dumb I am and how I have no idea what I am talking about. Fire away.

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How is that a backfire? Sounds like the employees were sufficiently protected from a company that clearly had no intention of following said law.

The company is a multi-billion dollar company that absolutely follows all employment laws. They just didn't want to deal with the French laws.

And yet Apple, Microsoft, SAP and Facebook have offices in Paris.

What's up with that then?

This shows that even giant US and German companies can work with French labor laws just fine otherwise they wouldn't be there.

So, to me, this whole current push in the west to drive down labor laws in the sake of "staying competitive" is just a big globalization scam on the working class and a backtrack of all the quality of life progress made from years of struggle by previous generations.

Good for France for not giving in!

What are the size of those offices? (I don't know the answer to this question).

Every multinational company of a sufficient size is going to have "an office" in a major developed country.

The question to me is whether or not that office is employing more than the minimum required for the company to sell products in that country. If your "office" is just local sales and support, some lawyers for local legal issues, etc, I don't think that's a strong case.

Do they do substantial R&D there? Are there new products that come out developed by "Microsoft Paris"? Etc.

So they didn't want to follow French law. Sounds like a bullet dodged for the French employees who are protected by those laws.

This doesn’t seem like a bad thing at all, allows the french company to further develop independently while still being locally owned... maybe bad for the owners but not necessarily for French society

It is a big handicap building a small company in tech knowing the largest company in the space which does a large number of acquisitions will probably not be interested in you despite how good your work is.

Depends if your goal is to sell ASAP. I know that in my part of Europe the government agencies that support small businesses with grants etc hate when they sell to foreign competitors as most likely outcome is IP transfer and breakup of a potential competitor. If these policies select for those unwilling to do this that’s fine as far as they’re concerned.

Maybe I'm misreading this, but isn't this a good thing?

'Small company avoids being taken over by globalcorp because their employee rights are too strong'?

I'm trying to think of other US-Euro takeovers but right now the only one coming to mind is Microsoft/Nokia... and that's not good story

While it's true that French labor laws are expensive and constraining, the same is true of German laws.

you can also do this argument to other way. american labour law is a joke, and outside of the 1% circles on HN, workers in the US have terrible working conditions for a western, developed nation.

also, a cultural thing I don't see talked about much on HN is that many Europeans are critical of capitalism and are far more class conscious then most Americans (from my personal experience).

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