> workers can be terminated only for misconduct or another such reason
This is such a weird request for technology workers. You want to work with low-performing coworkers?
This is such a weird request for technology workers. You want to work with low-performing coworkers?
It's just asking for due process.
This is where I break with the "pro worker" dialog you hear online a lot. In my experience, competent employees are incredible difficult to come by. Recruiters are paid a few months salary just to get someone through the door. To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true. I'd prefer the quick to hire, quick to fire economy. Especially since employers would be much less likely to take a chance if they know there are a lot of hoops they'd have to jump through if it didn't work out
I'm all on board with better pay and benefits. But protecting mediocrity doesn't benefit customers or other workers. Companies may occasionally arbitrarily fire good employees without a good cause, but that would be their loss.
One thing you'll notice in employee-owned companies (as opposed to unionized companies) is that they generally do no tolerate such clauses in their contracts.
https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/
https://routine.co/blog/what-is-the-prices-law-and-why-is-it...
...which is probably why you only see this stuff regurgitated in blog posts and right-wing Malcolm gladwell (Jordan Peterson is quoted as the source in one of your cited blog posts).
Either way, I'd be highly, highly suspect of parroting Price's "law" as a fact.
(I get stuff like Conway's law or Moore or Murphy are all also cited as laws, and I don't like that terminology either. "Conjecture" would fit so much better, save for Murphy's)
Even if the law were true regarding authorship, and applied to software, that still wouldn't show that the "valuable contributions" are only made by virtue of a small set of excellent contributors -- see "Matthew effect"
All the actual work on Earth is performed by sqrt( 3,630,000,000 )[1] or:
~60,000 workers
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN
"Based on choosing the current estimates of Labor force, total"
Have you only ever worked with reasonable management? The problem with quick to hire quick to fire is that eventually you might be quick to fire. I suspect you have a much higher level of security than most people to have quality of coworkers as a top priority!
Optimal strategy is to sabotage your coworkers in such an environment.
It's also bad for the high performers, as working in the same team is bad: Having 3 great performers in a team means at least one, if not two are going to get a middling review. Everyone's behavior gets warped in ways that don't align well with what would be good for the company
And overall if you're looking to be employed as much of your life as possible quick to hire/quick to fire is obviously better based on unemployment data.
Nobody has ever come up with a good set of objective metrics to judge software engineer performance. So the best we have is still the subjective opinions of your managers and peers.
Imagine I sent a manuscript to a publishing house and they rejected it for being bad. I wouldn't expect they got to that conclusion by comparing it to a set of metrics, I would assume they have people in authority whose judgement is the decider on whether something is "good" or "bad".
Human endeavors sometimes fail to live up to expectations.
For workers who work with their heads, "metrics" is a fantasy. How do you measure a better writer?
How do you measure a better writer? It depends on what the purpose of the writing is. If it is an author directly selling books then you measure by books sold. If it is an online publication you can conduct surveys to determine the impact of a particular writer on subscription or view rates. If it is a techincal writer doing product documentation you can measure based upon meeting schedule, number of defects and by conducting customer surveys.
> If it is an author directly selling books then you measure by books sold.
This is a fairly lousy metric. It depends enormously on the marketing campaign and the ability of salesmen to sell it.
For example, I read an article about the author of the "Slow Horses" book. It languished for years selling at a rate that was indistinguishable from zero. Then some journalist read it, wrote a glowing review of it, and it took off. Now it's a best seller, with sequels, and a miniseries.
Of course not. They fire people with different taste in music, or who don't listen enthusiastically to their complaints about other people, or who refuse them sexual favours, or...
And utterly zero awareness of what they themselves were doing wrong.
Attempting to explain it to them was a complete failure.
Middle managers don’t suddenly get 28 hours in a day after someone offers this suggestion. Their schedules are already maxed out, so every extra minute of focused attention needed is literally coming from someone else’s (or some other department’s) budget.
Instinctive social judgement definitely exists. Is it a good metric to find good employees? Dunno, maybe?
