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Comment by chernevik | Hacker News Reader

If the OP cannot legally fire this guy then it is time to depart that jurisdiction.

Law prevents the OP from just shooting the bastard, and rightly so. We surrender whatever right we may have to fight and kill on own our behalf, in return for protection from others and enforcement of just outcomes. The point is to remove our personal biases from interpretation of "just".

But if the sovereign jurisdiction won't allow this guy to fire someone who has done this, then its "law" has departed from its proper functions and can't be relied upon. I don't know what it is doing, but it isn't overseeing justice. I wouldn't wait to find out how it goes wrong next. I'd just leave.

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Oh please, leave the jurisdiction? With his 30-40 employees? I'm sure he's gonna get right on that.

The guy is fireable in any country.

> The guy is fireable in any country.

Not at all. As aforementioned, you can't legally fire him in the UK (or Australia). Doing so would immediately welcome a legal battle with Fair Work (in Australia) and your chances of winning that one are slim to none.

I'm not familiar with the law in the UK. Could someone fill me in?

I'm confused as to how someone can be forced to continue to give money to someone that they don't want to continue giving money to? What if I decide I can't afford those employees because we aren't making enough money? Surely I can close down the business if I want to, effectively firing everyone?

> What if I decide I can't afford those employees because > we aren't making enough money?

Then in various jurisdictions you have to prove that. In court. See item 1 of http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/world/europe/28iht-letter.... and this sort of thing is not limited to France.

The US setup of at-will employment looks just as weird on that side of the Atlantic, I'm told, as theirs does to us.

I can't tell you what the setup is with being able to close down a business. It wouldn't terribly surprise me if there are legal hurdles to that too.

bankruptcy tourism is a thing

You can fire people, but you have to follow a certain procedure to do so, otherwise you put yourself at risk of being sued for wrongful dismissal. There are clauses in employment contracts to cover gross misconduct so that you can fire someone for stealing etc. If you can't afford the employee you can make them redundant - but there are rules about not filling a similar position for a certain amount of time thereafter to ensure that it's not used as a way of firing people just because you don't like them. If an employee does their job and does it well you should not be able to just fire them because you're having a bad hair day. To me as UK citizen, your system looks like a crazy free-for-all. To each their own I suppose. :-)

Incidentally, IANAL - the above is essentially right but I'm not an employer and only have an employee's view of things.

I prefer a law making it legal to fire at any time except for a blacklist of protected reasons like race, gender. In an at-will united state, I hope adultery can't be misconstrued as a protected reason for not being able to fire....

It wouldn't work like that in New Zealand. Outside of work, consenting adults etc. The employee could just argue that the employer was acting unprofessionally during work hours despite the employee being professional at all times during work hours. If this firing was handled poorly the employer would likely face massive costs. NZ law has UK law as its origin.

Now, I don't think employers should need a reason to fire employees. That said, I think such laws aren't such a clear cut injustice like you're making them out to be. Not everyone believes in unlimited freedom of contract, and not being able to terminate employment contracts over personal issues wholly outside the scope of employment is not an inconceivably unjust limitation.

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