[vertex-four]

Pro-employee laws are not good for employees in the success case - that you're a top 10% worker in a field that is growing and has lots of demand. The thing is, if you think about the failure case - you're a disposable cog in a field that's stagnating - there's issues which need to be solved, unless you're a staunch libertarian with a belief that people who are unable to find work should die. Nobody wants to pay for a 40yo person with a family to spend years retraining when they lose their job and can't find another, so what is there to do?

[kelnos]

> Nobody wants to pay for a 40yo person with a family to spend years retraining when they lose their job and can't find another, so what is there to do?

That's the thing I don't get. In the grand scheme of things, it is much less costly to an economy to pay to retrain someone than it is to pay them to do a redundant job. It's even less costly than doing nothing and kicking them to the curb.

[tbrownaw]

The alternative to making it impossible to fire people, is to make getting fired less of a big deal. Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining.

Instead of focusing solely on prevention, work on mitigation. To much prevention can make everything grind to a halt.

[vertex-four]

> Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining.

Sure, except that nobody wants to do that for some abstract reason of "fairness", so the problem needs to be mitigated another way.

[tbrownaw]

Really? I thought it was that it smells a bit too much like communism.

Which seems to be gradually becoming less of a problem over time, even here in the USA.

[vertex-four]

Well, "why should I pay for my neighbour's re-education when they should've just picked right in the first place?" - if you are lucky enough to pick a field which grows for the rest of your life, and you're a reasonably good worker, you're never going to take advantage of that and so your neighbour gets more than you from the Government. Not fair! /s

[kelnos]

Is that actually a prevalent attitude, though? I mean, it's stupid... someone else retraining is easily still having it harder than someone who "picked right". And in the end, I'd much rather help pay for someone's education than have to walk past them on the street, begging for money.

[toomuchtodo]

Socialism, not communism.

And systematiclly dismantling the middle class through public policy and economic upheaval does that to a country.

Full speed ahead on stronger safety nets, even if it means higher taxes.

[philh]

> there's issues which need to be solved

Yes, and some people think that pro-employee laws make these issues worse.

Again, you don't need to agree with them, but you don't get to dismiss them as simply not caring.