Isn't this just a sign of bad management? If employees are capable of doing the work when their job is on the line, it isn't a question of skill or ability. It is a failure of the company to properly motivate, challenge, and reward them for their work.
It’s HN. We’ve all been maliciously compliant. I can close tickets without solving any problems or be on call in the most useless ways imaginable just fine.
Either the company should be able to evaluate an employee's performance and therefore can show proof of poor performance or it can't properly evaluate an employee's performance and therefore shouldn't be firing people based off an admittedly inaccurate measure of performance.
You probably couldn't explain how you walk, or how you cook an egg, or how you speak English, at the level of detail that would be required for something like this. Yet you do know how to do all those things.
Just because you can't write down detailed objective instructions for how to do something does not at all mean you have no idea how to do it.
Should we not require any due process under law, because the officer "just knew" that it was that brown guy who stole the bread?
What's being asked for is accountability for decisions that can literally result in someone ending up homeless—and that are hugely subject to bias, both conscious and unconscious, in a country that is currently riven by divisions of race, gender, sexuality, and class.
Maybe we're balancing the wrong side of the equation? Expanding teach-to-the-test across the economy strikes me as the wrong move.
This is a bit fallacious and a false analogy. Due process under law exists because it's definable. We have standards for evidence, burden of proof, reasonable doubt, etc.
The challenges in cleanly defining what it means to be a "good employee" don't somehow mean other aspects of society that can be defined shouldn't be.
I think almost everyone has worked with someone who they know shouldn't be there, but they still are because they keep finding ways to technically meet the letter of the law when it comes to "performance". And yet they are clearly a huge anchor for the team, and everyone knows the team would be better off without them.
I wish we could perfectly evaluate what it means to be a good employee, and we could show the exact measurements used to do so. But this simply is not realistic, never has been, nor will it likely ever be. The spectrum of possible behaviors and the intricate interplay unique to various teams makes such a task impossible. I'm not saying an effort shouldn't be made, but that these decisions are often highly subjective, without much hope of arriving at something more objective.
I've worked at places that had stringent requirements for firing people. The net result was that good people all leave voluntarily instead of being stuck with the problem individuals, ultimately resulting in teams full of mediocre-to-awful teammates.
Managers can both know how to evaluate quality and fit while not having any hope of perfectly defining and documenting those evaluations. I'd rather work in an environment that has at-will employment with all of the downsides that come with that than a place that can't fire employees without spending a year creating a mountain of paperwork that ultimately doesn't get anyone much closer to the objectivity people are striving to achieve.
Remember that homework assignment or group project where you spent an inordinate amount of time and effort on not doing the work as intended in some silly way? This is the adult version of that.
The same with students who'd go to great lengths to cheat, rather than spend a few minutes learning the material.
This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers. If I have to try to hit a deadline and my coworker is garbage, I want my boss to be able to fire them and start finding a replacement, not start a six month process of paperwork, meetings, and HR CYA bullshit with the sole purpose of avoiding some bogus NLRB complaint.
The only way a teacher can get fired these days is for showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student.
(And yes, in spite of this, there are some gems of teachers.)
having worked in a school district and staying in touch with colleagues afterward, I can honestly say that most people would be surprised at the number of teachers aren't fired for misconduct like that, particularly showing up drunk or high.
it seems that getting shuffled into an administrative role or a year of paid leave are the goto solutions whenever an incident can be handled quietly.
back in my grade school days, there was one teacher who would routinely lose her shit and scream at people.
when it inevitably escalated beyond that (usually throwing objects.. chalkboard erasers, garbage cans, even the occasional chair), she would simply end up teaching at a different school in the same district.
they managed to keep that game going for over twenty years.
I read that teachers are fired at a lesser rate than doctors having their medical license revoked.
This should make it pretty easy to see how union strength affects firing rates (no, I don't happen to have the data on hand). IME schools tend to avoid firing teachers even when they easily could, in favor of pushing them out, because they don't want the bad press from a firing, so my guess is firing rates for teachers are low everywhere.
