This isn't America. AK won't help you sue based on suspicions of discriminations if you don't bring written evidence that makes it a slam dunk case. And the court isn't biased towards the employee like the US jury.
4,520 karma · joined November 9, 2016
This might shock you, but lot of Austrian employers behave like this: Hire and fire. Got sick? So long. This shouldn't be acceptable in an EU country. AK is also useless here because the laws are toothless.
>unemployment benefits, social healthcare, sick leave, holidays etc
Those exist in every other EU company where you can't lay off people just because you don't like their face anymore.
>Competition against Germany, Belgium, Sweden, or the Netherlands is in my own interest.
Yet those countries score better at innovation, entrepreneurship while having better worker rights and higher wages. How do you explain that? I'm not sure working yourself to death in a race to the bottom on lowering workers rights is a good strategy.
Where are the benefits for Austrian workers for this lack of protection against firing versus countries that have protections?
And where is this HN simping for ruthless capitalist that lay you off you the moment you get sick coming from? What am I not seeing here?
The issue is being able to let go of workers for no reason, not the notice period itself, which BTW, every EU country has, Austria is nothing special here, quite the opposite. Do you feel this imbalance of power that you can be let go at any time for any reason is a fair to the workers in a so called socialist country?
Wouldn't be such a big issue if unemployment wouldn't be a pitiful 60% of your salary for ~3 months (yes it can be longer but you're then at the mercy of the system handler if they agree with the job search you're doing, otherwise they can also cut you off if you don't want to take hard jobs like warehouse work) .
>you can still sue immediately through the Arbeiterkammer
AK will only help you sue only in case of unfair dismissal which rarely happens because employers don't need to provide a reason for terminating you as long as they give you the 6-week-3-month notice. So long hours, burnout and hire-and-fire mentality is rampant among Austrian companies, but rarely talked about because it contradicts the "most livable country" narrative paid for by Austria to the Economist who runs that yearly campaign-ad.
It's not "somehow" by magic. The explanation is that as a neutral country between NATO and the former Iron Curtain, it was a middle-man for business, politics and trade between the two blocks in the cold war era, profiting from both parties without having to pay obligations to any of them. Basically it won the geopolitical lottery, similar to a Switzerland Light. Today with the Iron Curtain gone and the EU-Schengen borders extended east beyond Austria, it's a lot less relevant than it used to be and therefore a lot less profitable.
Taht's not true at all. Employers can lay off workers for no reason at all at any time without paying any severance (unless you have a unio that can negotiate a better deal). Just hand them the notice and you're done.
Average salary in Austria after taxes is something like 2k/month yet the country is full of flashy cars and houses costs from several hundreds of thousands to millions of Euros. How is that possible? You have mediocre EU salaries at San Diego house prices. Rents are reasonable but I don't see how people are gonna be able to also afford rent from retirement pensions.
I feel like in SW, impact and quality should be a lot more valuable than quantity of repos/apps you write. A few lines of code that fix a Gnome/KDE/$BIG_FOSS_PROJECT bug would be a lot more valuable in my book, than say another one in the millionth pile of JS note taking apps, or a repo full of "Baby's first Rust app"
Well, being the continent's money vault and avoiding two world wars while the whole continent ravaged itself twice, tends to make a huge difference in your nation's development (time in the market beats timing the market and Switzerland did both).
Also, just like the USA, Switzerland won the geopolitical lottery early on by being in a position that's easy to defend and difficult to attack and capitalized on it over the decades by attracting the highly educated elite and the wealthy entrepreneurs escaping from the European countries as they were torn by wars and revolutions, plus the dirty money of warlords, dictators and criminals from all over the world made them incredibly prosperous. It's not a repeatable formula that any other EU country could have easily replicated.
Adding the fact that Switzerland is incredibly restrictive with who they accept in the country, compared to neighboring EU countries who just let the dross in to virtue signal how tolerant they are, maintains Switzerland a very safe and desirable place to be despite it being relatively diverse (diversity in this context also means diversity of thought and diversity of opinion, not just the US identity politics version of only meaning non straight white males). So another win for them.
But if you look at Swiss elections, plenty of candidates took the xenophobic route in their campaigns demonizing Muslims and burkas as the biggest threat, but unlike EU members they don't really care what other think of them so they're a lot more outspoken about it.[1][2]
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/anti-minaret-campaign-divides-switzerl...
Not just running the place into the ground, but also actively lecturing people how everything is fine and how it's their perception that is wrong. That's what really pisses people off and gets the to vote extremists as those tend to at least acknowledge some of the issues average people are facing or seeing.
Average working class people don't like being lectured by upper class higher educated elitists off their high horse on how they're wrong.
Regardless of ones feelings towards the Orange Man and his voters (over half the country!) you shouldn't be able break HN ToS and get away with it. So either moderation efforts are being overwhelmed (hats off to Dang) or HN is heavily politically biased from the userbase to moderation team.
