[romanoderoma]

But can you or can't you be fired for that?

Because in my country you can't be fired for using the work email for that.

Communicating with other workers using their work email is absolutely allowed, courts ruled about it several times [1].

I usually receive trade unions (there are several of them) communications on my work email from the unions' work email, because they have been authorized by the company to send them.

In this case she wrote directly to workers using work email, but having no union or labor protection laws it doesn't make any difference whether she could or couldn't, she could be fired anyway without having to provide any reason.

In countries where there are strong laws protecting workers she would have written to the union members and they would have done the same thing: write directly to the workers.

Of course she did it at Google so it is different, but here the strict procedures to call a strike are only necessary if a public service that requires continuity risk to be interrupted, otherwise unions are only required to alert the company that the strike is going to happen, but have no requirement whatsoever on how to organise it.

Which sound logical to me,strong protection means IMO freedom to collectively counter the actions of the company, if that's not allowed the protection is not strong.

[1] Court of Catania, Labor Section, February 2, 2009 "The RSU employee can send trade union communications by e-mail to the employees of the company during their working hours and to their company e-mail address using his personal e-mail address"

[thu2111]

In many countries you do need a vote for a strike to be organised. You can't just spam people with a request to stop working. Strikes are a powerful tactic that have evolved a lot of formality around them to try and ensure the outcomes aren't totally destructive. Italy is a rather unusual exception to this. Perhaps it's a contributing factor to the long stagnation of the Italian economy.

[romanoderoma]

> Perhaps it's a contributing factor to the long stagnation of the Italian economy

Perhaps.

But doesn't explain stagnation in Japanese economy where there are no Italian unions.

Or why France did much better despite having even stronger work protections laws than Italy and wilder strikes (the gilet jaunes for example) or those happened last year against the pension reform where the workers of public transportation went on strike - for weeks - without even announcing it.

Even countries like Germany, Singapore, Switzerland and Finland are doing worse than Pakistan in the GDP growth race.

My point was than if there are stronger work protection laws somewhere else and the laws of your country are weaker, they are not very strong, they are moderately strong.

[thu2111]

Re: last point. Fair enough. That point is sound.

Japan seems to have evolved a work culture very similar to strongly unionised societies but without unions. Japanese salaryman culture is famously a culture of employment for life with unusually strong loyalty between employee and employer, hence weird things like "banishment rooms" that you don't find elsewhere. If it's the end results that matter and not the means, Japan might not be a good counter example.

I think French strike law sounds tighter than Italian strike law? The French are famous for striking but strikes must still be a collective decision and related to a specific set of issues, whereas Italian strike law really does sound incredibly broad and vague.

With respect to Pakistan, that's doesn't mean anything, poor countries always have very high GDP growth. It's easy to grow something small and backwards by a lot because you can get a lot of relative growth just by copying what other countries do, and less absolute improvement is needed to get a percentage point of growth to begin with. You can only compare GDP growth rates between countries of a similar level of wealth.