X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum
fortune.com
fortune.com
> In United States labor law, at-will employment is an employer's ability to dismiss an employee for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning,[1] as long as the reason is not illegal (e.g. firing because of the employee's gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability status). When an employee is acknowledged as being hired "at will", courts deny the employee any claim for loss resulting from the dismissal.
You might be thinking of "at will employment" - which is the case in 49 of 50 states.
Your employment contract may have terms that override the at-will relationship, in which case the employer has to follow the contract's terms. You may also be unionized, in which case the union will have negotiated termination procedures with your employer. And you may live in a State that has additional rules for terminating contracts.
But as a general rule, I believe this is legal in the US in most cases.
There are also very few places providing leave (outside of white-collar positions). For example, my wife was given two weeks off from her job after having my son. The state we lived in only required maternity leave to be implemented at companies having more than 50 employees. Oh, and those two weeks were unpaid.
In some places, taking a vacation longer than three weeks requires the company to stop paying your salary and consider you "abandoning" your job, or submitting special paperwork.
I do not miss the US; moving to the EU was the best decision I ever made.
"vacation longer than three weeks requires the company to stop paying your salary" What? Why is it called vacation then, I cannot comprehend this at all, heh.
Don't tell them some EU companies even give unlimited PAID vacation, lol. Never experienced this myself, because I usually have "only" 5 weeks paids vacation, but unlimited HO. Of course in practice this means I have main job and also doing self-employed contracts, if work in my main job is done.
Doesn't that depend on the state?
There's a new law still in committee:
https://www.scstatehouse.gov/billsearch.php?billnumbers=4226...
> What? Why is it called vacation then
Having more than two weeks off in a year is pretty strange. I worked at a place with "unlimited vacation" once, and you weren't allowed to take off more than two weeks at a time until someone took off two weeks every three weeks ... and that ended that policy. They made it about 4 months before getting fired though.
I mean, not that strange: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
Americans are very, very strange and the fact they think they're normal is part of that.
Shall we lobby our representatives? This does happen at the state level, and accordingly many states have more pro-worker policies and laws. But change at the federal level is a substantially harder thing to bring.
At the federal level, no major presidential candidate supports EU-style worker protections and mandatory benefits. And not enough congressional candidates support it, not even remotely enough to change anything. In fact, the vast majority are outright hostile to worker rights due to lobbying/capture by corporate interests.
At the state level, there is lots of variance, but even in the states most friendly to workers, it's not remotely possible to reach Europe's level of benefits around vacation, sick leave, maternity leave, let alone the right to organize for these things. There is no political will, and any political candidate who actually has the will could never win a statewide election.
All in all the US has been a success story. Whether there's correlation or causation between that and some of the regulatory and legal environment is hard to say. Maybe its success is primarily due to resources and geography and maybe the US would be even more successful with a more European style system.
[EDIT: it's should have been its ;) ]
Speaking only for myself, I've found that when I joined a company whose time-off policies I didn't like (only one so far), I just asked for more time off as part of the deal. The response I got was "sure. It's easier for us to give you more paid time off than more money."
Given the current political system(s) in the US, this is practically impossible at the federal level; difficult at the state level; somewhat more possible at the city level (eg New York City's Working Families Party). Third parties exist but generally have almost no influence.
Ummmmmm, Yes?
It's how the people who got ALL the rights we take for grated today did.
Especially our employment rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolpuddle_Martyrs
Probably other US organizations (universities?) also have fairly good vacation policies.
I think what's different about the US is that the country and states tend to not mandate this stuff. This does lead to people getting exploited under certain situations where the employer has more power in the relationship. I think the US is wrong on this but seems to work for them?
Make that five weeks for France plus up to 11 days of public holidays. That's a minimum too, we have a whole bunch of additional stuff that can stack on top of that, so many I can't even make a complete list from memory.
We're not better or worse, we're just different. Deal with it or leave us be.
Unlimited paid vacation is simply not a thing that is offered by any company anywhere in the world.
The EU approach is sort of the same, but to add regulation on top to steer the market towards specific goals, like having a strong middle class. If, for example, a company doesn't suffer from being nasty to their employees (e.g. because they're a monopolist), regulation will be put in place to create that dynamic. I personally find this approach more feasible, but regulation can be worked around and sometimes backfire, it's not easy to get right.
Back to your point: It comes down to how much you get paid. If you work full time and can't afford vacation or sickness, is that OK?
If you think that's OK, we just disagree I suppose. There's a power imbalance between employers and employees that favours the employers. They have more money, expertise, legal counsel, negotiation power etc. Given the chance, they will pay as little as they can for labour, crush competition etc. I don't believe that's good for a country in the long run.
If you think it's not OK, something has to happen. Paying people more so they can save up money to deal with this is one approach. Assuming the risk of them not working (with paid vacation and sick days) is another one. In the EU, we tend to go down the latter route. I guess you could see it as patronising, but there is beauty in sharing and distributing personal risks. I'm personally fine with both solutions. I'm running a consultancy right now, so I've decided to take the first route, assume and manage my own risks.
Historically, that stuff was put in place for factory workers in the industrial revolution I presume, though I'm very fuzzy on that. I'd argue good living conditions for low level workers help create a strong middle class through upward social mobility, but that's going off on a tangent perhaps.
A company having a monopoly in the regular market doesn't really matter for employment: if you're terrible to your employees, it's not your customers you have to fear, it's the employees. They will leave and no new ones will join and you won't be doing any business if you don't have any employees to actually do the work you'll get paid for.
> I guess you could see it as patronising, but there is beauty in sharing and distributing personal risks.
But that's quite literally what insurance is made for. The only difference is that insurance adds some amount of accountability.
Depends on the situation I suppose. If there's only one bakery corporation in your country and you're a baker, you can either work there, learn a new job or leave the country. It's a bit orthogonal for sure, but competition for talent is vital for good conditions for workers. Plus, a monopoly doesn't have to provide a good product or service, they just use their power to stifle competition. Suddenly their need for competent staff is greatly reduced.
> But that's quite literally what insurance is made for. The only difference is that insurance adds some amount of accountability
In my book, insurance is for unlikely, expensive events. In Germany for example, if an employee is sick for more than six weeks, the company no longer pays their salary, the health insurance takes over. It's likely that an employee is sick for a couple of days, not a case for insurance. Just how it's likely that an employee will want some vacation, also not a case for insurance.
I could however picture a system where companies only pay for the work employees actually do, and the funding for paid time off and sick days comes from some other source. Sounds intriguing. I believe everybody should be able to take some time off work for leisure and sickness, I see that as a human right. How exactly that's achieved, I'm personally very flexible there.
That's socialism. Look at what happened to the USSR and it's obvious that we don't want to go (further) down that path.
The cost of living is too high in many places; but that's a symptom and not a cause.
- Do you choose your water company?
- How about your power company?
- TV?
- Internet? and can it be different than your TV?
- Cell?
There are probably more that I have forgotten to mention. But, at least where I live, there is a choice for every one of those items. And hey, there's also no Comcast here.
What unlimited means is "as long as your manager is decent, you will maybe get your days off" vs accrued vacation where you may be forced to take vacation to not lose it.
I don't look at it that way. If you have accrued vacation, you "earned" your vacation and they can't take it away from you without compensation. Thus, you are guaranteed your days off. If they fire you, they should even have to pay you your salary for those vacation days.
"Unlimited" vacation just gives all the control to your employer: the right to deny you vacation, the right to dictate how long your vacation is, etc.
This is required in the US. That's the point of unlimited vacation - since it doesn't accrue, the company doesn't have to pay it out when you leave.
This is indeed the law in Israel. What happens is that people are allowed to accrue a number of vacation days up to a limit, typically however many days of vacation you earn in a year, times two. Then the company forces you to take, at the end of the year, a number of vacation days down to the limit.
Companies where this limit wasn't put in place introduced a moral hazard, whereby people would wink-and-handshake with their superiors when they would take a reasonable amount of vacation without actually reporting the vacation days to HR, wherein HR didn't really have the means to detect and enforce against the fraud. Thus people would work for decades, retire, and take compensation for decades of "untaken" vacation days, on top of the normal retirement packages. These policies represented usually $1+ million in obligation per worker and thus were clearly unsustainable without some kind of enforceable limit.
This is the law in California but not most other states.
In most states, vacation time is a benefit that can expire, evaporate, or be rescinded. The company is just deciding not to assign you job duties during your time off. How generous of them! But it's totally their right to decide not to do that, or to put a bunch of boxes around how they will do that. So it's legal, and common, that unused vacation time will actually be lost.
In CA, accrued vacation time is classified as "deferred compensation." It is legally money that is owed to you. It will be paid at a later date, but it must be paid.
It strikes me as no coincidence that the "unlimited vacation" fad started in tech companies with a large chunk of their workforce in California.