So because Israel is involved in something means that something can't be fascist? What about the fascist things Netanyahu is doing with Israel?
Shitting on your voter base is no way to win sympathy.
HN is like this too unfortunately. Anything slightly out of the high brow sanitized tech groupthink gets downvoted or flagged even if it doesn't break the rules.
It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one.
People are too sensitive and act on their feelings and emotions instead of logic and critical thinking. Which is ironic considering how such people pretend to be liberal, educated and all about free speech and freedom of opinion but only as long as your opinion matches theirs.
Who says people are being mislead? You? Isn't it how democracy should work? If Mainstream politicians refuse to listen to the people why are they surprised when they elect an autocrat who promises to do what the others don't want to listen to?
How about let people say and do whatever they want amongst themselves and stay out of their conversations.
Dudes in dangerous professions bond by calling each other slurs which is ok because they're all in on it, such that if you can't handle some bad words how are you gonna handle the real dangers of the profession where people need to know you have their backs, so you're either not cut out for the job.
You as an outsider from the nice people bubble don't have a say in this to lecture them since you're not in on it.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
>most of the germans who are homeless failed to take advantage of available support to get it
What if the system is poorly designed getting people slipping through the nets? I don't agree being so dismissive and throwing all the blame onto them.
> it is a fallacy to think that refusing help to refugees would improve the situation for locals
It's not a fallacy, it's basic economics.
>this is the kind of rhetoric that stirs up xenophobia and plays into the hands of the kind of politicians that according to your last paragraph you also don't want to see elected.
Then maybe the politicians should fucking listen for once and actually do what the people want them to do instead of doing something else and being shocked people don't like it.
I'm not legally nor morally obliged to provide them shelter, not do I wish to with my tax money. "No taxation without representation." It should be the voters' choice what to do with their tax money and I vote to provide shelter first to the local EU nationals. When there are no locals struggling to afford shelter, then we can talk about helping strangers from other places. No matter what you do, there will always be people suffering on the planet. It's not my job to help them all with my tax money nor is it realistically possible.
>only if we improve conditions everywhere in the world can we improve our own lives too.
Kneecapping our economy and our working class' standard of living in the noble pursuit of fixing the world's issues is not the choice most taxpayers want (see the swing in election results) nor is it realistically achievable no matter how much you reduce your heating/AC and how many paper straws you use when another Exxon oil tanker dumps its waste in the ocean as we speak and the likes of Nestle keep destroying the planet for profit and China and India are burning more cheap fossil fuel.
As long as the global economy revolves around greed of destroying the environment and privatizing the winnings in the pockets of a few multinational corporations and socializing the losses to the governments, environment and the working class taxpayers, your individual actions and sacrifices are in vain, while you're proposing the European working class should pay for this damage when it's not their fault nor responsibility since they're not profiting from this.
So squeezing the European working class further into poverty, in the name of some virtue signaling for the sake of the world (which the US, India, China and the Middle East aren't doing), is how you get another Adolf elected in Europe.
So true and applies to every EU member state. It's why the EU is not the US, and can never be like the US and compete against the US, even if all things were equal like labor laws and such.
Unlike the US, there's no such thing as a unified European culture, European language, European law, European army, etc. Every EU member state wants to be its own dragon hoarding wealth at the top of the union, the expense of the other members in the union, leading to internal squabbles and back stabbings, while the US and China steam ahead gaining more and more of the global GDP.
I don't know and I don't care since it's not a problem I created and I don't want my taxe Euros to be used on global charity, I want them used on the local citizens first and foremost. Why didn't the wealthy neighboring countries that are similar in culture like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, etc. take them in? Why must it be always the liberal European countries far away in charge of charity?
Imagine the local native American/Australian people seeing the British/European colonizers arrive on boats on their land and welcome them saying "where should these people go to instead?" instead of fighting them to kick them out. Or the Why would you ever welcome invaders? Hasn't history shown what happens over and over again? The culture with the most valance dominates the others. Why do you think random parts in the middle of Africa speak French?
> but denying refugees a save harbor is not going to improve your life one bit. those two issues are completely unrelated to each other.
How so? Less people coming to compete for access to limited healthcare and housing will definitely improve the life of the locals. It's just the basic economics of supply/demand. Do you think arithmetic is wrong? Denying this would be some advanced form of cope/delusion.
If those refugees would be such valuable human resources like skilled doctors and teachers with a great culture of assimilation, then all their wealthy neighboring countries I mentioned above would be fighting over them to bring them over instead of rejecting them. You don't want to import the dross that nobody else wants, so then why is Europe doing it?
> people who favor their own over refugees tend to also favor them over their neighbors, and when that happens we have a problem.
Maybe this kind of gaslighting and guilt tripping works on some people with luxury beliefs, not on me though. I like to be realistic on the economic realities and scarcity of resources. Noting personal against anyone or any group of people.
>let not a man glory in that he loves his country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves the world.
Luxury beliefs and virtue signaling. Feel free to engage in them as much as you like, but on your own dime.