I find it so odd to describe firing someone as "whimsical"
I think its even more whimsical to expect the government to step in and force your employer to continue employing you if they dont want to.
I think its even more whimsical to expect the government to step in and force your employer to continue employing you if they dont want to.
If that business signed a contract for materials and turns out halfway through they don't like the materials, they can't just stop paying and fire the supplier. They have to deal with it as part of their business and move forward in the responsible and legal way.
Treating labor similarly isn't shocking and the social benefits of folks having job security are hard to overstate. For example, all the places with these kinds of labor controls seem to have A LOT less homeless.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-ruthlessly-f...
The above is in the case of redundancies, being ‘fired’ for cause has a different set of criteria and protections, but the onus is on the employer to prove beyond reasonable doubt what you are being fired for
Or should you be able to go to court and sue for breach of contract?
Employment contracts in the US can be at-will, which means either party can walk away at any point for no reason.
Sounds awful, until you look at US salaries and average wealth levels. Turns out that easy firing = easy hiring = more demand for workers = easier to be an entrepreneur = even more hiring = more market power for workers.
The situation can vary by province, but hiring/firing employees in Canada immediately exposes businesses to significant government-imposed overhead (both administrative and financial) and risk.
Maybe this is somewhat tolerable for larger organizations with dedicated HR and accounting teams, but dealing with all of the unnecessary and pointless government-imposed overhead and risk definitely harms the productivity of smaller organizations. This is especially true for small businesses that may consist of just one entrepreneur, who's also possibly facing tight margins, who'd just like some additional help.
I know of a number of small business operators throughout the country who would love to hire a first employee, or additional employees, but can't justify it due to the overhead and risk that is unnecessarily imposed by government.
I also know of businesses who had hired employees, but eventually had to let them go because the overhead and risk couldn't be justified any longer. Frequent and substantial minimum wage increases can really cause problems, for example, especially when margins are tight to begin with.
Many jobs in Canada are definitely being lost, or not created in the first place, all thanks to government-imposed overhead and risk that supposedly makes workers better off.
I will almost certainly never hire in Canada. The next company I start will be in Delaware.
More tax and regulation is a moat for larger organizations who can afford to deal with it.
If you look at places with easy firing, I think you’ll find they are growing extremely rapidly. Vietnam and China used to be the poster children for kids making sneakers and look at them grow today.
I was an economic powerhouse long before then.
The 1930's US stock market crash brought down the entire world!
As another point, it's not possible to make a ton of money selling weapons if you don't already have a thriving manufacturing sector. You have to at least be doing well to begin with.
According to [0], the US reached parity with the UK (probably the richest country in Europe at the time?) in terms of GDP per capita in 1880!
[0] https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...
As we see in this thread, many Americans believe that it's actually a good idea. But if you go look at the actual behaviour at the top and bottom you see that as with many of these things the supposedly "bad" benefits labour movements in Europe fought to get for their workers are just like the things "good" senior management have agreed for themselves (but deny to their workers) in the US.
I think this may at least partially explain the attitude of americans. Less of an us vs them mentality cause many lowly workers ARE senior management of their own gig.