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Comment by pasabagi | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about your 'iniquitous postulate'. If such a correlation existed, you would expect all countries with weak employee protection to enjoy economic growth that is better than their peers. That doesn't seem to be true. If you look at the employment protections of the UK[0], and compare them to the US[1], they seem fairly similar. And yet, the UK has very low worker productivity, worst-in-class economic growth, etc.

The problem with taking general economic lessons from the US is that the US is in a unique, and uniquely advantageous economic position.

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Due to some recent mishaps in the UK's foreign policy, it probably isn't a great index comparison for economic growth in the 2010s. However, prior to 2016, it was a high performer among European nations.

>If you look at the employment protections of the UK[0], and compare them to the US[1]

I think you meant to include citations at the bottom, but I don't see them.

https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/United%20States.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/United%20Kingdom.pdf here, sorry.

They aren't that similar. US has at-will employment, it's very straightforward. In the UK that's only true for a short period, then Euro-style worker protections start kicking in.

That depends on the kind of contract you have.

Comparing different legal systems and different practical implementations of those systems is hard - but I think the basic claim, that there's a inverse correlation between employee's rights and economic growth, isn't visible within the EU or elsewhere.

The UK is a good example because they have aggressively reduced the safeguards for workers (between 2014-2017 it was essentially a state with no safeguards if you could not afford the employment tribunal process), and is also an example of consistent poor economic growth.

It's silly to claim British companies were flouting employment law on a massive scale just a few years ago. That wasn't the case, especially as even pre-2017 legal costs were awarded to the winner and you can get a year's wages as winnings.

There's a big gap between the US and UK in this regard. The UK has and enforces the concept of an unfair dismissal as distinct from being fired due to discrimination. The US has the latter but not the former. In the UK you can't lay someone off if it would be unfair or if your dismissal process was unreasonable, where unreasonable can mean purely bureaucratic reasons like not following your own dismissal checklists.

In addition British employment tribunals are very worker friendly, resulting in frequent bizarre outcomes [1] like:

- "A worker who was absent for 808 shifts over a 20-year career – costing the firm an estimated £95,850 in sick pay – has won tribunal claims of unfair dismissal against his former employer." (employee won because employer didn't follow their own absence management procedures).

- "An office manager was discriminated against after she was told she was not allowed to work remotely from her son’s hospital bedside", deemed unfair because the boss "gave her views no credit" and "had a closed mind".

- "Worker unfairly dismissed for complaining about boss on Facebook, tribunal rules"

- An NHS worker who resigned won an unfair dismissal claim, because her workers had played a practical joke on her at one point and didn't like it when she complained.

- A lecturer accused of sending “aggressive” messages to colleagues was awarded £15,000 for unfair dismissal after an employment tribunal ruled there had not been a proper investigation into the allegations made against him, whilst also concluding that he had indeed sent aggressive messages.

The idea that this is a country that's "aggressively reduced safeguards for workers" will seem blinkered to the Americans on this site, who can be fired with zero notice and for any reason at all, with recourse only available if it can be proven to be sexism/racism/union organizing/etc. Winning huge awards because you weren't allowed to work remotely hardly exists there.

[1] https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1747159/worker-ab...

> It's silly to claim British companies were flouting employment law on a massive scale j

1. I wasn't claiming that.

2. It's not silly at all. British companies were and are flouting employment laws[0].

3. If the plural of anecdote is not annecdata, what's the plural of a cherry picked, unsourced, and likely misrepresented court ruling? Fiction?

[0]: https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/06/14/british-employe...

I'm confused, isn't an employee tribunal free? Or do you mean it wasn't between 2014-2017 and has become free since?

It wasn't free between 2014-2017. They changed the law to make it cost about a thousand bucks, then the highest court struck the change down as unlawful.

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