Someone I know who retired from a fairly senior position at Netflix rather liked it and took some fairly long vacations but said there really was a good tradition of umplugging at least as he observed that came from the top.
https://namely.com/blog/minimum-pto-what-is-it-why-you-shoul...
They don't do that for normal PTO but it's certainly feasible.
Pretty much no one (outside of maybe something regulated who may mandate two week PTOs for security purposes) is going to do that every time an employee takes PTO. In any case, if I really want to do work I don't even need access to my employer's computers.
Getting sick was jokingly referred to as a firing offense, though people did take sick leave. Burnout was a real thing – and I barely lasted a year, though that may well have been unrelated.
I could easily see a requirement from high up managment to “reduce risk” by having a department have a plan for an unusually long holiday stint (I.e someone taking 6 weeks off in a row), fundamentally because senior management don’t trust middle management.
At the job before that I had accrued 6 weeks of PTO, which was the max. I took every other Friday off after that and was paid out a month and a half when I left the company. Everyone understood the situation, so it wasn’t looked down upon when I was gone every other week.
My perspective was that unlimited PTO was a scam to reduce vacation time. Most people are not going to take advantage of it, so the company benefits.
This is nonsense in general. I've taken month-long vacations and never had to do anything special so long as I had the time and, obviously, told my manager.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nq2ph2/i_r...
It isn't if they are meek or mid.
In general: it's good to let your employer know that you value your time. If you don't suck, they'll respect you more, not less.
I assume if you took the UK legal minimum of 5.6 weeks for example, you would get fired.
To have it really unlimited you need a special position, like be a relative of CEO. But in that case you can have the same even with limited vacation policy.
IIRC it's much safer not to provide any either — except in Montana which I believe requires Just Cause after probation, as there are only a handful of statutory exceptions to at-will employment, and most of them are very, very hard to prove without an extensive paper trail... or the employer spelling it out when they fire you.
Yes, you can be layered off a lot easier in the USA, but you also can jump around and chase higher income that isn’t regulated by the government.
The problem with your perspective is that people in America still want to make 30-50% more than in Europe for the same job and they want to pay 20% less taxes, but they also want all kinds of services and protection.
So I will go out on a limb and guess you are so self-righteous because you have a large savings pool, so you tell yourself “I don’t mind paying higher taxes and making less money because I have security” … largely because you have your savings, which you are also using to make life for Europeans unaffordable but bidding up prices.
I agree. I work for a FAANG and could ask for a transfer, but I'm worried about the risks that come with the US labor law and the lack of paid holiday too. Also the waves of lay off were much harsher in the US. That being said, it's fun to live in a different country (I lived in the US in the past) and there are more opportunities in tech in the US so I'm still contemplating it.
Take a Google L4 - $280K US, $190K UK, $160K DE.
But when you include the regulatory protections and benefits, the differences in living standards, etc. the US salary is probably still higher but these salaries are certainly nothing to balk at.
However, for higher levels (L6+), I think the difference becomes more important. Also, in US tech centers, there are many more opportunities than in Europe. If I were to lose my FAANG job, there would be no way I'd make the same amount of money in a different company in my country. On the other hand, being on a transfer visa in the US can make it hard to switch to a different company too.
In the end, there are pros and cons, and not a definite answer as to where it's best. It depends highly on individual circumstances.
Man this is fucking terrible. Despite what someone’s ideas about work might be, this is just not right unless you put work above literally everything else.
My wife currently has 18 months fully paid maternity leave, and we’re having tons of family adventure with our little one who is already 9 months old.
I couldn’t imagine not having that family time.
I think its very healthy and human to understand people have phases in life where they need to be cared for.
It’s very easy to have a narrow view of the world where everything would be fixed by the ‘market’.
Can you explain more about your experience with this? I’ve never heard of it.
You begin by referring to at-will employment, which has a long history in state laws. This context gives the impression the “what” that is doing the “requiring” is the state and its laws.
I’m wondering if this “long vacation” thing has a basis in law or possibly originates from individual company or union contracts.
Or if this is a cost savings measure for business services which are paid on monthly basis. Most insurances are based on employee count and earnings, but are calculated yearly.
It’s very easy to live in the EU with an US compensation.
I wonder if you will feel the same if you had a local job.
And money isn't that relevant anyway. Quality of life is more important. That's why I live in Spain where I make about half of what I could make in Holland where I'm from.
The biggest party in Holland for the last 20 years (VVD) was very neoliberal and they wanted to make the country into America where money trumps everything so I got disenfranchised and left. And right now the biggest party is even extreme right (and supported by the neolibs) so I'm extra glad I left.
But I'm happy in Spain. People enjoy life much more. There's no calvinist influence. Not to mention the climate.
You traded the Calvinist influence for the Roman Catholic influence in Spain. I'm sure there are tradeoffs involved. For instance, Dutch people tend to be very direct and matter-of-fact in their criticism of anything, which has benefits w/r/t efficiency and public order. Kind of hard to pull that off in a Catholic country.
Like most people talk about it as if culturally we used to expect 0 accommodations for working mothers, which was bad, and the expectation has increased over time.
But, actually in the past the mother would have spent many dedicated years with the infant/baby/toddler/child, until they entered school. If the mother has multiple children, it’s not really practical for a company to hold their spot open for like 8 years and I don’t think this happens even in the most progressive of European countries.
So, culturally speaking, does the rise of maternity leave actually come from an increasing cultural tolerance for the mother spending less time with the child via daycare?
Almost no one in Europe has 8 children but I know women who went on maternity leave 3 times. Generally kills your career as you don‘t advance during those years (and most only work part time afterwards) but the original job is still there.
Especially in very large companies, it‘s not too big of a burden. Just some extra slack in headcount planning. It‘s pretty rough in smaller companies. I used to sit on the board of pre-school. 5-6 employees, all women, lots of pregnancies and with the added twist that if they didn‘t have certain childhood diseases or vaccinations, they weren‘t allowed to work the entire pregnancy. We had to hire a lot of folks on temporary contracts.
Worth pointing out, while we had to pay the salary in case of work not being permitted and the time no work is allowed for anyone pregnant (6 weeks before birth and 8 weeks after), this is fully reimbursed trough insurance schemes every company has to pay into.
You don’t need 8 children to get to 8 years of dedicated child care with the pre-daycare-normalization worldview. You only need 2 children with an offset of 3 years, or 3 children with less offset.
That said, at least in Germany, you can‘t get to 8 years with 2 children as the maximum time for parental leave is capped at 36 months per child.
Likely the only reason for this minimal amount of statutory leave is a federal law:
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla
Though it does mandate twelve weeks of unpaid leave, not two, but it only kicks in if you've worked there for a year already.
Most short term disability insurance actually covers maternity leave for about 6 weeks. It’s really easy for employers to make sure this is part of their benefits package these days.
This is not entirely correct.
They can fire you for any reason as long as it’s not because of a protected reason.
There are certain protected reasons at the federal level and many states add additional ones at the state level.
So, for example, they can fire you for wearing a red shirt, but they cannot fire you for being too old (well, too old is defined as above 40…if you’re 35 they can legally fire you for being too old if they want).
Ergo: Surely it should be the other way around; that you can only be fired for specific protracted reasons, i.e. gross negligence.
The possibility of a lawsuit, resulting in fines and penalties. Obviously many people won't bother to sue, and some companies will take the risk.
Also socialized healthcare <3
Regardless of at-will employment, the vast majority of employers will still give you plenty of warning before you're fired for performance reasons. It's mainly an issue when a company suddenly has large layoffs. And despite what you see in the media, most people are employed by smaller companies that are generally not laying anyone off.
IOW, the negative aspects of at-will employment really don't have much impact on the average techie's life.
It would for me. It would be a constant worry, being jobless from one day to the next, how to pay the mortgage etc? I would find that a huge negative, even if it doesn't actually end up happening.
Also besides the notice period you're also entitled to a significant fee when you get fired (up to about a year's worth of salary depending on how long you worked for the company). Which is really reassuring especially for paying mortgage etc. I don't want to live on the edge of my seat all the time. And it's also something that stops me from moving to another job because I would have to start from zero and lose this protection. Which I don't mind, I don't like job-hopping anyway.
I really don't like the American mentality of high-risk, high-reward. I don't care much about money but I do care a lot about stability. But anyway I live in Europe and I'm happy with the way things are here. I do hate the neoliberals here that try to make europe like America (which mainly benefits the big corpos, not us).
So, if a company says "we're firing everyone wearing red shirts", then you can potentially contest that. If they fire you without a reason, then it's legal. If you can prove there was actually a reason, and that the reason was illegal, then you can sue them for wrongful termination
Sure, it is a risk. You could be wrong and then they sue you. Now you have to prove it. Better to just say that you're firing them and that is all. If they don't know the reason, they can't effectively sue you.
Possibly in Europe, but this not the law anywhere in the U.S.
To the extent that any American corporation requires this, it is purely a corporate policy.
