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That has nothing to do with workers' rights. Firing with notice is how the problem is solved in Germany. When your boss fires you, you don't get chased out of the building, no, your employment contract transforms from indefinite to definite and you just wait until the contract runs out. Gross misbehaviour like theft allows immediate firing. Also new hires have a probatory period (several months) during which firing works exactly the same way it does in the USA e.g. you can fire immediately for any reason.

Americans will tell me how onerous this is and yet they somehow managed to screw it up anyway because I constantly read on the internet about "unfireable" employees which is a ridiculous concept. Even hiring quotas for large corporation's and government funded institutions (universities for example) don't matter when making firing decisions, the point is to let people with other backgrounds into the door, not keep them locked in.

> That has nothing to do with workers' rights

A french court would disagree with you - the German process you described is impossible in france. once an employee has finished their trial period, only gross misbehaviour or an official economic redundancy plan can get rid of them...

You're saying that in France it's against the law to fire someone for performance related reasons?

Employers in France need valid grounds, which may be personal or economic. Personal grounds includes poor performance. Easier said than done though, it requires a lot of documentation proving that the employer provided sufficient training/retraining to improve performance, regular documented meetings to discuss performance problems, etc. If the worker stops showing up to work at all it becomes easier, but if the worker wants to drag out the process they can.

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and is a far cry from the OP's assertion.

only if the employee plays ball. all they need to do is go to the doctor, say that they're burned out, and no amount of poor performance reviews will be enough. the next step will be a negotiation between employer and employee

You can fire someone in France for poor performance.

But it's not like in the US where you just declare this, and then fire them. It works like in many union shops in the US. You need to document that poor performance, show missed deadlines, show that you attempted to train and accommodate them, give them a few months of heads up to adjust, and then you can proceed with dismissal.

Just think of France as an all-hands union shop.

> I constantly read on the internet about "unfireable" employees which is a ridiculous concept.

Anecdotally, I've heard about companies with these, which got that way by getting sued over and over again for wrongful termination. Now they are scared to even discipline employees engaged in sub-extremely-egregious behavior.

Like one story I heard was, "As long as they spend more time working than looking at porn, let's just let it be."

My 2 cents on this: Your company gets this way with poor leadership. Terminations without your i's dotted and t's crossed, and also an unwillingness to take some things on the chin for a broader view of how things are going to go.

Gov’t jobs often require due process to dismiss. This can involve steps that are almost impossible to fail. They also often have a probationary period. It’s cool that Germany does things differently.

I don't believe that the US Federal government can't lay people off.

Quite. What they generally mean is they have managers that are too incompetent or too temporary to do the work to get rid of people.

> Again, obviously tenants need rights, but it seems like many jurisdictions have overshot the sweet spot

Tenants need rights and landlords need tenants. In some cities (SF) the demand outstrips supply sufficiently that you won’t easily find housing but in other cities (NYC) there’s such a diversity in housing options that you’ll always be able to find a closet to rent somewhere.

I think it’s hard to say that tenants have too much rights. There’s no reason to enter the business of land letting unless you are comfortable with the regulations. Laws and their purpose come before profits.

It most definitely backfires in SF.

When i gave up my rent controlled apartment my landlady said she was leaving it empty.

Why?

Because she was retiring soon and in a 4-unit building the value of it goes up by $100,000 - $250,000 for each unit that is empty.

Why?

Because rent control locks in rent and this future income. Evictions can takes up to a year or more and mandatory payouts are often in the tens of thousands if you do evict without cause (say owner wants to move into a unit).

If the unit is empty someone can move in right away or rent for market rent.

The units were renting for ~$3,000 per month, so as long as she sold it within 9 years she wad ahead of renting the unit out.

I agree that landlords need to go in eyes wide open, but the challenge is rules can change after you get tenants.

And the big lesson here is landlords respond to incentives too. If regulations make it cheaper to do something negative, they’ll do it. Most people would.

I think you missed OP's point...

There are plenty of landlords right now happy to rent an apartment to a couple each with 6 figure salaries and no debt. But if they can't find such a couple, they'd rather leave their apartment empty.

There are lots of landlords like that, and the end result is there are lots of empty apartments and lots of other people who can't find housing.

The vacancy rate in the US is not high, at least according to statistics. I don’t know where this “lots of vacant apartments” narrative is coming from.

> There are lots of landlords like that, and the end result is there are lots of empty apartments and lots of other people who can't find housing.

The solution for that are serious vacancy taxes. If people are unwilling to assume the risk of hitting a "dud", they can always sell their property to some large-scale landlord.

That's why those landlords need to be taxed more : so they lose a great deal of money if they don't rent.

(if they sell up because they can't stomach the taxes, reducing home prices that is also a positive outcome)

Landlords taxed too much for vacant properties would just knock the property down and keep the land. Then later, when they want to recoup their investment, they rebuild.

Most properties it isn't the building that is valuable, but the inner city land where one can build a building.

>Landlords taxed too much for vacant properties would just knock the property down and keep the land.

Unless that was what was taxed.

>Most properties it isn't the building that is valuable, but the inner city land

Precisely my point. If you slap taxes on land you increase the available supply.

Quite the opposite. In many ways employers are like tenants - they rent out the position to you and in return cash in a certain part of the value you produce. Just like with landlords in a properly just society you do not need that middleman ... The hordes of unhoused people are there not because of desirable or undesirable tenants, but because of landlords gatekeeping the access to homes.

I have a rental house next to me. They got raided by SWAT a few years ago for using it as a selling house for fent.

I'm ok with some gatekeeping. There are some undesirable tenants.