[wolvoleo]

At will employment is something we'll never accept here. We don't need the threat of having nothing from one day to the next.

It's good for billionaires but not for actual people that matter.

Running a business is not something everyone should have to do anyway. It's good if it's hard. That keeps the cowboys at bay.

I would never ever want to own a business. I don't need that uncertainty. I just want a stable wage.

The prevailing idea here is that the US is best at everything and its model will always win. But in reality it's been in decline for a long time and it's become a pretty toxic society I don't want to see here in Europe. Trump is only a symptom of that but not the cause. The real cause is a top layer (which many HN commenters are part of) that is getting ever richer and a huge disadvantaged mass that is stagnant or declining. Their anger is what drives MAGA. Also called late stage capitalism. Going even more capitalist is not the way to fix or prevent that.

[galangalalgol]

I agree with everything you said except for the cowboys bit. I don't think business owners should be a separate class of people. It shouldn't be unusual to meet people that own their business. I don't want to do it, it would stress me. But we can let random people try random ideas without having to start out wealthy, and we shouldn't have the failure of that business and the loss of those employees' jobs, risk the health and well-being of those let go. If getting fired just meant you had to do with fewer luxuries until you found another, we wouldn't need to protect those jobs to the detriment of a business. By tying employment to safety and well-being, we complicate the whole matter.

[tick_tock_tick]

Most people in the US own stocks the USA is "fixing" this by making everyone part of the owner class. Especially now with childhood investment accounts by the federal government (the "trump accounts").

[wolvoleo]

By cowboys I mean the people starting businesses left right and center and just collapsing them when they don't get the desired result straight away. E.g. US venture capitalism. I think it's a really good thing that we don't have that here in Europe. Sure it prevents the googles and metas but those would never have made it that big here anyway because we regulate big businesses before they become uncontrollable. And now that we are breaking off ties with the US we will have to build our own anyway, just with sustainable and fair business models.

Sure we can get society to pick up the tab but the problem is that those cowboys are even more incentivised to be risky then. There should be a penalty for them when it goes wrong.

[ragall]

Various places in Europe already have what amounts to at-will employment. There are exemptions for companies under a certain number of employees (e.g. 25 in Italy). There's a wide use of fixed-term contracts (6/12 months). Many work through agencies, which means they can be "fired" with a few weeks' notice.

[embedding-shape]

Depends a lot on what country, but I think you'll find that the ratio of full-time employee vs contractor/at-will employee in most European countries will look very different from how that ratio looks like in the US (or other similar countries).

[ragall]

Sure, but that's very different from saying that Europeans have would never accept it. It's already happening quite extensively, though not as much as in the US. Europe seems to be 20-40 years behind the US in various economic and social developments, but it's not immune from them.

[embedding-shape]

I don't read "we'll never accept here" as "it's be impossible", more like "we won't base our entire economy on that, it's not what the average person wants", because obviously Europe has various staffing companies already, and if you add a tiny bit of nuance into what they said, I'd agree with it too.

> Europe seems to be 20-40 years behind the US in various economic and social developments

That's one perspective, another is that US is 20-40 years behind Europe because the average person can barely afford to stay alive in the US right now, which is much less of a problem in Europe. But it all depends on what you value, I'm not gonna say one is more "correct" than the other, we all have our preferences and so on.

[ragall]

> But it all depends on what you value, I'm not gonna say one is more "correct" than the other, we all have our preferences and so on.

I wasn't talking about values. Yours or mines are largely irrelevant.

40 years ago, much of the US economy was made of stable jobs. Contingent jobs used to be few, labour unions used to be much stronger. Europe is under the same economic pressures as the US, and it's slowly trending in the same direction, just with 20-40 years of delay.

[alephnerd]

> That's one perspective, another is that US is 20-40 years behind Europe [...]

The US's HDI (0.938) is comparable to New Zealand and Liechtenstein [0], and significantly above Austria's (0.930), France's (0.920), and Italy's (0.915) [0], and the EU's HDI is itself 0.915 [1] - this puts the EU roughly in the same position as the US almost 16-17 years ago [2] despite both having a similar population.

That said, once you break the 0.900 range, the differences are essentially cosmetic so Europeans or Americans saying either are significantly behind the other from a developmental metrics perspective is dumb and deflects from issues that exist in both the US and Europe.

[0] - https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union

[2] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA/?levels=1+4&ye...