We might further hope to see whether union strength affects education quality, but there are too many confounders—the states with weak teachers unions tend to be red states and to have weak economies, either or both of which may have stronger effects on educational outcomes than union activity. But, on the specific question of the effect of teachers unions on teacher firing rates, we can maybe get something like a useful experiment out of these state-by-state differences.
I’d guess the rates remain low even with weak unions because schools are piss-pants scared of bad publicity, due to the public’s role in (indirectly) hiring and firing the top of their pyramid, and in allocating funding. But maybe I’m wrong and rates of firing are closer to whatever you consider a desirable rate, in states with weak unions. I did go looking, but couldn’t find datasets tackling that in particular. Frustrating, because with that we could get at least a strong hint of the actual effect of unions on this specific thing.
Everyone who has interacted with a large company has met a more highly-paid negative-productivity employee than even the worst government worker.
> Just because there's a process to get rid of someone doesn't mean it will ever happen.
If managers aren't competent or motivated enough to follow a process, I sure as hell don't want those same managers firing people just on their say-so.
> This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers.
No, this is about making it harder for management to fire programmers who do pesky things like informing other employees of their rights, or refusing to work unpaid hours.
It appears we have stopped teaching Mythical Man Month in university.
This is not because "it's hard to fire government workers" as often stated, but simply because government runs on a shoestring budget and cannot hire only good people.
Also because a shocking amount of people working in local government didn't realize Ron Swanson was a fucking satire character.
The system here is going to be something like LoC or tickets answered, things that are objective and easy to measure. We know these don't reflect real productivity, but because they are objective, that's what will be used in promotion and firing decisions. Anything subjective, even if it's the opinions of peers or experts, will be contestable in due process hearings, creating risk for the employer, and will be deemphasized or eliminated. One reason why the US government and European software companies are relatively uncompetitive in hiring is because of the difficulties created by due process in firing bad employees and promoting good ones.
Mild issue with this. Mostly, cause it's a one size fits all. There's a certain kind of productivity worker that actually responds relatively well to that type of metric. That vagueness results in stagnation and analysis paralysis.
Those workers tend to actually respond better to what the game community almost considers the grind mindset. Give us a well defined hallway, with well defined tasks, and then we'll walk down the well defined hallway. It may not be "super creative" productivity, yet it's a "form" or "type" of productivity.
Part of the issue also, is a lot of the time, people seem to always want to be the Einstein of the company, and nobody really wants to deal with the day-to-day shit. It's simply not status enough, or management visible enough, or high-level content enough, or similar.
if you can be fired "only for misconduct" and low performance doesn't count as misconduct means that you cannot be fired for low performance.
Granted, the actual demand might be more nuanced but going only by what was reported, they don't want to be fired for low performance.
It's incredibly hard to quantify "low-performing" for white-collar workers, because any measure is either easily gamed, actually creates roadblocks and bad incentives, or both.
Now companies are wary of hiring people because it's harder to fire.
This is another one of those obvious "unintended" consequences. The harder it is to fire someone, the correspondingly harder it will be to get hired. Companies will be unwilling to "take a chance" on someone.
For comparison most French companies I've seen can hire an engineer within 3 interviews. I entered a company in the past in a single interview.
In comparison talking with an US company's HR, the plan was 4 rounds with a coding test, for an average of about a month to go through the whole process and there's still a probation period.
Disclaimer: this is only my opinion on where to work. I'm fully aware there are many other good reasons why management needs to document low performance.
Most managers are pretty good but organizing lots of a people is really hard. And there is something like a leaky abstraction for every level of the organization as goals and context and understanding get filtered and warped as information travels up and down the org chart. You're manager is your closely interface to the insanity of distributed human decision making, so they usually are seen as bad and are blamed for all of the dysfunction of the organization when they're trying to make the best of an imperfect situation.
Do you have any examples of systems that worked well?
The problem with that is it's a subjective decision, not an objective one.
In every workplace I've been in, it was obvious to everyone who the low performers were. But it's nearly impossible to prove it.
Even if they could document it, it would take a year to document it, costing the company another $100,000 just to replace them.
You're asking them to solve a problem people have been working on for decades without success. How can they measure productivity of tech workers?