I'd understand (though not agree with) an individual company capping an individual vacation at three weeks, but not a (presumably) state law to that effect.
I think employees have been allowed to quit at any time since the early 20th century in most western countries. Of course there is a probationary period involved, but it's nothing like earlier times when police would possibly come and take you to your place of work, or it was illegal to be unemployed in several jurisdictions up to 20th century (e.g. USSR) etc.
So discussing this as "feature" rather than tablestakes in any modern society is somewhat misleading IMO.
I don't know if there are some professions where it's a bit more complicated than this and am happy to be corrected.
So let’s say I leave after 1 month of giving notice. I now owe the employer 2 months salary.
Like, I could just stop showing up and they would fire me for cause without notice, but that matters only if I needed unemployment pay. If I already had a new job that I would like to start immediately, I could just do that.
2 weeks in der EU is common, 1 month rarer...3 is a lot and leads me to believe there's a lot of € at stake in this case.
For employees that have not been working for the firm very long the notice period will be shorter on both sides. What the exact rules are I'm not sure.
How is it the same if there's a probationary period?
I can quit my job today with absolutely no consequences beyond not having an income. Can I do the same where you are?
Some people do have employment contracts with more consideration but as I understand it that mostly applies to union work and C suite executive positions.
Most states’ unemployment insurance covers up to a maximum benefit per week, and a maximum number of weeks. When I lost my job once, I was paid $325 per week.
The contract is between two parties until a new contract is proposed. If a party declines the new terms (by not clicking) then the past contract becomes void.
So the old contract is still in effect, as it was not replaced by a new contract. So who terminated the old contract? That's the question here, and the conclusion seems to be that the employer is the one who then fired the employee, the employee did not quit by refusing the new contract.
no, it's actually the polar opposite of that. either party is free to end the relationship at any time. there is essentially what is a long term contract (may not be called a contract), but one which either of the two parties can terminate. it's halfway between being a european style employee and being a truly independent contractor. an indentured servant is certainly not free at all to end a bad relationship or to seek a better job or more pay - totally the opposite thing.
and i don't think there's anything wrong with it. in fact, i personally strongly want to move more toward becoming a true independent contractor someday, but the culture of engineering strongly favors employees for what i prefer to do. i'd rather pay my own taxes and handle my own retirement and medical insurance and other "benefits", many of which do not benefit me at all.
when you say "click-or-be-fired" it seems shocking. rephrase it into "agree to our new terms going forward, or we will not renew". i have zero problem with that if that was the situation that was originally agreed to.
now, i don't know what those new terms are or whether they were fair, and that might have been a problem. but simply the at-will employment system isn't wrong on it's own. but in our jurisdiction, not ireland (which is how X appears to have got itself in trouble).
An employee has needs that sometimes cannot go untended, s/he has rent/mortgage payments, s/he may have family to take care of, loan repayments, children at non-free school, etc etc. This is normal, and the paraphernalia of living a life. They are long-term commitments.
So if the employee is presented with an ultimatum like this, it really amounts to “rip up your life, or take the new (worse) offer we are giving you”. It smacks of Vader’s famous line: “I am altering the deal. Pray that I don’t alter it any further”. You may prefer living in a world where corporations can wreak havoc with employees lives without consequence (like Vader) but I don’t.
Leaving the country at the end of this year and returning back to the UK. I came here for the money and the weather. The weather is now too damn hot, and I’ve made enough money to retire (in the UK at least) and look after my wife after an American hospital utterly destroyed her life, putting her into a coma after trying to “turn beds” like restaurants “turn tables”. I so much wish I’d done this 2 years ago, life would have been very different if I had.
you prefer "guarantees". that's fine. i prefer more freedom and i don't want or trust those guarantees. nothing keeps a company from going out of business and then it doesn't matter what the law says or what they owed you - piff - you're screwed right then and there. you can also be run over by a bus tomorrow through no fault of your own in spite of any number of laws to keep that from happening.
> You may prefer living in a world where corporations can wreak havoc with employees lives without consequence (like Vader) but I don’t.
i don't like that either. but realize we both already do live in that world. unfortunately it is a fundamental universal fact of life that enough power and money can be, and usually will be, wielded to do bad things. since you can't fundamentally change that, most "fixes" are just trading one thing for another, or shifting costs to someone else, who is probably poorer and less powerful. every safety net is also a set of handcuffs. every benefit has a cost somewhere else. to move more toward more employment guarantees makes you more of a slave, not less. ironically, more regulation strongly favors the larger bureaucracies and bigger companies at the expense of the individuals and small companies. so now you just encouraged more economic asymmetry.
i'm not telling you what you prefer or what's best for you or what to believe. just realize that everyone does not have the same viewpoint or needs at all. and it's not simply evil vs. good as portrayed in the movies.
i'm sorry to hear about your wife. the quality of healthcare in this country can be highly variable, it's certainly not always bad. i've heard that UK sometimes has different issues. use your intelligence to make the wisest and best decisions you can and be as proactive as possible, that's all you can do, anywhere, anytime.
"Accept this employment contact change or be unable to afford treatment for your illness" is often not really a choice. It's "freedom" for those with money, oppression for those without.
> nothing keeps a company from going out of business and then it doesn't matter what the law says or what they owed you - piff - you're screwed right then and there. you can also be run over by a bus tomorrow through no fault of your own in spite of any number of laws to keep that from happening.
You seem to refute your own point. It's true you could get ran over by a bus - so why do we still have laws to prohibit bus drivers from knowingly running you over? Because we typically want to minimize the number of lives we "screw", even if we can't reduce it to zero.
Further, a company going out of business is still very much in the realm of something sufficient social safety nets can help with - lessening the blow to employees' lives while they search/train for a new job.
> i don't like that either. but realize we both already do live in that world.
We can and should try to improve it. There is no reason to be resigned to the idea that this is how things must always be, when this itself is a relatively recent state of affairs and already a notable improvement over, say, feudalism of the 10th century (in both freedom and quality of life).
> every benefit has a cost somewhere else
Humanity's progress isn't a zero-sum game - there are plenty of net positive changes we have made and can continue to make.
> and it's not simply evil vs. good as portrayed in the movies.
I found spacedcowboy's consideration of power dynamics a significantly more developed worldview than what you've demonstrated above.
You actually net increase the ability of people to work for themselves. Healthcare is often cited as one of the primarily reasons people don’t take the step to found their own business.
Not to mention that if you want more equity between employer / employee relationships we need more ways to break up the asymmetric leverage of the relationship and this is a major one that traps folks
- as you mentioned health insurance (and to some extent life insurance, cheap when young, but not so cheap as you get older)
- retirement. this seems to be steadily changing to 401K type schemes. the 85 point (age + years of service = 85) pensions are solidly in the rear view mirror, and i for one, applaud that. you can take your 401K where-ever you want and decide for yourself what age and how much money you need.
but i have other problems with "universal" health care though; the VA has something like this and it's not better. must it be that way? maybe not, but is it likely be that way? yeah...
then you have the free-rider problem vs. basic human rights. i'd just be happy if everybody could purchase the same insurance at the same price employed or not if they wished to do so. it's not quite there yet, although i have received quotes from Kaiser in CA for equivalent individual policies are that are nearly the same price to what just my parole deduction portion is from $$big$$corp - not counting their ~40-50% portion. which implies, as usual, big companies are being not very efficient. billing is a disaster; why is my insurance charged $50,000 for something i can buy out-of-pocket for $5,000? patents and drug companies are a disaster; problem: drugs are too expensive - solution: give artificial monopolies...
so what we've done so far in this country manages is a half-measure that manages to be worse than what we had before and just as bad or worse than some ideal universal health care would be. i acknowledge that health care is a thorny problem, nothing seems to be a good answer and we're highly unlikely to be fixing it (by fix, i mean make it better, not just doing more stupid stuff).
except all the legal ways you can't fire someone. Sexism, Racism, Ageism, and maybe Sexual Orientation (may not be Federal) are the big 4 reasons why this can't simply be a social contract. And there's more subtle but not illegal ways you can screw yourself over like Promissary Estoppel, because you can't just hire someone and fire them the first week "for whatever reason" and think that's not open for abuse.
>when you say "click-or-be-fired" it seems shocking. rephrase it into "agree to our new terms going forward, or we will not renew". i have zero problem with that if that was the situation that was originally agreed to.
"I have altered the terms, pray I do not alter it further".
These aren't even labor laws. This can be extortion or retaliation. Neither of which are exactly squeaky clean. Or it could be a simply breaking of contract (e.g. your contract says WFH and now they want to force RTO you). If there's no protection nor reparation on the employer side for breaking a contract they can remake at anytime, it may as well be handcuffs instead.
- Generally, you can be fired without any particular reason.