[notahacker]

Differences once you break the 0.9 range are more noticeable at the bottom end, particularly in the context of the OP's claim about people in the US "struggling to stay alive". There's also an "inequality weighted" HDI (accessible from your HDR link above by drilling down to the individual country data) which puts the US a fair way behind many of the EU countries the sheer weight of its per capita GDP puts it ahead of (on that index the US is even marginally worse than some of the wealthier Eastern Bloc countries, but interestingly on dead level pegging with France for the last decade)

[wolvoleo]

Not really. Fixed-term contracts can not be used indefinitely. A worker must be permanently hired after the first extension. Agencies can not be used indefinitely, and also, the agency is required to support the employee after the client lets them go. So the company just pays to shift that responsibility but the responsibility towards the employee is there. A company is also not allowed to make an employee 'self-employed' by making them start their own company. They must always have multiple clients, if they have just one the government will consider it permanent employment with all strings attached and will apply all relevant restrictions and taxation retroactively.

I'm just talking about holland here but all over europe the conditions are similar.

All the exceptions you mention were just sly ways the companies have tried to circumvent their responsibilities and the law has caught up with regulations to make those impossible or at least impractical.

And there are some exceptions yes. But those are mostly for in-between gig jobs. Not for stuff people make a career out of.

Of course there are also exceptions with easy firing for things like gross negligence. Though the employee always has the ability to countersue.

[ragall]

> A worker must be permanently hired after the first extension.

After the first extension the worker will not be hired again.

> Agencies can not be used indefinitely

Yes they can.

> A company is also not allowed to make an employee 'self-employed' by making them start their own company.

Wrong. I've seen this happening personally.

> I'm just talking about holland here but all over europe the conditions are similar.

You're talking about what you think is happening in Netherlands, and the conditions in many places in the rest of Europe are not like that.

> But those are mostly for in-between gig jobs. Not for stuff people make a career out of.

Not yet.

[tick_tock_tick]

> The prevailing idea here is that the US is best at everything and its model will always win. But in reality it's been in decline for a long time and it's become a pretty toxic society I don't want to see here in Europe.

If the USA is in decline you must consider Europe a failed state at this point then? Nearly every wealth inequality issue is worse in Europe then the USA. Youth unemployment has become a permanent fixture of society, your housing affordability crisis makes the USA look really good, most of your nations can't afford to keep social services at current levels and will be cutting them over the next decade, and you need to actually spend on military now that's just going to happen faster.

It's kinda funny by trying to avoid "late stage capitalism" the EU is going to force themselves into it as quality of life and global relevance continue to fade.

[wolvoleo]

The EU is not a state.

And no, wealth inequality is much higher in the US: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-in... . And those are averages, we don't have people making 100.000x more than others.

We also have wayyy less violent crime: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/violent-c... , and much less people in prison per capita

LGBTQ+ rights are way better covered here (with the exception of a couple countries that should really be booted out of the EU). Also really important for me.

We're doing pretty good, we will have some challenges going forward but that's always the case. Military equipment is something that we're now buying a lot from the US where prices are really high, and once we move that to European vendors we can get a lot more for the same money (this is similar to how Russia manages to have so much military power on a country with a GDP similar to Italy: they make it themselves with their own purchasing power).

The one challenge to the EU is not to fall into the austerity trap as they did in 2007 though. And we don't need so much. I don't need or want a car, a big TV, daily takeaway coffees etc. Less consumerism is also a good thing.

[tick_tock_tick]

> And no, wealth inequality is much higher in the US

Absolute numbers don't matter as I was saying the issues caused by wealth inequality such as housing crisis are much worse in the EU.

> We also have wayyy less violent crime

Fair but I will say ours is very concentrated to specific areas / demographics so the average person rarely has to deal with that.

> LGBTQ+ rights are way better covered here (with the exception of a couple countries that should really be booted out of the EU). Also really important for me.

So they are worse?

> Military equipment is something that we're now buying a lot from the US where prices are really high, and once we move that to European vendors we can get a lot more for the same money

That's a two decade plus plan that hasn't even started and is already running into issues. Doesn't help that the EU needs weapons now not in 20 years.

> And we don't need so much. I don't need or want a car, a big TV, daily takeaway coffees etc.

It's one thing not to want it's another to not to be able to have.

[galangalalgol]

It really matters which state you look at. Wealth inequality, gdp per capita, and median wage are all better in several eu members than in the US, and that still holds if you factor in housing and cpi in general. There are other states where that is really not the case. Its mostly the Scandinavian countries outperforming the us on these metrics and they are relatively low population in comparison so its kind of an odd one to make. If the goal is total gdp, who cares about the median wage, then the us/china plan does make more sense, but neither of those plans work without the other existing and cooperating.