Nobody has ever invented a working system for objectively rating software engineers. I really doubt NYT will be the ones to do so!
There are also people who are technically performing but in practice but are jerks. And please don't start with "that's what HR is for" because I have never - not once - seen HR solve, or even significantly help, this sort of problem. Plus everybody hates dealing with them.
Just let people fire lousy workers man. This isn't that hard. Or, employees should push for employment contracts where the commitment is reciprocal: employers promise to keep them on for a few years and they promise to stay on for a few years.
So instead the choices tend to drift to "fire them on the manager's whim" or "practically impossible to get rid of short of murder"
That sounds like just your experience
https://www.apqc.org/blog/better-measurement-knowledge-worke...
The crux of growth in knowledge workers is that our current norms of measurement and productivity were developed in a manufacturing or manual task-oriented mindset. According to Peter Drucker, productivity for knowledge workers needs a different set of considerations
https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-...
While in manual work the targets and outputs are usually clear, knowledge work and its results are less tangible, and therefore harder to define, measure and evaluate
https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/114586/palvalin...
Drucker (1999) has even stated that knowledge worker productivity is the biggest challenge for modern work life. Other researchers have also discovered that the performance of an individual knowledge worker is the most important factor for organisational success... The need for general performance measurement is great as the theme is still quite new and there are very few previous studies measuring the effectiveness of NewWoW practices. There is also a need for practical tools for analysing and managing the performance of knowledge work from the NewWoW perspective. Organisations are still planning and making NewWoW changes, without clear evidence of their benefits and without any measurement information
Great, which means we have a way to measure individual performance with respect to what matters (organizational success). So what's the problem?
> Organisations are still planning and making NewWoW changes, without clear evidence of their benefits and without any measurement information
Unless you question the validity of the research? But if that's the case, why did you mention it as being significant in the first place?
Can you expand on that?
Clearly if it was possible to measure effectiveness unambiguously this wouldn't be a debate.
But I think this is a bit of hyperbole - some kind of ongoing, documented low performance seems obviously better than just letting managers fire on a whim.
As I was soldering boards together, I said "gnome". The clerk laughed, and said "no, seriously". I said "seriously, gnome". We argued a bit, and he capitulated, saying I was going to be sorry. The Aph guy behind me heard the debate, and asked for "wizard" as his job title. And so forth for all the employees. I think the owner of Aph asked for "grand wizard" or something like that.
Wandering around the convention floor, people would read our badges and laugh. It was all great fun.
After that, such job titles appeared on business cards, convention badges, etc.
I flatter myself in suspecting that it was I who started it!
I was once interviewed for a job by the CEO. He asked me where I saw myself in 5 years. I said "CEO".
I got a "no hire".
I've worked with people that were passionate about the art their entire life , and I've worked with on-job trained people in equivalent positions -- the difference in code quality/structure/logic is pretty telling between the two camps.
It certainly makes one think that either the skill set is 'special', or that we're really in the experimental trial phase of learning how to teach it to those otherwise uninterested.
Previously, you were probably a dork in high school and mostly self taught for the love of technology. You might have gone through a prestigious academic CS program and cultivated a sense of superiority over the humanities and biz school kids. Outsourcing / off shoring was a thing but you had the innate protection of skin color and acculturation.
Today it's just another thing some people study because that's where the jobs are.
Bold assertions requires evidence.
I mean sure we are not "wizards" , but I highly doubt "large swaths of population " can qualify to work in tech as you claim.
Tech remains be a highly desirable position specifically because it's difficult for an average person to fully grasp it. CS has one of the highest drop rates compared to other fields because people fundamentally have a hard time comprehending systems.
I never understand why our profession actively tries to undermine its own status compared to other fields. You never hear Lawyers going around telling people their profession is pointless and any average Joe can master it by taking a 6 week boot camp course.. or that they are "overpaid" for sending a single letter via email.
My pet theory is that the underlying nerd culture enables this due to our insecurities.
I bet this is also why we are not taken very seriously and lack accountability.
Unfortunately I think those types of layoffs are separate from "firing" and probably not covered by these terms.
