As a non-American I'm always surprised at how quickly people are fired there. I cannot imagine such a severe action been taking in any country I've worked in, thanks to robust workers rights.
I know that in Europe you can let people go if the company is experiencing financial difficulties and all that, but there's no question that the commitment to any new European employee you hire is higher than in the case of their US counterpart. And it would be foolish to assume that by increasing the decisioning barrier there wouldn't be some kind of an action-reaction happening in the market. As an employer, you never have 100% certainty that a new initiative will pay off - there's always this doubt in the back of your mind. Well, if the cost of failure is higher in one case than another, you are simply going to initiate fewer bets and will also give fewer people an opportunity to benefit from them (and those bets that you do initiate, you will approach more carefully and with fewer people).
Does this explain the entire gap in unemployment? Of course not. But I really do think it is a factor. So what's better - a bulletproof job that fewer people have, or a more risky proposition that more people can get access to? I don't think I have an answer to this, but I certainly don't think that the answer is always in increasing the decisioning barriers.
In addition you have to ensure you look at comparable statistics on who is counted as unemployed. This is toften tied to receiving unemployment benefits or being able to work etc. so different statistics might count based on different criteria.
It seems a different story for public orgs like schools and government positions. But private companies have a lot more freedom than some in here have been suggesting.
It’s likely a different story elsewhere in Europe though. There’s a lot of countries with their own laws in Europe
(I agree that the concept of server wage is pretty awful and should be eliminated as a matter of policy.)
This is an interesting take: with the idea that maybe the actual customers can contribute to the worker's salary
The customer always contributes to worker's salary
Unemployment in northern Europe is lower than in comparable places in the US with the same labour rights.
I can imagine unemployment in Southern Europe to be higher, but I am curious what you think you are comparing.
Here is something else to think about: it's safer to hire Americans because they will work 60 hours a week, never take a sick day, won't get pregnant and even if you give them vacation days they won't use them. So they are about 3/5 of the price of your typical European employee. A much better value proposition.
In return some of this will burn them out and put them on edge. This will likely have cultural, political and social consequences. If only we could give our American friends the sleep, reflection and family time they so much deserve.
You should also cosider wages and disposable income. The US worker will have a substantially higher wage, and because of lower taxes and living costs, a higher disposable income.
>You should also cosider wages and disposable income.
As one would consider purcasing power, healthcare costs, student debts, good public infrastructure, public spaces, physical safety, quality of water, quality of air, amount of people owining firearms, amount of conspiracy nuts, reliability of things like heat and electricity, the level of institutational racism, human rights, freedom of speech, etc. Lets not even dive in the fact that healthy high quality food is so much more expensive in the US.
In the end, the list of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_livable_cities does not contain many US cities at all.
This notion that you are rewarded better for the same work in the US is just not true. You have to work more, you have to put up with more abuse, you have to spend more time travelling to work, your roads are shit, your public transit is none existing. If you get into a small car crash, you have to worry for a bit if the other person will drive on (stucking you with a bill), or bring a gun (because they might just be angry and armed!). Your kids live in a cage in suburbia and after working all those hours, you will have to drive them around for them to go anywhere except their own house.
It's also worth noting that there's plenty of innovation happening in Europe too.
edit: I'll add a little more detail as to why I don't agree with your theory: in Europe you can still make employees redundant relatively easily. So if a company hires 100 employees then realises it's not cost effective, it can easily make 80 of them redundant. The catch is you cannot rehire for the same roles (basically you cannot make someone redundant to get around firing them), but given the purpose of your thought experiment was to cull staff after initial growth, redundancy works perfectly fine here.
Europe also has such as thing as short term contracts. Not contractors, though we obviously have that too, but FTEs that are hired for 6 months / 1 year rather than indefinitely. I'm sure America has this too.
So there isn't really any need to hire people with the intention of firing them shortly after. In fact any company that does this would get a pretty bad reputation pretty quickly. That's true for America too.
I've also seen people fired at short notice in the UK too so it's not like it can't happen in Europe even with greater worker rights. Heck, I was unfairly fired from one job -- but I hated the job anyway so it wasn't worth my time taking the company to court. Instead I used that energy to find a job I did like.
you respond definitively claiming that you know the answer, not causation.
I will say calling your own hypothetical link as "sensical" is a little presumptuous though. The very fact I disagreed in the first place should be evidence that it's sensical to everyone. :)
† Or never fired, like Eric Schmidt!
"A job" is really a fictional abstraction. Every day one works is additional services-for-money. Either party should rightfully be able to say "no thanks, that's enough, tomorrow is a new day" at any time.
If a person can get another job immediately, you aren't harming them by declining to continue to be a customer. In fact, you employing them is no power over them at all (unless you were overpaying them relative to their market value).
This does not happen in reality. There are transactional costs involved in job searching plus additional costs that come from onboarding.
It becomes more common the lower skill the job becomes, as the fungibility of the worker increases.
