Fed rate has improved, inflation is rising again, and the surrounding conditions resemble those of the ZIRP era—aside from the actual rate. Meanwhile, corporations are making more profit than ever. There should be policies in place to prevent them from pulling crap like this whenever they feel like it.
As a lifetime employee, I know we need better labor protection laws and enforcement.
Wage theft is one of the largest sources of crime in America.
https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
I think we need to abolish salaried work, at least for anybody who isn't in management, and legally require companies to use timeclocks with auditable logs. And if a manager tells you to work without clocking in, that should be a mandatory prison sentence. Do all this and wage theft should become a relic of the past.
(Also, none of this requires it to become a lengthy bureaucratic nightmare to hire or lay off employees, so the concern about companies becoming less nimble and more reluctant to hire at all should not apply. It is possible to have our cake and eat it too.)
But we had Mistral and it’s so bad in the market that Macron asked for 109b€ additional investment to be able to keep France competitive.
We also had Daily Motion but it was also second to market, like 0,5% of Youtube size.
So yeah labour protection laws give you very cheap engineers with 35hrs per week and 7 weeks of holidays per year.
Good luck competing!
That said, Europe isn’t struggling because of labor protection rules but because of its culture.
There are 69 countries with 69 different languages, and each of them wants high-paid foreigners to learn their language. I saw the same thing in France, Germany, and Finland. Why on earth would I care about German or French when I speak and write native-level English?
Another issue is the vacation culture. Three weeks of vacation is incredibly generous, but people here get even more. I’m switching teams because my current one can’t ship anything—different people are on exceedingly long vacations at different times, and there’s no coordination.
Europe is poorer and full of red tape. The fragmentation of languages and regulations doesn’t help. It’s a massive continent, yet the only real tech hubs are in Munich, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London. The rest are just running underpaying sweatshops.
In the US salaries have to be inflated in order to cover the lack of transportation, healthcare, and social services.
To claim that all (or even most) issues with wages can be solved with less regulation and enforcement to prevent fraud and abuse doesn't carry water.
When visas are tied to jobs, getting laid off means something completely different—even in a good labor market. I had to move from the US to one of those countries with strong labor protections. But I agree that salaries take a massive hit because of this, and opportunities are reduced too.
I’ve seen the opposite as well—people losing their residence permits and healthcare coverage, and then going bankrupt after a layoff. For me, lower pay for better labor protection is a sensible tradeoff. But of course, your mileage may vary.
As someone from a country with strong labor protections, I'm in favor of making it easier to fire people. There's too much dead weight around in companies here. But being fired shouldn't be a life threatening event.
But the reality is that tying visas and healthcare to jobs, and treating expats who pay taxes in the 90th percentile like unwanted immigrants, is a bad deal for everyone involved.
I do hope this gets fixed at some point—I’d love to go back. I made some great friends there. But until then, I still stand for better labor protection.
I don't understand how America (I'm an American) has diverged so far from what the literal Statue of Liberty stands for.
If someone wants to come here and try make a life for themselves, by all means come and give it your best shot.
Maybe so, although I don't know that Blue Origin is the best demonstration for the need. I doubt it's made a profit let alone returned investment. Bezos has supposedly been putting 1-2 billion into it every year, and CEO recently said it makes hundreds of millions per year.
> Every other day, I see drama like this that ripples across the globe.
What do you mean by ripples across the globe?
> Fed rate has improved, inflation is rising again, and the surrounding conditions resemble those of the ZIRP era—aside from the actual rate. Meanwhile, corporations are making more profit than ever. There should be policies in place to prevent them from pulling crap like this whenever they feel like it.
I don't think that's a good line to go down to basically say corporate profits in good times should be curtailed by forcing them to hold onto employees who are costing more than they make for the company. Because what do you do in bad times? Force the companies to go bankrupt, or weaken laws?
I think labor protection should be significantly or entirely divorced from corporate performance, and profit-taking that is wildly disproportionate to value provided should be addressed by mostly by promoting competition.
I heard a talk today(1) that pointed out that pre-Musk was given too much power and now we see from BO's demise why. Competition is now impossible.
I don't know any fellow Americans that want labor laws similar to Europe. In sure some people do, but in my experience its nowhere near a majority.
I understand the hate for at will employment. If you pay attention to the industry and what your company is doing, you can avoid layoffs or at least be better prepared for them.