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Comment by iamacyborg | Hacker News Reader

The flipside is your company can't just fire you at will, which is rather nice in this day and age.

I'm not trying to be obtuse, but at what point do the worker protections discourage employment? If I have to pay the huge employee fees associated with the EU, I may just go hire someone in Asia.

From almost the beginning itself. Whenever you hire, you have to consider how hard it would be to get rid of the employee for whatever reason (underperformance, changing business needs etc.)

employees as contractors is very common. this is a solved problem.

and firing people is also not a mystery, interestingly PIPs are a US invention (but if labor laws are so lax, why were they needed there? :))

People always bring this up but in my 15 years of working in tech I've never seen anyone fired on the spot unless they really fuck up. Like cause the company serious financial or legal harm kind of fuck up. The tech layoffs get a lot of attention, but that's a tiny, tiny fraction of the US's tech labor pool and full of some of the most privileged employees of an already salary privileged set of workers.

In reality what happens is you get 3 months notice of a firing in the form of PIP. Perhaps if you work at Walmart you can get fired on the spot, but honestly in industries where this is a common occupance, it's also well known that the employees also just don't give any notice at all either. They just stop showing up, maybe won't even give a 1 second of notice.

Personally, I'm happy for at will as someone who has had a shitty. Shitty job that ate at my mental health. I just had to say "today is my last day" and I fucking left and that was that. Got a final pay check and paperwork for continuing my benefits if I wanted them and this was at a random company in a labor hostile state. In some place like California, they would have been required to pay my last paycheck that moment instead of when the never payment day was.

I've seen employees work contacts that mandate notices by punishing you with legally enforced fines and whatnot and I just cannot see the benefit of being forced to give notice. It's just encourages your employer to make your life hell in that period if you're on bad terms and you had a good reason for leaving.

Right to work laws can get bent though. That's active underminement of unions for no benefit at all for an employee.

They could however do a restructuring, eliminating the exact role one's skillset matches. You get a couple of months of notice period which is no different from a severance package.

The solution to people’s income instability is government subsidy. Levying the costs of this risk on individual businesses both entrenches existing large players and disincentivizes new businesses.

The problem is that it doesn't matter who pays the cost. Let's say I live in the US where the social safety net isn't large and companies can fire me at will. Let's say I'm also competent and driven. Logically I focus on money because having a large bank account is the only safety net I can ever get. Since everyone understands the lack of a safety net trying to get large amounts of money is socially acceptable. Now lets' say I got lucky and never had to use that safety net but until one day I decide to start a business which means I will make 0 income for a year. Now I have money to cover my expenses as I try my hand at running a business. But given a strong safety net it'd be illogical to keep that much money around unless you're paranoid. You enjoy life, go on vacations, etc.

Granted, the hoarding of money and drive to greater wealth eventually leads to a capitalistic dystopias with massive wealth inequality. But you get lots of startups!

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