[proc0]

Why do companies have to train you? Is this law or God's mandate? Is there even evidence that providing some safety net for your employee somehow creates a better employee and/or company?

Ultimately this is about controlling others vs. not wanting others to control you. IMHO people need to fail in order to learn properly, and safety nets remove this risk which in turn also removes the learning, effectively preventing those who would otherwise be successful. We think we are helping workers by forcing them into some contract that is supposedly beneficial, but really people are the ones making those choices. Safety nets and forcing companies will just reinforce the bad decisions some people make and will affect the whole industry in the long run because quality will go down and prices up.

[benjaminjosephw]

I got into software through a paid internship at a webdev company that was spinning out a startup on the side. The founders were great folk who invested a lot into the tech/startup scene in the city. They also invested in their employees and into me. Without them, I wouldn't have had the head-start that I did. I'm not suggesting that companies should be compelled to behave like this. I am saying that there's at least some social/ethical/civic responsibility a company has towards its employees.

If you've hired someone and they aren't doing a good enough job, it's in both of your best interests for that person to be trained and supported appropriately to help them improve. If they still aren't up to the job you should part ways but at least you've both tried to make it work. Employers and employees cooperating in the pursuit of aligned interests like this has nothing to do with control. Independently deciding what's good for people and how they will best learn sounds like it has a lot to do with control but that's what you're suggesting, not me.

I do agree that failure can sometimes be a great teacher. In my experience, the best work happens in places where it's acceptable to fail and where failures can be recovered from. Safety nets exist to allow for more risk and more failure, not less.

[proc0]

Of course it's better to train and all that, I'm saying it's probably not a good idea to somehow have a global solution to all kinds of relationship between every type of company and employee. Every industry and every company will have different solutions to what they need and they'll know best how to set their employees for success. This is all done in a mutual agreement. A better strategy is having everyone understand their options in order to make better decisions when it comes to choosing an employer/employee, and again all of this is specific to the industry.

The problem with fighting worker rights is that not all workers are the same, and having a small group of people decide all the intricacies of the system for all industries is unrealistic. At the very least there would be a concerted and visible effort to adapt solutions for each industry, but that's not what happens, it's always some global abstract mandate that has unintended consequences. Politics is the ultimate solutioning by committee, so it's always inefficient and often hurtful to use politics to solve societal problems which are really the collection of the decisions people are making. Encouraging businesses is one thing, but deliberately blocking actions and forcing decisions on ALL business is almost never a good idea.