[shagie]

This gets into "my French is rusty... and legal French is non-existent".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_(employment)_in_Fran...

https://www.rippling.com/blog/termination-in-france

In particular the parts:

> French laws don’t recognize at-will employment. In France, you can’t simply dismiss an employee without reason. In fact, the French labor code makes it extremely clear that it considers termination to be an absolute last resort, especially in cases of voluntary or involuntary personal grounds for dismissal. Instead, it encourages employers to try to find other ways to resolve the problem. For example, let’s say the employee in question is having serious interpersonal issues with their manager or a coworker. You can only dismiss them after you’ve tried everything else, such as holding a meeting in which you talk to the two of them and try to find a solution, or by putting them on different projects so they don’t have to work together directly. If the company is putting technological changes in place to increase its competitiveness, before you can start the dismissal procedure, you must demonstrate you tried another course of action, such as redeployment or employee training.

> Everything must be documented. This is extremely important: You must document evidence of all events and/or incidents that led to the dismissal of the employee, even if the reasons have nothing to do with their conduct specifically. You’ll use this evidence both during the interview when you’re telling the employee why they’re being dismissed and should also keep it in case the employee decides to bring a lawsuit against your company.

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If someone is having difficulty with their job, you first provide them training before you can fire them. From what I understand, it has to be a "we tried everything for the past year, here's all the documentation and they're still unable to do the basic requirements for the position.

[bdangubic]

> companies shouldn't be allowed to fire someone except for actual negligence / malice

France sure does a lot of things right here but above is what OP stated that I commented on which isn't the case for France. While one might have to go through some additional paperwork / procedures / ... you can in fact fire an say an underperforming employee

[alexgieg]

OP here.

True, if you prove they're in fact a completely underperforming employee. Notice this is not only for the position they're in at the moment, but for every other conceivable position they might be reassigned to before the conclusion becoming it's impossible to keep them and the company positively, absolutely, needs to hire someone else for their place.

For absolute unfireability, there are countries where government employees cannot be fired no matter what, but that's not private employment so it doesn't count for your question.

The closest to that for private employers, that I know about, was Japan before the 1990's economic crisis, in which the culture (not the laws, but the culture was strong enough for it to be the same in practice) prevented companies from firing employees. If an employee became useless, the company assigned them a desk and nothing to do. After a few weeks of this the not-fired employee felt so ashamed of being paid for doing nothing 8 hours a day, they themselves asked to be let go (which was also the expected cultural thing for them to do, so they did it).

Regardless, the point is that at-will employment vs not-at-will employment doesn't affect things as much as it seems to do. And if you look at statistic comparing US States that don't have at-will employment vs those that have it, there's no practical difference either.