[beachy]

> In New Zealand, it's pretty much "at-will" anyways, with the cost of removing an employee typically being 3-months wages.

No way. Removing an employee in NZ (other than for redundancy) requires a series of warnings about performance and assistance to said employee each time to get their shit together. It takes months, is easy to get wrong by missing some step, and it's nothing whatsoever like "at-will".

[yarg]

I left a job in large part due to the fact that they couldn't get rid of our incompetent tester.

We really need it to be easier to get rid of idiots in positions too technical for them to understand.

[sofixa]

That's what the initial probationary period is for.

[yarg]

And it's clearly an insufficient protection.

[M95D]

I see it as bad management or bad HR.

[muti]

Redundancy may be the method they implied. I've seen it happen to my partner and several colleagues. It's laughable how easy it seems to tailor a redundancy to 1 or a few specific people, and the cost of fighting it is not worth it.

[beachy]

Faux redundancy is indeed a tool that can be used by smaller NZ employers. It's risky though for bigger companies to try it and it would never work for the homogeneous group that is Uber drivers, since they all effectively fill a single identical role, and redundancy must be about the role, not the person(s) filling it.

[roenxi]

In this particular case I think this might be a bit of a red-herring discussion for Uber. I doubt they care about the drivers for reasons that aren't legitimate for firing them. For example, if the driver isn't getting enough rides to justify paying them they probably are redundant.

[CamelCaseName]

But performance seems like a very easy thing for Uber to measure, which, according to this thread, is an allowable reason for termination?

[yarg]

Redundancy is complicated as well - it places burdens on hiring new people in the same position.

So if you want to remove an incompetent to replace them with someone useful, you cannot do it with a redundancy.

[crowcroft]

In New Zealand it's illegal to make someone redundant and then hire back someone into the same position for at least six months. You don't make a person redundant, you make a role redundant. This would be hard for Uber to do with drivers.

[jpollock]

When I was following these things, if you end up in employment court, the typical penalty was 3 months wages.

[beachy]

That could be so for first offences but I would imagine any business flouting the law and making repeated appearances in the employment court would experience escalating punishments.