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Comment by diordiderot | Hacker News Reader

This seems fair if it goes both ways.

You can't fire me without notice, I can't quit without notice. Gives everyone time to get their affairs in order.

If that's the situation, don't be a petulant unethical crybaby about not getting what you want when you want it and do the job you're being paid to do.

Rights come with responsibilities.

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No, it doesn't seem fair at all.

The employer should provide severance. Their act of removing a person's livelihood can have devastating consequences for the individual.

The employee shouldn't have to give notice, and forcing someone to PAY a fee to NOT work is forcing them to choose between wage theft and indentured servitude.

By and large, losing one employee won't make or break a company (and if it does, it should have given them more equity and/or autonomy to have a stake and sense of power to change some of the reasons they're leaving).

Losing an employee from one day to the next without any possibility to do knowledge transfer or implement a transition plan is far more disruptive than having then continue to work for a minimum period.

The idea that if you just pay people enough money they will work a single job their entire career and never quit is absurd.

The article specifically talks about doctors and nurses. There is no knowledge transfer going on. Even if I were to be generous to your argument, if the company trained a person to do that special job then they can train someone else.

Giving two weeks is a courtesy, nothing more. Forcing someone to work against their will ant great financial penalty is indentured servitude and the article cites court cases that are proceeding under human trafficking claims.

> Giving two weeks is a courtesy, nothing more. Forcing someone to work against their will ant great financial penalty is indentured servitude

What do you mean "against their will"? They have voluntarily signed a contract. I hope that contract is fair (notice goes both ways), but it's definitely transparent from the beginning. If you don't want that, don't sign such a contract.

Read the article. Imagine you were a foreign immigrant brought in to work as a nurse. Turns out you were sold a bait and switch, and the work conditions are straight from hell. However, the contract you signed said you’d owe them a $20,000 termination fee when you wanted to quit. But you don’t have $20k in the bank and where you’re from the monthly wage is equivalent to $100 USD so no one you know has that money either. They threaten to bury you with legal bills to defend yourself unless you pay to break the contract. So instead of quitting you suffer and try to save up $20k, but you’re barely making ends meet as it is, so maybe you’ll be able to buy your freedom after you’ve served out the contract.

I’m pretty certain you’d call that a modern form of indentured servitude. They got a judge to agree with that and currently have a case against the company for human trafficking.

In the UK the mutual notice doesn't start immediately. You could make a clean break even a few months in. Ofc they could fire you as well

Interestingly, this is pretty much what it‘s like in Germany. My contract, for example, has a mutual notice period of 3 months. It‘s not legal to give the employee a longer notice period than the employer.

It would be fair if corporation would also allow new hires to wait 4 months due to Notice Period. But that is not the case. They want immediate joiners while their employees spend months after giving notice

Is this the job they signed up for, though? The working conditions sound bad and unless that was very clearly communicated before signing it sounds like the company isn’t keeping their side of the deal. There’s an enormous power differential here since they can easily make their employees’ lives bad but it’s ruinously expensive for an employee to get any sort of consequences for the company.

It'd be interesting to see an analysis of whether it is enforceable (across states and so on).

The article talks about it in the context of non-compete agreements, which the provision is at least similar to (specifying what happens after the employee decides to terminate the relationship).

There’s nothing fair about holding a corporation and a person to the same standard.

Losing a job is more devastating than losing an employee, though. At its worst, losing a job can mean losing healthcare, losing a home, having to move. Losing an employee at its worst usually means redistributing work for a few weeks or months.

Adding: in our profit-over-people centric world, where corporations are treated like an entirely invented class, elevated above the worker, I posit that corporations have more chance to be bailed out than people do.

You don’t see people pointing at homeless corporations saying, “that could be you, walmart.”

But you DO see corporations happy to have scared emps worried about being homeless, AND those same emps helping, through taxes, enable welfare so that walmart can pay less in wages.

Literally anything a public corporation does is evil. Every single one is required, by laws they lobby for, to put shareholder value over employees.

The remarkable thing about the law is that it doesn't matter what you (ignorantly) think about it. Indentured servitude is illegal and it's incorrect for you to have a problem with that.

Notice periods are standard contractual terms in a lot of european countries. Some even have legally mandated minimums.

The fact that it may somehow fit the US definition for indentured servitude doesn't make it ignorant to think it's a fair deal. Laws aren't always perfect.

They are common enough in the US, too; they would only be indentured servitude if the government enfirced them by ordering specific performance rather than by way of damages for breach, which, in the US, it generally will not for labor contracts.

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