The people interviewing with you might be a biased subset of those that were laid off. I don’t mean anything about your company, which could be great or terrible, I have no idea. But I would expect the best performers to get new positions quickly through their networks and connections. You would not see these people replying to random offers, but it does not mean that they were not high-performers who were laid off.
I suspect this to be very likely the case but I don't think it changes anything here. If we laid off people that were high performers and they got taken up in the job market quickly that means things are still healthy and we are still giving jobs to people that deserve jobs. A net neutral effect on the system as a whole.
The stragglers that can't find new jobs because they were laid off for low performance AND also are low performing interviewers are not useful to the system. Now they just kind of eat up some interviewing productivity but thats probably a net-positive for the entire job market as a whole.
Look at the news organizations laying off reporters in large numbers. The news organizations' product suffers considerably.
I worked for a company once that was doing poorly, and management decided to do an across-the-board 10% pay cut. One of my coworkers was livid with rage. I asked him why didn't he just quit and get another job? He said he didn't have any savings at all, and bills to pay. He had a mcmansion with expensive new furniture, new cars for himself and his wife, and expensive clothes. He had forged the chain connecting him to his desk - not the company's fault.
For example, my dad survived 32 missions over Germany. His group had 80% casualties. He had resigned himself to inevitable death. When he arrived home, he was amused by the trivial things people were stressed about. After all, they would survive to the next morning.
Thereafter, whenever he felt down, he'd think about what a golden opportunity he had to live, that his buddies did not have.
This morning, it was rainy and gloomy. In the afternoon, the sun came out and lit up the wet trees. It was spectacular. What a fine day to be alive.
I told him that the first step would be for tech workers to stop thinking that their greatest competition is other tech workers.
(Flip the question: "If your coworkers are low-performing but the union prevents the company from firing them, why don't you just go form your own company with your three closest buddies and compete? That's the dream, right?")
As a manager, I'd naturally want to retain the people who made me look good to my manager, regardless of my personal feelings.
Having a personal vendetta against particular employees has never happened in my experience, though it's been alleged a lot.
Making it hard to fire low performers results in low performing teams, and there are no reliable solutions to this.
An interview is at least 4 people, each grilling you for an hour, asking hard questions.
Their hiring bar is high and they optimize for avoiding bad hires (which of course is pissing off the commenters who want to be hired and therefore would prefer lower hiring standard).
In Europe they make it harder to fire people and guess what happened?
First, companies have probatory period (2-6 months, depending on the country) where you're hired but can be fired at will. This is to minimize chances of being stuck with a poor performer.
Second, EU economy is about the size of US and China but software industry (and the tax / employment riches associated with it) is largely in US Chine. Might be a coincidence but I think there's causality between over-regulation and stagnation of the economy.
With the endless seas of SWE layoffs, we'll see if that behavior continues.
What good is a growing economy when your country's people are living shorter, unhappier lives?
Look at the countries that are generally regarded as happiest: are their economies the biggest?
Assuming when you say "biggest" you mean per capita... yes. Obviously it's not the only factor, but generally I think it's generally accepted that people in rich countries are better off than people in poor countries.
It's also not a solved problem in countries where at-will employment is not the norm.
It seems if the problem you allege were true at scale, the entire labor force is sitting around doing nothing.
Are you really claiming that the only reason all (tech) employees do their job is just to avoid firing? How do you operate in a zero-trust life?
About half the people on this thread seem to be misreading that sentence.
It's very clear that "just cause" includes cases of low performance. So no, it's not about making it impossible to fire these people.
Both parties have freedom in this arrangement, but we can find examples of both employees and employers with weak negotiating positions. I don't think that invalidates the benefits of freedoms of association.
To your point about business being bound by constraints, they absolutely are bound by the niche they operate in. As markets change, world events unfold, competitors appear, decisions are made, companies can struggle and fail, yet are typically unable to pivot.
Consider a company that makes ICE cars that can't follow the market into making EVs. Or a company that has never had competition might be in the stranglehold of "this is the way we've always done it" when a fierce competitor emerges, and won't adapt.