- Outside of a few whitelisted reasons (like being fired "for cause"), when fired, you can collect unemployment (a system where the employer self-insures, sending money into a governmental pool to payout in such cases) for O(1 yr), with caps in the $900/mo.range, depending on the state. Not clicking on the link would likely not count as "cause," but Twitter might try to argue it does (not that it necessarily matters since the severance package is probably better and probably precludes filing for unemployment).
- Other labor laws exist, like requiring some sort of notification period for mass layoffs. If this were found to be a mass layoff in disguise, there'd be additional penalties.
- Similarly with race or any of the things you can't fire a person for (e.g., if a person didn't see the email because they were pregnant and doing something medically relevant, a lawyer might be able to say something about the firing being structured in a way that discriminates against pregnant people, which is not legal).
- If the link had any attached terms and conditions, those likely would not be enforceable since the contract was agreed to under duress.
- Any other contracts between Twitter and the employees might matter. Perhaps the firing is allowed, but there are other constraints on the exact manner (e.g., having previously negotiated a better severance package).
- If the link had any specific terms involving lower pay or reduced benefits or whatnot, there's a decent chance that it was criminal extortion or blackmail in various parts of the US.
And so on. We can start tacking on hypotheticals which might apply, but I'll stop there.
> indentured servitude
There's no need to be so hyperbolic when bagging on the US. It's bad that we don't have great safety nets for people, but forcing individual employers to take up the slack isn't an ideal solution either (still no protections when the employer goes bankrupt or when a crisis hits somebody like a college student, and it disproportionately impacts the smallest businesses because you can't spread the risk out across a lot of employees and revenue -- an imperfect but almost strictly better solution is just raising the unemployment rates to match the real inflation we've seen), and it's nothing like indentured servitude which allows the working conditions to degrade nearly arbitrarily without a chance to leave and go someplace better.
But that's not what this was about.
X was attempting to characterize the refusal to click as a resignation by the employee rather than a termination by the company. This is because a resignation would not trigger contract-related severance (which apparently Twitter employees had) or hit X's unemployment insurance account, while a termination would trigger both severance and unemployment.
As a tendency, Irish labour courts tends to find in favour of employees... but also tend to award relatively small compensation.
A headline making award is pretty rare. Judge must not be a Twitter fan.
Delta tried not paying around £3000 owed to a customer. He got a court order and sent bailiffs who went to the airport, closed the checking and said they were going seize the plane to pay for the debt.
There's a good short documentary about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QSj9odUD_c&t=320s . This link starts at 320 seconds, where the action starts. Start from the beginning if you want the back story.
Spoiler: Delta called the police who explained to them that they were about to pay up or lose the plane. Delta paid up. Actually, the managed used her personal card to pay I'd assume Delta paid her back.
There's a much higher chance that Twitter have a legal and financial presence in Ireland, especially being that it is/was their EMEA HQ.
Not to mention having the manager pay the police out of her own pocket. Doesn't Delta have a petty cash policy giving discretion to managers around payments of small amounts like this? The whole thing was both bonkers and very entertaining!
[1] https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/threads/jc-penney-lifet...
You mean they decide to play defensively because they have the power to be a pain in the neck.
>If a company makes an honest mistake, courts will typically side with the less powerful party when possible.
I'm seen way too many malicious "mistakes" punished with a slap on the wrist to really believe this.
All over 3000 euro. For an operation as large as an airline they may as well have been arguing over a dropped penny.
All the "agents" care about is getting the money for their client. For this, they're willing and apparently able to abort at least one flight, and possibly others, costing people on those flights possibly thousands each with rebookings etc, all for £3k.
I've only has the displeasure of interacting with a bailiff once, when I was a naive student. The guy knocked on the door asking after a previous tenant. We went through for any mail addressed to the guy he was after, and while doing so seemed to revel in explaining how he had the power to barge in by force and arrest me if we wanted. In the moment I was slightly incredulous but nodded along. Was only after the fact I researched to find you're within your rights to turn them away unless they're accompanied by actual police.
Seems like the perfect job for power-tripping sods.
Except these are High Court bailiffs collecting a commercial debt. They just enforce the powers of the court. Useful in this situation where the executives are in a different country. The High Court can do a lot worse than stopping check in if you don’t comply with its orders.
I don't care about the cost to Delta in that video, but I do think this particlar strongarm tactic was way over the line, due to the significant financial impact it could've incurred to innocent bystanders
Are you seriously saying I should not have done this, just because it might have inconvenienced their other customers!
Get a grip sunshine; and put the blame where it it due.
I do. if it was something like 3m euros I'd understand the greed, even if I don't condone it.
3000? They just seem petty. As the article said, this was something a manager could pay out of pocket (and I hope they got reimbursed). It should have been a rounding error already built into their budget that they paid immediately. Delta clearly didn't care of the "innocent bystanders" either, or they were willing to bluff with them as ransom. I've had delays for stupider reasons, but this would at least be a hilarious story to share as a passenger.
It's not like some working class that may not have that much in liquid to pay off.
There's a comment in the video that this is david vs goliath, and they give david some leverage. I think that's the perfect use for high-court bailiffs. The other way around, maybe not so much.
(Ironically - obeying court judgements is not without control of the airline, so if this caused delays, those customers could claim compensation also.)
You clearly had the former masquerading as latter. In Blighty, a debt collector tricking a naive student into believing they have court authority (!) is their Standard Operating Procedure.
As an employee in Germany, it sounds deranged to receive an email saying I have one day to completely change my work contract, or be fired from my job.
Companies could even offer that as an option. We pay you $97k with no labour protections, or $68k but we promise to give you all the labour rights that Germany has, including nice long holidays, unions, no unpaid overtime, can't be fired without cause, etc. Your choice.
(And those figures are the median programmer salary in the USA and Germany respectively)
So deel.com is a usual choice.
of course, who's to say that next quarter priorities of management or shareholders shift & those "promises" evaporate?
And yeah, they could terminate the contract, but they would still be bound by its terms that say how they can do that, with how much notice, for what reasons, and how much they will owe you.
Yes. And I appreciate those labor protections enough that I gladly pay for them.
I could still buy a car, a house, raise a family, have some savings, etc.
The stability and security provided by the labor protections are very much appreciated, a lot more than some extra cash would be.
The US also has contractors.
That's why many EU countries have pretty strict limitations on short term contracts, like how many you can do in a row. It results in a huge reliance on contractors.
Can you explain your thoughts here a bit further? The short term contract can be renewed or replaced with a full time contract. This should provide extra incentive to perform well compared to a full time employee (who doesn't have to worry about either), as long the as the company is a good employer.
As someone in games, this is exactly the road to getting exploited. "If I work harder and really wow them with this feature, I could get full time work!" meanwhile, there were plans to not renew anyone at the end of the project and to lay off full time workers. But you get a convinient carrot to lure starry-eyed devs with
Your "as long as the company is a good employer" is doing Atlas levels of lifing here.
I don't think that's happening in games or tech, but it's been widely observed that Gen Z is less invested in corporate than ever before (or from the boomer's POV: "nobody wants to work anymore").
It actually makes companies more hesitant to fire.
And on the other hand, the French government dramatically loosened the rules around layoffs in 2016 (you can let people go as soon as you have a decline in sales over a few month, a negative cash flow over the same period, if their are new competitors on your market, or even just if there's technological change in your sector that justifies getting rid of people). It was 8 years ago and it has had little to no impact on France's unemployment, which is still very high.
I heard that wges are less than 50% but you end up saving more
Yup. Cost of living is insanely low compared to the US, even when just comparing hotbeds like Silicon Valley vs London/Berlin/Munich, with the largest factor being housing. Additionally, healthcare costs are far lower as well - there is no such thing as co-pays, surprise bills and whatnot here (although I do admit some things like dental and vision care aren't covered by insurance, but generally still affordable).
Going back recently, it’s a _lot_ more expensive; home has gotten more expensive too, but not at the same rate.
(Some of this is due to the currency thing, of course; the dollar was about as weak as it ever got post-financial crisis in 2018.)
The other bit is that you’re comparing living in Dublin to visiting SF. Rental prices in SF make Dublin seem cheap. You’re still probably financially better off living in SF as an engineer, but I’d rather the quality of life of Ireland/Europe
> Rental prices in SF make Dublin seem cheap
Oh, yeah, they definitely do _now_, but pre-Covid it wasn’t as clear-cut.
> You’re still probably financially better off living in SF as an engineer
I think even that probably isn’t totally clear at this stage. If you’re in Big Tech(TM), you’re probably getting on the order of 60-70% pay in Dublin that you’d get in the same role in the same company in Silicon Valley (there’s some variation, but that’s about the usual ratio). If you have to pay SF rent or mortgage (plus property tax) with that, then you may not come ahead. If you can afford to buy outright or with a small mortgage, you’re probably doing better in SF, but even most big tech workers can’t afford that.
