The people downvoting you are suffering from a sort of survivorship bias. Sure, now you'd like the comfort of knowing your employer would have to pay you a ton of money if they laid you off, but what if you were somebody who was recently laid off looking for a job and people were reluctant to hire beacuse of this requirement? It's not clear to me that it's a net win, from my perspective I'd rather be able to easily replace my employer as opposed to them paying me for a few months.
A strong labor market has been effective in rasing the real incomes of the bottom 25% or so over the past few years, it's entirely possible that a weaker labor market with stronger workers protections would've been less effective at doing so leaving the very poor worse off.
I like it more than the (admittedly extreme) situation in France. There could be a happy medium, but going far enough down the road to making it hard to fire makes it hard to get hired.
I think where a lot of companies find themselves is "[last year] we think we're going to grow 20% next year and need to hire 15% to cover that business growth; [this year] oops, we only grew 5%, meaning we should have only grown headcount by 2% and now need to layoff around 10% of our staff to keep our financials sound and protect the jobs of the other 90%"
I think that's a lot of repeated applications of the former case.
Sure, if we roll out some sort of socialized medical coverage. At least for my family, stability of medical coverage is a major impediment to changing jobs.
I continue to not understand the position that the default provider of health insurance has to be either your employer or the government. What makes it fundamentally different from housing, food, or transportation, where you just pay money and there's assistance for people who can't afford it?
This was a mistake the US government made in World War II—they made it illegal for wages to change in response to actual shortages of workers, so employers competed by offering health insurance and other perks instead of more pay.
Companies have leverage due to size that individuals do not. Private insurance for worse coverage than I have now (and mine is good) is almost 2x what I and my employer pay.
So why can't you and a thousand of your closest friends get together and organise private health insurance for you as a collective? Then you get the size leverage. You would also be able to pay off the risks that one person might face, because although some of you will have high health care demands, chances are some of you won't. Isn't that how it's supposed to work? By competition, arbitrarge, etc?
No matter where you work in any major city in the US, whether you are working for a major tech company or your run of the mill enterprise shop, you should be making at least twice the median household income of your local area if you have at least three years of experience. If people making half of what you make can manage to survive and it be homeless or go hungry, you should be able to save enough “to live in a position of f%%l you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI).
You may not be able to put little Timmy in private school and he may have to gasp go to a public college.
That you should save money and not be dependent on the generosity of your employer or the government to make sure you can continue to have food and shelter.
Please tell me what the purpose of living in a society is? Also, be sure not to use the words "firetrucks", "military jobs program", or "I pay my taxes for this exact purpose, in the event I need these services"
Well, you can either live in your idealistic world and starve and be homeless unless you can live off of unemployment or live in the real world and save your money.
Or do you expect the government to replace 100% of a tech employees compensation?
If the answer to "am I likely to have to lay this person off soon?" isn't "probably not" then it's good that the company becomes more circumspect in hiring.
The other side of the token is that such a guarantee would help convince more people to accept an offer. I'd personally be hesitant to switch to a less stable job right now, and getting an offer yanked or immediately laid off with minimal severance would be brutal for many. A company providing "we changed our mind" insurance would retire a lot of risk for job seekers - and, if things are going well, it costs them essentially nothing to do.
I've laid out my thinking above, which part was unclear?
Many people taking a job are leaving some other job or passing up on other offers to do so. Imposing a cost on employers when they pull a "whoopsie daisy" and rescind offers or immediately lay off a new employee seems like a reasonable trade off to me.
Does "more reluctant" here = "more thoughtful"?
I'm sure you could take it too far, but I'm highly skeptical that we're in any sort of optimal situation today.