True, most employees typically don't have equity (so they don't share in all the upside), but they also aren't married to the company when it looks like a supertanker headed for an inevitable collision with a bridge (getting wiped out on the downside).
Yes.
One thing that I don't see being discussed here: If you add "just cause" to your employment contract, you are pretty much trading away future pay raises for security. That is fine, but it needs to be said out loud.
Lastly: I never heard the term "just cause" before this HN discussion. It sounds like a US-specific term. I learned more about it on Wiki here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_cause_(employment_law)
I live in the Netherlands where these types of worker protections are enshrined in law, and I don't think I've ever encountered this boogeyman of the super low performing coworker that somehow ruins things for everyone else. News flash, low performance is still a valid reason for dismissal, it just has to actually be backed up by proof rather than being done on a whim because some manager has a vendetta.
Also, I don't give a shit how low performance my colleagues are as long as the useless managerial class exists. The laziest and most worthless people I've ever interacted with were always managers or manager-adjacent, never a regular employee.
I've worked with plenty of low performing ICs (as both peer and manager), and the trends are clear:
* companies that don't do, or don't do sufficient, technical interviewing
* employees with heavy worker protections, like in Germany.
I've also worked with fantastic German colleagues btw. But one reason they tended to get paid so much less is that they came with much, much higher risk, as they were essentially un-fireable. Even with imminently clear under performance you're looking at a year of PIPs, paperwork, and CYA bureaucracy.
Personally, I've found it more fulfilling to work in at-will places, for much higher wages, with more uniformly excellent colleagues. There's a reason so many of the best software engineers in the world make their way to the US.
The total freedom of the company to terminate anyone any time for any reason or no reason is extreme, and now we are pivoting to the other extreme. Funny how that happens.
I don't think it's great that our society tries to treat work like it's family, and jobs like they're some guaranteed long-term relationship. It sets people up with the wrong expectations.
Your company will lay you off or fire you once they run out of money to pay you or reason to keep you on board. That's how it works. Just as you will quit your job and take a new one if you interview and get a better offer elsewhere.
These are business contracts.
If you're a worker, why shouldn't you be able to band together with your fellow workers to not allow this?
- Landlords should not be able to collude to keep rent prices high. They should be forced to compete against each other, either by offering lower rent or better premises and services to tenants. The result is that over time, society gets better and better places to live, that are nicer, updated, and safer, at cheaper prices.
- Healthcare providers shouldn't be allowed to collude to set uniform prices for services. They should have to compete on price, quality of care, or access to treatments, ensuring patients can choose better or more affordable options. The result is that more and more people can afford healthcare services, which themselves become increasingly effective over time.
- Internet service providers shouldn't be able to divide territories or coordinate to prevent competition in specific regions. They should have to compete, driving down prices or increasing service quality for consumers.
- Software companies shouldn't agree to not hire each other's employees to keep wages low. This prevents employees from negotiating higher salaries and better benefits, hurting workforce dynamism and innovation.
Etc.
Capitalism is simply a collection of laws and regulations that blocks all means of profit other than simply offering a better deal or better services. The goal is for those to be the only real ways to profit. The side effect of workers and companies all competing to do this in order to profit is that society benefits by having a ton of innovation to make better and better things, at cheaper and cheaper prices. Which is the central reason why, today, the average person can have a cell phone, a TV, the internet, amazing healthcare treatments, and an almost infinite array of options for clothing, food, entertainment, etc.
Allowing people to profit in ways that disrupt competition gunks up the entire functioning of the market. Maybe you get some short-term benefit, but ultimately you end up with a system that doesn't create nearly as much wealth and prosperity. Because why go through the trouble to create great things for your customers (as a company), your employers (as an employee), or your employees (as an employer) if you can instead benefit by simply banding together with others and colluding, or monopolizing some essential resource, or fixing prices, etc.
Because that is bad for the individual worker. We live in a society, and society should look out for humans before corporations.
What are the results of worker protections mentioned above ? Literally no jobs with protections. See for yourself. LATAM has an average of ~65% informal employment. Take Argentina for example. Close to 50% of the labor market are under-the-table "jobs" for this reason.[3]. Even more developed countries suffer the consequences , such as UK having 24% informal sector [4]
All those governments intended to look out for humans before corporations. It didn't work out that way. The road to poverty is paved with good intentions.