(I think the pay gap probably is bigger outside big tech, tho)
People see the difference in wages, but what they miss is a) the amount of fees and extra expenses they have to pay that escape cost of living calculations, b) the "natural" lifestyle inflation that comes with living in the US (maybe summed up by the word consumerism), c) some size/low density related inefficiencies and d) things like educational costs
Now, yes Europe makes it hard on itself a lot by being dumb (see HS2 costs soaring off or the failed German energy policy - not against renewable but their fee structure is stupid)
Curios regarding how you came up with that conclusion. After paying rent, taxes and buying some groceries from EU senior engineer's ~80k you will generally have enough to maybe buy a new smartphone at the end of the year, not any meaningful amount of savings.
You are an outlier. Very few SDEs in EU can afford to raise a family in their own SFH on a single salary while living in a location with any notable IT jobs market.
No I am definitely not.
In every company I worked for, in three different countries, my coworkers were in similar situations.
There may be some truth to this, but it's not as stark as some think.
The average cost of a "moderate" house in.. say, Palo Alto is around $3M USD. Those are typically older houses, smaller lots, less desirable neighbourhoods.
Everything is more expensive in such an area. Property tax on that $3M USD house is likely going to be about $20k USD per year, one may as well say an additional $2000/month. That property tax alone is more than most people pay for mortgages in any other place in the US.
I once compared my Ottawa, ON, Canada salary to at typical, comparable one in SV. After looking at the cost of housing, and living, I determined that even though I was making 1/3 the salary? I was taking home more.
Now of course, there is one key difference here. If you don't rent, and do buy, some of that missing "take home" goes into property which does have value. But if you're a renter? If your primary cost (housing) isn't coming back to you in some way?
That SV salary is actually a lot less than you think.
I'd take $100kUSD in Ottawa, over $200kUSD, maybe even $300kUSD in SV, if I wasn't able to buy. EG, forced to rent. And I'd have more money in my pocket in Ottawa, at end of day.
Oh, and that massive property tax certainly isn't recoverable. You're paying some of that whether you rent (because the landlord does), or if you buy.
As that dies off and the USD rebalances to a post American empire equilibrium, housing priced in USD will be far more similar everywhere, exactly the same way it did post British and French empires. (back when 1gbp would buy you 10usd)
It's all about population density compared with economic might.
If the USD was to crash tomorrow, people in SV would still draw their salaries, housing would still be the same price relative to them. You're not going to erase costs due to population density and economic drive, because a dollar drops a bit.
Not to mention, the UK has a GDP basically half the US per capita. That has nothing to do with a petro dollar or not. I really see the "petro dollar" thing is a talking point, without the validity to back it up.
https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index
generally speaking USD is going to lose about 50% of its value as the petrodollar and yen carry trade unwind over the next couple of decades.
So to understand what is actually being earnt and spent in the US in a global context, just divide USD prices by 2, then you can see e.g. the US and UK gdp per capita are basically the same.
Its obviously far more complex than this, but that basic rule of thumb still holds even when you add in all the complexity.
How one can take a 67% pay cut and have housing still high means you have more in your pocket you’re going to have to explain.
And it's not just the house itself, goods and services associated with real estate have blown up with it. Home renovations and maintenance work on your home (if you can even find a contractor) are just stupid. So even if you bought in years ago (like I did), the carrying costs are very high.
Housing has exploded in Canada over the last decade. Even in smaller cities like Ottawa, the prices are more expensive than cities like Chicago.
Then layer on top low salaries, and housing affordability is worse in Canada than many US cities.
There are loads of houses well under $1M Canadian, the average price would likely be 700k.
In USD that's about 500K. a far cry from the 2 to 3M USD in Palo Alto. 1M CDN (720kUSD) houses in Ottawa, are what you'd pay $5M for in Palo Alto.
Inflation is not unique to Ontario, you'll see the same sort if thing in SV too
A $3M home in Palo Alto is comparable to a Ottawa home in the core of the city. And not a townhome, a detached single family home.
Palo Alto is like Kanata, price wise. Ottawa core is like San Fran.
Even ignoring the labour rights issues (because I didn't really consider them at the time), rent and other costs were high enough that I was seriously considering a private pilot's license and a small aircraft for commuting, because that would allow a nice easy fast commute from somewhere that wasn't priced absurdly. That wouldn't actually have worked either, but I decided against the USA well before pursuing that to more than a superficial calculation — if I had, then it wouldn't have taken until Scott Manley's videos showing me the flight considerations[0] in the area, to learn why this wasn't going to happen.
[0] "I know, I'll commute by light aircraft to somewhere in the middle of a city that has a huge international airport and is 'one of the busiest airspace in the world'", yeah, no https://johmathe.github.io/flying_bay_tour.html
You can also choose to live in California for a few years as a renter if you are young, save money and go live elsewhere with the savings. Ask me how I know you can do that...
The higher wages in the US are not related to labour protections. They are related to vastly higher wages in tech because of big corps pushing up those wages to have the best of the best working for them.
Proof is simple: Since a lot of low paying jobs in the US have no labour protections.
Or look at what Tesla does in Texas, with the "unprotected" third party companies that don't have labour protections. They are vastly worse off than those that work for Tesla ( since the country required minimum protections and Tesla didn't apply that to contractors)
That doesn't follow. The low paying jobs exist because the value to the employer of hiring someone exceeds the low pay. For those jobs, if the employer is required to provide paid vacation etc. then it can push the cost of hiring someone over the cost of offshoring the job or automating it, so the alternative then isn't high pay vs. low pay, it's have a job vs. no job.
Also, many of the costs are in proportion to the pay, e.g. the cost of a vacation day is the cost of paying someone else to cover, so the difference will often be a percentage rather than a fixed amount. Then it's no surprise that skilled professionals get paid more than unskilled labor, but that doesn't mean the unskilled laborers can't still be making more than they would be in the alternative where the company had higher costs to hire them.
> Or look at what Tesla does in Texas, with the "unprotected" third party companies that don't have labour protections. They are vastly worse off than those that work for Tesla ( since the country required minimum protections and Tesla didn't apply that to contractors)
They have fewer employee benefits, but in return contractors generally get higher hourly wages. One way or another they have to convince the worker to work for them instead of somebody else.
Your argument makes no sense.
It was a bubble, but a bubble that has been inflated for a very long time.
For software engineers, it absolutely matters. For the same reason it’s going to be a pretty weird discussion about Actor/Actress pay if you just ignore Hollywood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
> For software engineers, it absolutely matters.
The bubble means you currently get more in San Francisco, sure, but take the bubble away and you'd still expect the US average to be higher than the EU average as it is in other industries where there isn't a bubble.
Here's the reality:
https://fortune.com/2022/11/15/tesla-texas-gigafactory-const...
> ‘I’m going to die in this factory’: Tesla Texas gigafactory construction workers are suing over wage theft and dangerous conditions
But sure...
> They have fewer employee benefits, but in return contractors generally get higher hourly wages. One way or another they have to convince the worker to work for them instead of somebody else.
"generally"
> Other whistleblowers will complain that they were either not paid at all for their work, or were not given proper overtime compensation. Some who sacrificed their time to work over Thanksgiving say that they were never paid the promised double wage, according to the case referral.
Next time. Please come with sources. Because I couldn't find any credible sources for your claims...
There you go.
Remember folks: a company's interests are directly opposite to yours. If it makes enough money to not hold their promise, they will.
I don't want promises from an actor that is structurally infinitely more powerful than I ever will be. This is why not only must this be on contract and enforceable at any time, but individualistic mindset is always against our interests, because it's easy to promise to one who will be able to defend themselves and plunder another one who can't.
It's not my choice, it's our choice.
FWIW, this is not as simple as labour protections being effectively equivalent to $29k. By being a legal requirement and not a choice, that $29k doesn't register to the market as using disposable income, so competitive pressure doesn't inflate prices of everything to compensate. It's strictly better than having a choice between $97k and $68k + labor protections.
In competitive markets prices approach the cost of production rather than absorbing all of the disposable income of the customer. If you have uncompetitive markets, that is a separate problem with its own solutions.
And then you have the other problem. The job pays $29k less because it costs the company that much to avoid those costs, i.e. they're willing to pay that much more to someone in the US to do the same job. That doesn't mean you're getting $29k in value. Some of the money is going to compliance and administration rather than you.
And in general money is worth more than stuff, because if you want the stuff you can buy it with money, but if you don't want that specific stuff then turning it back into money or other stuff at best incurs transaction costs and at worst isn't even achievable.
The notion that you're not taxed on the stuff is also an illusion; the rules apply to everyone in the jurisdiction and the government needs however much money from people to provide the services it provides so if you're not paying it there you're either paying it somewhere else or getting fewer government services.
All markets are a bit uncompetitive — if they were not, if they were perfectly elastic and frictionless cows in a vacuum, then not only would anyone making a profit be undercut by someone willing to make less profit, a cycle which would repeat until profits became zero, but so too would wages be undercut by anyone else willing to provide the labour for less, with the same cycle driving income to subsistence + internet in our present case (or pennies per kloc when LLMs get better).
