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Comment by fullmoon | Hacker News Reader

I live in a modern central European nation.

There is nothing dystopian about denying people that are no longer employed office access.

I live in a modern central European nation.

All our contracts are managed by unions and you can't just fire someone out of the blue, there's notice periods on both sides (unless there's just cause for termination)

I live in a modern central European nation.

Yes, and most of the time the fired employee will be sent home during his notice period, so im not sure what you are talking about?

The thing is, mass layoffs are often discussed widely in Europe since its mostly blue collar employees and the unions and politicians are often trying to prevent the layoffs.

Precisely. Most places in Europe, you're able to find ways to fire individual tech workers with whatever notice period dictated by the contract terms. Mass layoffs of tech workers is quite rare.

Mass layoffs (or some kind of forced unpaid leave) is typically something that happens for blue collared jobs when there is a reduction of demand for their products.

The twitter case is different, though. Twitter was a hostile takeover (even in the end, it was the company that forced the transaction). The takeover was not done for economic reason (or that was what was claimed), but because the new owner wanted to radically change the values of the company.

For employees that base their personal identity on those old values, this makes them natural enemies of the new owner. When Musk carries the sink in, he is like an enemy warlord accepting the surrender of an enemy tribe.

After a short tally, the enemy warlord lets half the prisoners go, after disarming them (takes away access to accounts and buildings), while the other half are allowed to join his forces, if they desire to.

This is probably the way this had to go. Letting everyone keep their access to the infra would be crazy. Now the question that remains, is how much does he have to pay those that got fired.

Which is a large reason why people in Europe are so much poorer than US, and not getting any richer either over time (in contrast to the US).

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/xgoouz/americans_ha...

What are you talking about. USA has a serious problem with poverty and homelessness. It's much worse than in Europe.

Also we can have a heart surgery here without going bankrupt.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-r...

Average Joe (or median Joe) has it significantly better in the US. Poor Joe would probably do better in EU.

I would say upper middle class joe has is better in the states. Everyone else is barely clinging on to their lives in perpetual serfdom because of no universal healthcare, extreme housing costs, extremely expensive education, etc…

Statistics about average and median income in the US and EU is widely available. Also the graph linked above about disposable income shows that only in the lowest 10th percentile people in Europe are (marginally) richer that in the US. Starting with lower middle class the gap becomes quite significant already, and what's important is only growing.

So what? They might be in the books or twiddle their thumbs but union or not they’re is no right to location or remote system access post termination.

> There is nothing dystopian about denying people that are no longer employed office access.

That conveniently leaves out the dystopian parts. Being logged off remotely, no personal communication, no delay, &c.

That's just modern technology. I'm not aware of any country where labour laws would prevent logging employees out remotely. There are some where you can't be laid off immediately, but even there you could be denied access to the systems and just get paid for the rest of your tenure I believe?

Correct. Places with a statutory consulting period can lock you out, but they have to pay you for the consultation period.

That email went out to all employees, not just the ones that were laid off.

So? If they need specific people to come in then they'll probably just call them, I'm guessing they're running with a skeleton crew while they do the lay offs. Most of the people in the office probably won't even be Twitter employees.

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