Sure, yeah. no innovation at all at Sandoz, Nestle, Novartis and Roche, and ~200 other companies in life sciences and another 300 in precision manufacturing.
Zero.
In 2018 the Swiss financial sector accounted for 9.1% of GDP. For comparison, in 2018 the US financial sector accounted for 7.4% of US GDP. To claim that it is _entirely_ banking is just plain wrong. To insinuate that there is no innovation elsewhere, (but there sure is in good ol' America), is just insulting.
>Financial markets in the United States ... In 2018, finance and insurance represented 7.4 percent (or $1.5 trillion) of U.S. gross domestic product[0]
>Switzerland’s financial sector ... as a share of gross domestic product (GDP). In 2018, it represented 9.1%[1]
[0]: https://www.selectusa.gov/financial-services-industry-united...
[1]: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/gdp_switzerland-s-financial-sec...
> Luxembourg remains a financial powerhouse – the financial sector accounts for more than 35% of GDP - because of the exponential growth of the investment fund sector through the launch and development of cross-border funds (UCITS) in the 1990s. Luxembourg is the world’s second-largest investment fund asset domicile, after the US, with $4 trillion of assets in custody in financial institutions.
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/luxembourg/... (2020)
Why is it that nice places to live have such horrible weather?
Norway (lets ignore because oil, but really it's not oil), Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland - also better? Longer vacations, better transit, definitely less hobos from what I remember, and no pervasive urine odour.
And bigger median annual incomes.
The weather is brutal in some parts of Nordics, I'll give you that. Not sure if I'd trade cold weather for urine vapours though. Very very difficult question, so I guess NYC isn't entirely hopeless just yet.
When you say per capita, are you referring to median or mean figures?
Hong Kong is richer per capita than Switzerland at the median and does not have nearly as robust of employee rights.
The US is richer at the median than Germany and does not have nearly the worker protections. The US also has vastly more low skill labor immigration (for 40+ years now), which persistently debases its median figures. Why are German workers so relatively poor, if the claims about worker rights is accurate? Surely the dynamo of Europe, the German economy, combined with such potent worker protections, should lead to enormous median wealth.
Luxembourg has 613,000 people. That's a pretty ridiculous comparison. You're comparing a giant country of 330 million to a modest size city like San Francisco.
Perhaps they made a different trade off, more leisure, less work?
I've only brought up the two most obvious examples (there many others) that negate entirely that silly notion that somehow human rights are incompatible with technological advancement, which borders on hate speech.
I mean, should we really go back to slavery to become space-faring species? Not the kind of future I want to live in.
Anything can be sold in America.
I feel in the US there is a lot of subconscious decision making that's essentially about buying more time with money, but in an actual monetary transaction as opposed to some implicit trade off. They seem to be chronically starved for time.
Social mobility in the US is still pretty good last time I checked. Most European countries have have lower income income inequality, but less mobility. Eg, the difference between the bottom and top 25‰ is smaller, but your birth class is more predictive of your future income.
The authors picked several factors like which they assume lead to improved social mobility (like births/woman), score countries out of 100, then perform a simple numerical average them to form the mobility index. Look at page 205 of the report for the list. They don't validate that the factors are actually related in any way to mobility outcomes.
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....
In fact, mean income feeds 0% into the index ranking. Intergenerational change in income feeds 0% into the index. Income inequality (fixed in time), feeds in 10% to the index.
> They do consider income as well: "In Denmark or Finland, for example, if one’s parent earns 100% more than another, it is estimated that the impact on a child’s future income is around 15%, compared to about 50% in the United States...".
That is a reference to another study in the section explaining "why social mobility matters". It was NOT included in the Index ranking. That line data isn't sourced well, so it is hard to follow up on what exactly they are comparing and how.
Maybe, maybe not. I'd argue there are far more who tried and failed than who succeeded, but I don't know if that ratio of success is better or worse than in other countries today (yes, today - not when the US economy was booming relative to other countries, or when immigration was easy, or in the early days of Silicon Valley, or back during the Gold Rush(es) etc).
In any case, though, I would argue this argument applies to a narrow slice of the population, namely those whose main goal is to get rich. Not everybody wants to "work hard and become rich". Not everybody wants life to be a competition to get ahead. Plenty of people are not deeply invested in a career and simply want to work 40h/week for a decent salary and still be able to afford a decent life.
Others feel a calling to a profession that will generally not make you rich, but is still valuable to society. Case in point: teachers. Extremely valuable to society and extremely badly compensated in the US. If I wanted to be a teacher, I'd much rather be in most European countries than in the US.
I'm not a loyal employee. I do most jobs just good enough to get by, and alway looking for a angle to extract more money out of an organization. (It was easier before being surveiled with cams). I always like a few coworkers, and we become friends, but despised the corporation, and everyone in charge.
But I'm never fired.
I'm usually shocked over the person they fire.