Oh sure, but there's a vast difference between "people make $1000 more and landlords take $0.05 on the dollar" and "people make $1000 more and landlords take $0.95 on the dollar".
Profit margins are also not inherently determined by wages in some other sector. If a bag clip costs $1 and $0.25 of that is profit and $0.75 is cost of labor, the profit margin clearly isn't zero. If nurses then get a pay raise that came out of reduced overhead rather than higher prices, the unrelated $1 item can profitably be produced for the same price it always was.
In can, indeed, go the other way. Some item is $1.00, $0.75 of that is labor, you eliminate some regulatory overhead which reduces the company's labor costs (e.g. need fewer HR/lawyers) and now the labor costs fall to $0.60. But this also reduces barriers to entry to the market, so competition increases, the profit component drops to $0.20 and now the item costs $0.80 instead of $1.00.
You mention some regulatory overhead being eliminated, but more often than not, a surplus of disposable income enables passing further regulatory requirements that improve (or at least purport to) safety or quality of products and services, and that were hitherto too costly to implement. Then, most sectors aren't nearly competitive enough to keep the margins to zero, and some degree of price fixing is a natural thing that happens without any actual collusion, so things get more expensive (per unit) (or don't get cheaper). Then, like with new regulations, you also get new products and services that had no market yesterday, become popular today, and a de-facto requirement of living tomorrow. Etc.
> Oh sure, but there's a vast difference between "people make $1000 more and landlords take $0.05 on the dollar" and "people make $1000 more and landlords take $0.95 on the dollar".
If I parse this correctly, then the latter is definitely the case. Real estate is the prime force that eats all surplus disposable income. Houses and apartments get smaller, get built from worse and worse materials, using inferior techniques, and designed for ever shorter life span, all while getting more and more expensive. Any sudden bump in disposable income across the population is, first and foremost, likely to be eaten by rent.
My argument is that this is not a feature of markets but rather government action.
The rise of two-income households is a great example. Historically only the husband worked for money and the wife would do domestic work like washing clothes etc. Now the washing machine washes the clothes, which takes 15 minutes of human labor instead of four hours, and the labor is then spent working a job that does something else. Meanwhile the family has more money, which allows them to buy those same additional products and service now being provided.
And yet this hasn't happened. The surplus went somewhere else. You already know where:
> You mention some regulatory overhead being eliminated, but more often than not, a surplus of disposable income enables passing further regulatory requirements that improve (or at least purport to) safety or quality of products and services
It "enables" that to happen, but we as a populace are not actually required to do that. And when we do, the overhead eats the surplus. So maybe we shouldn't?
> If I parse this correctly, then the latter is definitely the case. Real estate is the prime force that eats all surplus disposable income.
Oh, absolutely. This is why uncompetitive markets are a problem.
Real estate is an unusual case, because the really isn't anyone with a monopoly on real estate. The supply constraint comes directly from the government through zoning rules. We effectively have a cartel whose board of directors is the zoning board.
In a free market, if wages go up, people who had been living with their parents will want to get their own place, so they would use the extra money they're making to do that, and the extra money would pay construction companies to build more housing. But if that's prohibited by law then the extra money only goes to bid up the price of existing housing, people don't get housing who didn't have it before because new housing is not created, and the money just goes to landlords.
That is an independent problem that we badly need to solve, because it isn't just a problem when people make more money. If you get more benefits, the same thing happens. If companies all start providing free daycare, people save the money they'd been using to pay for daycare, they want to use the money to get their own place, rents go up. If prices go down, the same thing happens. Computers get cheaper, you can get a suitable one for $400 instead of $2000, landlords take most of the difference. This needs to be fixed or it eats any surplus that would otherwise go to the middle class. It's a huge problem, but it's a solvable problem. Build more housing.
And either way it doesn't affect whether you should prefer cash or "benefits" as compensation, because when a market with an artificial supply constraint is eating the bulk of any surplus, it would just as well eat the surplus created by benefits too. At which point we're back to "money is better than arbitrary stuff" because turning money into stuff you want has lower deadweight friction losses than turning stuff you want less into stuff you want more.
It happens basically everywhere, even when the rules are different. If I understand correctly, the primary limit in the UK is there's not enough builders, which is not to say the government isn't in the way as that's despite it also having constant planning issues with regard to the "green belt"; likewise in modern Germany, my understanding is not enough builders (and again yes the government could be better because bureaucracy is very slow, but they're not the limiting factor); likewise DDR (not even trying to be a free market) where the government was organising the construction work and trying to do it cheap and fast but there still wasn't enough.
After a while, the governement wanted in, joined the verbonden to landsbonden (Country level insurers grouped by world view) and put themselves in the money stream.
The end result is Belgium having a weird construction half way between private health insurance and country-level health insurance.
Co-op is the word you’re looking for. These co-ops went far beyond just healthcare after all. They owned bakeries, pharmacies, entertainment facilities for the workers, …
This type of behaviour - unilaterally changing the employment agreement without even specifying them in their entirety! - should never be possible.
I hope other employees and EU countries follow suit and slap X with more fines, if this impacted other citizens as well.
I've been on both sides of the fence (mostly in Germany). As an employer, my approach was usually to be nice to employees I wanted to get rid of and to offer them a good severance package proactively. If you push an employee and give them ammunition to sue (and you fail to fool/bully them) it's gonna get a lot more expensive. Not to mention distracting/emotional. Just keep in mind that if you hire an FTE, you'll have to mentally put money aside to exit them at some point in the future. Hiring freelancers is more expensive, but doesn't carry these problems. I tend to mix FTEs and freelancers, partly to distribute the risks and costs.
When talking to people in bad situations with their employer, I'm always surprised how little they know and how easily they're willing to take the short end of the stick. There's a deal between you and the company that specifies what you'll do for them and what you'll get in return, with legal context surrounding it. I think it's also good to be nice and willing to compromise in that situation, but employees generally don't seem to be aware of what a powerful position they're actually in, and don't feel they "deserve" that, or don't want to upset anyone. It's business at the end of the day, contracts. Don't be a bad business person, it's not like CEOs will respect or like you more if you don't put up a fight. Typically the opposite.
The lack of these protections is one thing that, IMHO, warrants the comparatively high US salaries in tech. More risk, more reward - business 101 stuff.
In many European countries unions provide free legal support.
Join the union even if things are good for you now, and you don’t have to go hunting for legal help if one day you feel like your employer isn’t being fair.
...a government body providing impartial advice for employers and employees to improve industrial relations. I can't recommend them enough.
Whether those representative act on their own, or join a national union or syndicate, is their own decision, and they're elected every 4 years.
Any meeting or importance between an employee and his employer, he can request one of the representative be present to assist him (and in some type of meeting, it is pretty much mandatory to avoid employer pressuring against).
Etc etc ...
Our system is far from perfect, but at least having SOMEONE in the company to turn to seem to make sense to me.
In Germany, that's called "Betriebsrat" (something like "company council") with pretty much the same purpose.
And then there's the "Gewerkschaft", which are unions not for one company but for entire sectors of the economy who - through their numbers of members - are able to do collective bargaining for the employees of their fields of various companies. E.g. "IG Metall" being the industrial union of metalworkers, which considering Germanys large manufacturing background is the largest union in the country.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Metall
I’ve never been highly convinced by these organs, since they seem to be colonised by folks who want to become Very Difficult to Fire, and who ultimately fold to any poorly thought-through management decision that impacts the lives of employees.
I’ve come to that both as an individual contributor and as a senior manager, but YMMV.
Also, any major change need to be in counter signed writing, it cannot be a one way thing, not even a "we both agreed" even if it's true.
As an employer myself it sometimes lead to seemingly absurd situation where you need heavy procedures for a simple change, but the end result is that no worker is screwed this way in a way that would stick in court (it still does happen, mostly in areas where people don't go to court after, of course).
A specific kind of deal is the "the company is going south, we make a collective agreement like eg no firing and no dividends and workers agreed to reduced hours or salary for X months" things like this, and in Twitter case it could be what they should have used, but again these have clear procedures and steps to be considered legal and not abuse by the employer, and as you can imagine a middle of the night email with no representation does not fit at all.
I know Musk is a know it all that believe he is so smart and better that he doesn't need to listen to the competent persons around, but I wished I could be a fly on the wall in the company's lawyer room that day, just for the absurdity of it (I imagine it was sort of "we can pretend it's ok, or we can tell him and be fired too").
As for Musk's lawyers, I'd also love to know how exactly that played out, I can imagine all kinds of scenarios, some hilarious. The most likely to me seems that he wasn't exactly involved in this particular case, or any of these cases. People handle it based on what they think he'd want to do, then pass on the bad news if their plots fail somehow. I'm assuming this might be net positive for him in the end: He got away with the forced, incredibly quick culture change and workforce culling and was able to move forward with his strategy immediately. Delaying problems seems to have worked out for him quite a bit in the past.