US dynamism actually creates more jobs as more are willing to try new things and experiment.
Yes, you can protect workers, very very well. But only if you are OK with a tiny amount of protected workers, and let everyone else toil in the informal sector where zero protections exist
[1] https://goglobal.com/blog/from-legal-protocols-to-cultural-n...
[2] https://www.acc.com/sites/default/files/resources/vl/public/...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1037216/informal-employm...
I'm not surprised, on a startup-angled site, that there'd be dissatisfaction with not being able to hire and fire at will. COVID had employees re-assess what was important for them. Tangentially, now we're seeing that shorter working weeks results in higher employee productivity and satisfaction.[1]
Having job security, when you've taken on long-term commitments like a mortgage and raising kids, is considered important in many parts of the world. The EU isn't SV; for employees that's probably a good thing.
[1]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/10/surprising-benefits-...
Its not just startups. The chickens always come home to roost.
Lets go into COVID since it is a wonderful example. Employers in Ecuador dealt with minimum wage protections well outpacing productivity growth precovid, doubling the cost of protections relative to Colombia and 75 percent higher than in Peru [1] . Then COVID hit. The central government had no choice but to temporarily rescind the rules of strict protections under "force majeure". This eliminated all severance payments to employees under 'force majeure'. [2]
What happened?
A bunch of low performers who had built a decade or more in 1 job, got unexpectedly laid off, despite working in perfectly operating businesses with no risk of bankruptcy (AG, export adjacent etc) Then, with zero marketable skills from a decade of non-work, these workers are chronically unemployable now. [3]
PS - Regarding the UK number cited, which some people felt very strongly about.. I made a mistake and quoted the wrong year. I can't edit my comment any longer [4]
[1] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/downloadpdf/journals/002/2021/2... see page 11, section 1.
[2] https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2020-09-21/ecu...
[3] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/downloadpdf/journals/002/2021/2... , see page 13, section 6 ("the recovery has been very partially among the less educated (persons with basic education or less) ....'they exited' the labor force in larger numbers from the crisis onset")
[4] The number is available in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_share_of_...
It is IMO ridiculous that in a lot of EU countries, chronic low performance is not just cause for firing.
It makes economical sense to reduce the friction of allocating workers where they'll be most productive. It just shouldn't destroy those workers' financial security.
Coddling workers by expecting corporations to basically act as their family, their parents, their financial planners, their healthcare providers, etc., is terrible.
We should not be telling people to expect any particular corporation to provide them a livelihood indefinitely, when it's a simple fact that corporations cannot do that. They can afford to pay you when it's profitable for them to do so, and that's it. That's the deal. Period.
I'm all for taking care of people. That's what our government should do itself. We should not be placing that role on corporations. And we should not be telling people to expect that their jobs will last forever and they can't be fired. We should instead tell people to maintain their skillsets, maintain their savings, and live within their means, so they can weather inevitable job changes. That's what caring for people actually looks like.
Not necessarily. Sure it is better if every other factor is held equal, but it's not: everyone benefits from living in a more highly economically developed society where industry is more successful. So you have to weigh pro-worker concerns against these other benefits.
If your argument were valid then its logical conclusion would be that all profit from the business has to distributed to the employees (as in most traditional strains of far-left thought). In practice systems like that have major flaws.
Eventually you learn that one of your middle managers managed to fire someone for some reason that is illegal, or is related to some kind of crime, and guess what? It seeps upward, and your company is in the wrong.
A process doesn't just protect the employee, it protects you from the iffy middle management that, without exception, gets in. And the more freedom you give them, the worse the behavior.
I would agree with this but if that's the case why employees are not given the same perks as companies from a tax point of view? My personal preference is to treat every human as a business. The alternative would be to eliminate all taxes except sales tax with some cutoff for low income persons.
It's business's responsibility to not depend on a single employee. The employee might have been hit by a bus.
