| HN Mirror

I was about to give a whole speech about the many misconceptions I know US people have about Europe, and the differences between the welfare measures in both regions... but I lost the energy. Edit: I eventually ended up going on a tangent :)

To be succinct, I'm from Spain, here you can fire anyone for no reason whenever you feel like it. If you do so out of a whim, you have to pay about ~20 days per each year that employee worked in your organization. This is the worst case scenario. What everyone refers to "you can't fire people in Europe".

There are other circumstances in which letting someone go might get you in trouble (as in having to re-admit that individual). Such cases include letting someone go for ethnical reasons, pregnancy, illness, etc. You can get sued and after a due trial you might need to re-admit that employee and pay a fine. To put things in perspective, I have a close friend that got fired just when his company learned he had cancer (by a coworker). They went to trial (one year later) and the judge solved the case by an agreement where my friend got about ~3,000e (something negligible).

Obviously, there are many other cases in which you can fire an employee without paying them anything. If the employee is not doing her job (not being on time, bad service, etc) you need to go through some hoops (filling fault forms) to justify letting that person go without any kind of compensation - this is similar to the US when someone is not performing and you want to let them go. Another case is if the company is losing money (which is different from predicting future loses or worsening its performance).

The latter case is the one that companies like Google, Meta, etc are going through. They are not going bankrupt. They are actually having humungous benefits. The only thing that is preventing them from letting people go is that 1-month/year compensation I mentioned above. In some countries, these laws might differ a little bit, but I imagine they are cut from the same cloth.

At the end of the day, in most situations, this does not differ that much from companies in the US where you are not entitled to any compensation but companies still give you some money to avoid any future lawsuits.

For the regular Joe procrastinating in HN, these laws have close to no impact in their welfare because they are not part of a vulnerable strata of society. They won't be working in a McDonalds or a car factory in their 50's, and luckily cancer won't come knocking their door at their 30's or 40's before they had the opportunity to save as much money as they can with their IT jobs. However, for the people that are not that fortunate, being able to look for a job for 3 months after you got fired (so your past company could hire someone younger and more productive) is a blessing. Same as if you fall ill for a year and your non-IT job didn't let you save enough money.

Neoliberalism is great for those who are well established in life. For those that when tragedy (death, illness, depression, simply bad luck) knocks their doors are well prepared both economically and mentally. For the rest, it's a hole that they might not be able to escape for the rest of their lives, which will have an impact in younger generations.

On my side, I'm extremely grateful we have these laws protecting those who need it the most, even if (hopefully) I might never need them.

I'm ~30, from Spain, my parents' family were immigrants (from inside Spain), living in what today would be seen as extreme harsh conditions. At the time of my parents, university was only for rich people. However, I had the luck to go to the world top109 and Europe's top14 engineering university for almost no money (1,000e/year). Today I have an IT job, working from Spain for a company from abroad, making more money than I need, and being grateful my taxes are high and I don't need to worry too much that an enraged homeless/crackhead do me any serious harm.