If you've been forced to make a choice with an incredibly short timescale, many tribunals/courts (in Europe anyway) will put aside your choice if it later turns out to be detrimental. It's a bit like forcing someone to sign a contract at gunpoint.
It would be nice if people on HN tried to engage in a good willed nature rather than treating discussions like a struggle session.
But to the topic at hand, in rapidly changing sectors, high levels of friction when it comes to employment has a cost. There is no free lunch in economics.
When hiring employees means you’re hiring them effectively for life, it creates disincentives for hiring. Maybe you hiring consultants instead. Or maybe you make do and not hire at all.
No doubt it benefits employees when it comes to job stability. But the cost can be not having those jobs at all. That’s something that has to be considered in the equation.
The other thing is the employee obligations it creates. When I worked in Europe I had to give three months notice to quit. Either that or pay the company the equivalent of the salary I made. As an employee it was a penalty I couldn’t afford and thus opportunities at start ups that needed someone now were out of reach. Employee protections had a real cost to me.
It’s pretty clear that Europe as a whole is willing to pay that cost, but it’s a choice.
Nothing wrong with that, but one can’t make that choice then turn around and wonder why your innovative sectors are lagging other countries.
Would you mind sharing the country you were working in?
One month is common for juniors or contractors. I've never seen a contract with less than 1 month notice in tech. Three months is common for senior or management positions.
Due to the position "garden leave" was the most typical way to spend those 3 months, so it wasn't much of a real-world concern.
In Germany it is not the case.
"The other thing is the employee obligations it creates. When I worked in Europ" Europe is a big place and working law in the EU (and outside too!) is in the charge of national law. Where have you been living ?
In Germany you can talk to company to quit earlier because these quitting comworkers tend to be rather unproductive.
The only German tech company I’m aware of was a fintech which was a massive fraud that collapsed on itself.
Do you have some opposing examples?
It doesn’t generally get included for the same reason IBM doesn’t typically get included in list of ‘tech companies’, even if they are one of the oldest actual tech companies.
Been around forever (70’s or earlier), large multinational, more about business integration and sales than any headline tech. Frankly, their tech has been a side thought for a very long time internally. It’s a blue chip that happens to involve tech, not a ‘tech company’ like any of the FAANGs. Same issue Tata/Wipro, etc. have IMO. Arguably Oracle falls in the same class too.
A parallel comment mentioned Deutsch Telecom, but they’re really not a ‘tech company’ anymore than T-Mobile, AT&T, Comcast, etc. are.
If we include it anyway, that gives Germany 2 and the US…. Several dozen? Minimum? Maybe 50ish, actually. Even if we don’t use the same broad criteria in the US.
If we use the same broad criteria in the US, probably 1/3 of the Fortune 500 qualify, if not more. Is Bank of America a ‘tech company’?
This fits Microsoft as well. Are they not in tech?
They always seemed a bit weird to me. Near as I can tell, they were first, bigger, and invented most of the tech at scale (well, kinda - porn companies were first I think?).
Also, without the N in the acronym it becomes a lot less cool sounding, and well, a lot more derogatory.
If you want examples that fit some specific definition of "tech company", please share that definition, or where one can look it up. I deliberately didn't bring up more examples than SAP, as I didn't want to get lost in the weeds.
We also have our own fancy pants multi billion dollar delivery companies like "Delivery Hero/Lieferheld" or Zalando that Silicon Valley types are so fond of.
SoundCloud is a German startup. So is ResearchGate.
Or how about Hello fresh that so many English speaking YouTubers tend to have sponsorships with?
By the way I was mostly trying to think of Silicon Valley esque startups with a strong internet presence. The moment you talk about things like semiconductors, digital twins, robotics, basically any manufacturing related technology, Germany has a long list of major "tech" companies. I know, I know "tech" is actually American slang for software, not hardware, technology but still.
Germany has a large "Mittelstand", so medium sized companies and much stronger antitrust/cartell-laws. One could argue, that the lack of extremly large tech-companies is, for better or worse, by design.
Wirecard was a disaster for a multitude of reasons: The company itself [lost|stole|defrauded] a billion euros, their auditors (Ernst&Young, now "EY") failed to notice a billion euros of irregularities and lost their auditing license over the debacle. The german banking authorities failed in some capacity I cannot remember right now.
First, they ignored early - like TEN YEARS - and relatively continuous warnings about fraud at Wirecard.
Then they legally targeted journalists who pointed out misconduct at Wirecard (!!!)
Then they banned short-sellers from shorting Wirecard (!!!!!!) and indeed in internal memos mentioned that short-sellers were Israelis and British citizens in some kind of bigoted justification for the ban. Gross and disgusting, but perhaps par for the course in some levels of the government there.
They tried to cover up malfeasance within their own org, including at least one, but probably more employees undertaking insider trades on Wirecard before its failure.
But don’t be too worried about the poor chauffeur-driven bureaucrats at BaFin!
They’ve since reorganised and added more senior employees to an already bloated and ineffectual regulator who are culturally in bed with the regulated entities.
The gravy train must continue.
(Just reviewing what happened through internet searches has caused steam to come out of my ears again. What the actual fuck was BaFin doing all those years?)
But I refuse to believe that every employer in the US is a piece of shit. I bet most of them are decent people.
The effect is compounded by all the smart talent going to SV or large rich cities (London, Zurich), leaving scraps to the rest.
Unrealized capital tax gains being reinvested tax free made Silicon Valley's exponential growth possible (which is the only reason why a16z was forced to back Trump despite the Tech are being overwhelmingly democrat leaning - they're scared they'll be taxed out of existance).
In Australia we have codified National Employment Standards which are strictly enforced. https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/national-e...
This happened to Alphabet/Google when they wanted to lay off 6% of their workforce, but were wildly profitable. They couldn't in Germany.
(This probably wouldn't have applied in the Twitter case, because Twitter wasn't profitable, but it illustrates that there are processes and rules around employment that might seem very unusual to others).
There are laws regulating layoffs due to operating conditions (Kuendigungsschutzgesetz). But these laws do not allow the government to intervene directly in company affairs - that would be communism! If a company wants to restructure "for internal reasons" (rationalizations are specifically mentioned) it is allowed to do so. This includes offshoring, moving workload to contractors, or simply getting rid of a department.
However: many of the large companies (eg. SAP, BASF, carmakers,...) have collective labor agreements. These agreements often exclude layoffs due to operational conditions within a certain period. Under very special circumstances layoffs are still possible in such arrangements, but the companies have to prove their economic hardship and the layoffs often end with a sort of golden handshake. If they happen at all :)
To lay off somebody, a company needs a reason, and the bar for being laid off because of redundancy is pretty high. You have to be able to proof that either the economic situation is bad enough that other measures don't help, or that their labor had been automated away, or other possible reasons that don't apply here (like seasons for seasonal workers).
But it seems you've cited an example of something ironically very anti-labor. This means your government has codified into law the false idea that all human employees are undifferentiated commodities (like cattle). So as an employer, if there's no ability to remove underperformers every year, you've turned employment into a market for lemons, and created a classic adverse selection problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
A market for lemons 1) suppresses prices [wages in this context] 2) decreases price variance and 3) creates inefficiencies. As 50% of workers are actually above average (statistics!), you've created a negative feedback loop hurting workers wages and ultimately growth in the economy.
No, that is not the case. You can still fire people and you can do so especially if they are underperforming. You just can't do it as a mass layoff.
If you fire someone then you need a reason to do so. If you fire people because of a layoff then you need to show that the layoff is legitimate.
You can not just group underperformers and let them go as a layoff because you are circumventing labor law. You can not lie about the reason why you are letting someone go.
No one would care if you fired 99% of your company IF you are prepared to show they were underperforming and that was the official reason given.
Show me examples of firing a few underperformers easily from a company.
You would probably say that it isn't EASY because in the US it is much easier to do. You might not be able to do it immediately without notice period unless the employee does something really stupid or illegal.
You can however fire someone any time when you give them the notice period defined in the employment contract. You might need to give them a warning that they are underperforming first so that they can fix it before you fire them, but after that, you can just fire them.
This happens ALL THE TIME, but it isn't done as a mass/group action. If you have a problem with an individual then the individual gets fired.
Also, in the first 6 months, you don't need any reason and the notice period is shortened to 2 weeks.
But it's not some multi-year ordeal just to let go of one employee in the EU. Maybe in Asia, but different culture, different sentiments.
You can fire someone, but not on a whim*. You need to build a file, build history, give chances for one to improve their behaviour and performance.
*in some cases you can, like grave errors, like ignoring safety regulations, endangering others, etc.
If layoffs only affected "underperformers" you may have a point. laying off 6% of your workforce despite a profitable year betrays the basic idea of "underperforming".
All that aside, if your worst employee is still generating a profit for the company then there's little ground to say they are "underperforming".