Plenty of people are aware of this, and they navigate this successfully by saving part of their income, by maintaining an employable skillset, and by living within their means, while working a job.
When you suggest to people that it's their company's responsibility to take care of them, to guarantee their job into their future, or to look out for their personal financial livelihood, that IS NOT REALITY. That's not how it works. You're telling people that their own responsibilities are someone else's, when that's not in fact true. When people mistakenly believe this drivel, they're far more likely to take bad risks and make huge financial mistakes.
Employees, on the other hand, put all their eggs into one basket at a time. Many (most?) employers specifically forbid moonlighting and working multiple full-time jobs at once, so employees are forced to depend on a single job at a time. The risk of having a bad employer is shouldered 100% by the employee.
It's this power dynamic that justifies different standards for employers and employees.
Business is not all huge companies with infinite redundancy. There are 30M small businesses in America that employ 60M people. For the vast majority of businesses and teams, losing an employee hurts, and employees have lots of leverage. These business owners have to do the work to ensure redundancy, to plan their budgets and products and systems to ensure they can weather inevitable employee turnover. Plenty of businesses fail to do this and have to close their doors. It happens with regularity.
On the flip side, unemployment is the US is super low. It's true that workers can only hold one job at a time, but they are not "trapped" at a job. In fact, they have more mobility than ever, which also gives them leverage to negotiate for higher salaries or to hop jobs. Not to mention more gig jobs, remote jobs, and contract jobs than ever, even for highly paid positions. Sure, losing a job hurts. But the employees who plan for this possibility, who maintain skills, maintain savings, and live within their means, can find new jobs, just as businesses who plan well can weather employee turnover.
It goes both ways.
So if you're in a position where your employer has some huge power dynamic hold on you, is that some universal truth for all employees resulting from the nature of the employer-employee dynamic? I don't think so. I think that's the result of poor personal decisions, or bad luck at best.
All that said, I'm 100% on board with legal protections that set a high standard for employers. We have plenty of those already. And I'm 100% on board with government stepping in to help take care of people who fall through the cracks. For example, I love that COBRA allowed me to stay on my previous employer-provided group healthcare plan for 18 months(!) after my last job ended.
What I'm against is any cultural or legal change that begins to suggest that its employers' responsibility to keep their people employed. It's not. Financially, the system can't work that way. Employers are not our parents or our nannies or our caretakers, and we should not try to make them into that.
Your claim of: > Yes, and it's an employee's responsibility to not depend on a single job, and to be prepared for the possibility that it might go away. That's the mindset we should be teaching people, because it's REALITY.
is capitalist mindset that thinks there's never a chance of change. Kinda pathetic for a MIT grad, tbh.
Personal attacks are shite, especially when they dig into someone's background for extra 'bite'.
P.s. what rock have you been living under where you have a preconception that all MIT graduates are ethical white knights that share all of your own opinions?
It's one of the most varietal student bodies at a school that forks people majorly into military programs and research labs.. to expect harmonious homogeny regarding ethical opinions from the graduates is ridiculous.
My understanding from the comments was that this prevents people who don't do their job from being fired, as long as they don't set fire to the servers or something. If I misunderstood, then the union is being nicer than they have to.
A court never reinstates anyone to their job, the company just needs to pay damages to the former employee.
That is your problem right there. You cannot trust comments to give you an accurate idea of what actually happened. The linked source is marginally better (but keep in mind that it is close to one side of the story, even though it is more independent than some people here seem to believe).
Anyway, no, that is not what they want.
A ton of tech workers are, in fact, socialists who think job expectations should be 0.
"I should be able to work anywhere so long as it doesn't affect my performance..."
"Also don't judge me based on performance".
I think people need to be honest that WFH is as an argument is tightly integrated with merit.
Your union might protect you from termination on an assembly line, and at least they can move you around the facility or bring in extra workers. Or for a teacher they bring in more supervision and resources.
In contexts where unions have similar provisions, direct supervision is implied.
You're arguing on the side of the rentiers and parasites who do not work, and lecturing about "low performance".
It's the people doing the work's purview to discuss performance, not the parasites.