Comment by southernplaces7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by southernplaces7 | Hacker News Reader

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southernplaces7

You seem to forget why companies hire people in the first place: for the sake of making more money and growing while paying those employees for services rendered as long as those services are needed.

A business, particularly one that isn't some state-subsidized, leeching megacorp, doesn't have an obligation (nor should it) to operate as a make-work office. Its most fundamental purpose is to benefit itself. There's nothing morally wrong with this. I'm sure you've hired people in the past for temporary work and then stopped hiring them when you don't need it. To call the guy the scum of the earth is absurd and smugly hypocritical. He did what he felt necessary for his company and was rather fair in helping the laid-off staff transition.

Dynamic economies work with these kinds of rights for companies. Countries that forbid it also tend to suffer stagnant employment numbers in which business are very careful about hiring in the first place. I'd prefer the former, it certainly helps younger people find jobs more easily than we see in some of the 50% youth unemployment countries where "workers are always protected". I'd suggest getting off your high horse.

It has gone so bad in many countries that companies cannot even fire people (due to headache that comes with it) and have to ask employees to rather resign via some way (WFO)

Badly for who?

Anyone who cares about efficiency. Imagine a world where every business was saddled with useless workers. How hard would it be to get a new job? They’d have to be ridiculously sure about you. Progress would severely slow down across the board.

Is efficiency the most important metric here?

Is bothering people who care about efficiency more important than the basic rights of those that dont?

It's not efficiency itself that's the sole metric, it's the ability to find a job in the first place, easily, fluidly, in a dynamic economy that lets business owners and workers both experiment fairly smoothly. You cannot have this without foregoing heavy handed worker protection laws. It's such an obvious bloody thing but apparently some people get so emotionally blind-sided by the notion of "companies firing = bad" and immediately assume that such a right always boils down to "greedy businesses". It does not.

Put yourself into the other shoes: You want to start a business, you have limited resources, you want to hire people who can help you in exchange for compensation and these people want that compensation, but the laws where you live make it nearly impossible to fire anyone you hire. What will you do? Be realistic, looking at your actual finances and human self.interest as objectively as you can.

Businesses are the private organizational expression of private people (or groups) using their personal resources to try to earn something more, improve their economic well-being. Saddling them with the ideological notion of being make-work resources just because they started something of their own that required employees for fixed aims is absurd.

It also promotes informality and labor black markets, in which people who prefer actually getting a job and money for living expenses to "enjoying worker protection" in the abstract but having it basically impossible to get hired legally in practice. So they accept being hired under the table. Now that they're working informally, as if they were illegal immigrants, they're even more open to abuse than they would have been if they could just get hired and fired easily, but at least formally, and under at least basic rules of minimum wage and labor law.

A simple analogy would be you hiring a gardener to trim your hedges and mow your lawn and then being forced to offer him work any time he asks for it from then on. I doubt you'd accept this. In fact, I doubt you'd even hire gardeners ever again.

>"Put yourself into the other shoes: You want to start a business, you have limited resources, you want to hire people who can help you in exchange for compensation and these people want that compensation, but the laws where you live make it nearly impossible to fire anyone you hire. What will you do? Be realistic, looking at your actual finances and human self.interest as objectively as you can."

I am in the other shoes, and have been for decades, like my parents were before me. I never hire people with the expectation of firing them. If your having to fire a lot of people through the course of doing business you're hiring the wrong people and need to revise your hiring practices. This is your failure not societies.

>"A simple analogy would be you hiring a gardener to trim your hedges and mow your lawn and then being forced to offer him work any time he asks for it from then on. I doubt you'd accept this. In fact, I doubt you'd even hire gardeners ever again."

This is a horrible analogy. Nobody hires their gardener as an employee. It's the perfect example of the opposite. Given the difficult to fire people hypothetical environment you propose companies would be well served to hire their labor as contractors. This is very common. And a gardener is the perfect example.

A fair analogy would be a pilot who invests years of their life and lots of money to be trained in a certain profession. There should be protections for people like that.

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