But the most vulnerable of us are new grads or people with little experience, and most of the time the abuse from the bosses falls in a gray zone, where it is not clearly illegal, but still very damaging for the future of our careers. And no laws or unions will protect you from that kind of environment.
It's also worth mentioning, with respect to Germany specifically, that there are a lot of anti-worker customs that would make Americans gasp. For example, the quasi-requirement of having pictures and other personal information on your CV, the fact that racial discrimination is an open secret even though there are laws against it, the requirement of a reference letter from your previous employer, the glass ceiling that you will encounter frequently unless you are part of the right demographic to break into management ... I could go on.
As an employee in Germany, I feel abused and helpless. Most of the laws on the books are not written to protect me. The only thing that really protects people like me is a competitive job market.
It's worse in Austria where you have at will employment with a notice period and can be laid off without any reason so many companies can subtly force you to accept a new contract or just get laid off.
Picture was a requirement, but that is slowly becoming less popular. Especially in Tech. Leave it off if you don't feel like including a Picture. I stopped including a Picture as well some years ago and it has not harmed (or improved) me yet.
Which other personal information is required? I would expect contact information and Name. Of course also your Work History and Education. Which personal information do you have a problem with?
> the requirement of a reference letter from your previous employer,
Yes, they are required to give you a reference letter when you leave the company. Honestly, I have never been asked to provide said letter to my new employer in the 15 Years I have worked in Germany.
Most times I don't even have one during the hiring process since I am still working there. So, even if asked about a reference letter, I would just reply that I do not have one. Which, again, has not happened to me yet.
it's barely even necessary in this day and age. Just search up John Doe, Job Title, citysville, State and odds are you'll find some LinkedIn (they probably applied that way anyway). If not, a twitter or open Facebook or more. lot of the newer generations happily give out such private info.
And it's amazing how much nonsense they don't have to deal with just because The business will make the Americans do it so as to avoid a works council hassle :P I'd like a works council that makes my management pause before they load me up with extra work on top of my normal tasks.
What's sad is the people who get frustrated by the German's not having to deal with the bullshit and instead of thinking "we should have that!" they think "They should NOT have that!"
humans are weird.
In such states, employees can also leave for any reason, but the asymmetry of the power dynamic means the "at will" laws are generally more beneficial to the employer.
So Musk feels to be above contract law. The whole basis for law based commerce goes out of the window. Musk's world view is incredibly dangerous for a law based country.
This means €550k is a way to low number as punishment. It might be enough as restitution for the employee, but an additional, much stronger and personal punishment should be given to anyone who agreed with this way of working.
And he hasn't made it ABUNDANTLY clear that he doesn't give a shit about laws, regulations or conventions?
They indeed are for a very small subset of people, who are overrepresented on this website.
I really don't think you can generalize that wages o/a are incredible in the US.
Also note that salaries are rarely that high even in tech. Usually a big part of compensation is stock grants which are taxed differently.
Indeed, but payments awarded by courts generally rank very high in priority in bankruptcy proceedings, and he can also apply for garnishment against Twitter's bank accounts in the meanwhile.
I think the problem is that wealth disparities make anything involving expertise (including but not limited to legal battles) increasingly one-sided as the disparity increases. This is where unions, public prosecutors, wealth taxes, class action suits, and the idea that contracts can be voided in part or in whole by courts, all play a part.
Murdoch, Musk, Thiel, Trump et al are doing their level best to convert the US into a banana republic.
If you own a company, that comes with responsibility and if you shirk those responsibilities the law will come for you; as it should.
The commission is pushing US companies to avoid breaking employment law in Ireland. Companies that believe the law is unfairly attacked against them or who were planning on ignoring the law might be deterred from opening up shop in Ireland, but how many companies does that describe?
Of course, those companies were not under the whims of a moronic buffoon.
The €550k was compensation for unlawful termination.
Inconsistent application of corporate/employment law is a strong disincentive to business participation because it makes the law feel capricious (and because there are plenty of disputes between businesses where there's no obvious way for political actors to put their thumbs on the scale in a "pro-business" way).
Something tells me they’d be okay with that.
The staff member had a choice, agree to an increased level of commitment or decline, he obviously declined.
If companies can't decide who stays on or not, then definitely they would be more hesitant to invest / movel locations to Ireland.
This will take time and certainly one of the things considered among a thousand others when choosing a location!
The law stood up for the employee in this case, as it should.
Ireland's tax regime is notoriously kind to tech companies, so I doubt they'll go anywhere.
I know it's paywalled, but could you at least take the time to find an archieve and read the article if you're going to make such a claim? It's usually the top comment.
>Rooney was one of thousands of Twitter employees sent an email by Musk requiring them to pledge to stay with the company, working long hours at “high intensity” during its transformation, or to accept a buyout. Staff were given a day to click “yes” to agree to unspecified employment terms.
Doesn't sound like performance issues. Sounds like "I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further"
>If companies can't decide who stays on or not, then definitely they would be more hesitant to invest / movel locations to Ireland.
Good. These are employees, not contractors/consultants. You want a short term expert solution, hire a consultant with their much higher hourly rates. You don't want culpability for employees but need labor (short or long term, but not forever), hire a contractor.
Companies seem to forget what "careers are", and why once upon a time they helped to develop them.
It's viable because Twitter/X controls the access to the audiences of their users - if you leave, you lose your network.
I'd like next gen social media platforms to allow transitions from one provider to another. While related, I think this is a different topic than centralized/federated.
Most of those 'users' are probably bots though. The bot activity has increased massively since Musk has bought the company (just look at all the like-bots nobody seems to do anything about).
https://fortune.com/2024/08/15/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sale-tw...
https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-revenue-falls-x-payme...
https://archive.ph/20230817224420/https://www.wsj.com/tech/b...
(I count "can make Starship on the side" as a QED of "making bank").
Regardless of how Starship concludes, when it does so it saves them ongoing costs, and turns "small profit" into "huge profit": either Falcon becomes redundant, or the R&D team does.
I'm not sure that's a wholly accurate description? The article appears to point to sources beyond that singular comment - in particular, ostensible internal financial information:
> Ferguson based his assessment on internal second-quarter figures recently obtained by the New York Times. According to this report, X booked $114 million worth of revenue in the U.S., its largest market by far. This represented a 25% drop over the preceding three months and a 53% drop over the year-ago period.
> That already sounds bad. But it gets worse. The last publicly available figures prior to Musk’s acquisition, from Q2 of 2022, had revenue at $661 million. After you account for inflation, revenue has actually collapsed by 84%, in today’s dollars.
X also receives far less media exposure than Twitter used to. For example in the U.S. about a decade ago, it was common for every ad and news broadcast to include the Twitter icon with their Twitter handle on the screen. Entire movies were made with Twitter as a central plot element (e.g. Jon Favreau’s Chef). Reporters were hired and fired based on the size of their Twitter audience.
None of that happens anymore. X gets a bit of news coverage primarily from random controversies and that’s it.
Do you have a source for that? Many of the accounts that I follow on twitter are now completely dead. I think most of them are not deleted, but they have basically no activity. This is of course very subjective, but is there any reliable data how many active user x now has?
With all the jockeying in the US, I wonder if this is a sign of more, meaningful, legal trouble to come.
It was an enforcement action from the Workplace Relations Commission, and can be appealed in court.
I sure hope there is because the guy is in the running for most powerful man in history.
Doesn't seem that hard, tbh
I’d like to invite you to clarify why what seems a difficult topic to me seems a simple one to you?
From where I’m sitting it seems nuanced and complicated and involving decades of history.
It’s eminently possible that I’m missing key information on this, but I can’t glean a “no-brainer” from the above comment.
This opinion is not nuanced though, because nuance is tricky and requires more effort than simply categorising into a tribal viewpoint
But certainly I’ve posted some stuff online I wish I could take back, I suspect most have, and given the cool stuff around renewable energy and rockets I’m rooting for a good outcome.
He really doesn't look like someone who wants to take anything back. In the past couple years he basically doubled down on everything unpleasant about him, sadly.
How one can go from having interesting opinions on all sorts of scientific topics to being able to entertain Trump's rumblings for an hour is beyond me, but that's what happened.
After that it was just one unhinged incident after another, growing worse and worse.
These aren't mutually exclusive.
I've never been a fan to be fair, and he surely didn't make it easier for me the last few years. But I think some of his potentially negative traits, incredible risk taking appetite and stubborness, propelled these two fields forward. Faster than they would have been if he wasn't around. Perhaps someone else would have done it with the same effects, I don't know.
I used to think there _must_ be method to the madness. But since the Twitter takeover and subsequent right wing transformation, I don't see it anymore. He seems way too smart to fall into a silly us-vs-them mentality. I refuse to believe he doesn't see "left" and "right" policies in a nuanced light. My only explanation is that he's going through some severe personal issues, and we're witnessing the symptoms in public. I don't like him, but I hope he can work through them and find happiness. Not just for his sake.