[ponector]

If you don't trust your people so much, why to hire them in a first place?

Looking at it from Europe - it is such a weird inhumane practice.

Someone decided your position is redundant. Okay, shit happens, economic downturn, etc. Then you have extra 3-6 months of work to pass your knowledge, train replacement and document everything.

[PunchyHamster]

sometimes you fire because you trusted them then they gave reasons to stop. At company I work at it happened, but the more common way is just getting info few weeks later then working normally till the end date

[joe_mamba]

>Looking at it from Europe - it is such a weird inhumane practice.

Pretty standard practice in many technology(not just IT) and finance companies in Europe as well.

>If you don't trust your people so much, why to hire them in a first place?

It's not about trust, it's about risk, and most companies operate on liability and risk mitigation. If society ran on trust alone, we wouldn't need contracts, door locks, passwords, IDs, judges, security cameras, jails, police, etc.

You can verify someone's performance at the job interview, you can't verify their trustworthiness, especially once they've learned they lost their job, even trustworthy people react irrational once emotions hit making snap decisions they'll later regret without thinking of the consequences on the spot, and you see innocent people suddenly turn vengeful or violent and break the law (just look at relationship breakups and domestic violence).

You can't predict such reactions, so best to prevent them instead of chasing damages from them later through the court system.

Put yourself in a business owner's position for a minute. Nobody wants to be the "this former employee set my building on fire after I gave his notice, by leaving him in the flammable material warehouse unsupervised, because I wanted to show him that despite the layoff I still trust him".

For some businesses and jobs the trust alone is enough, for other jobs that involve access to sensitive data or money, it's straight to paid garden leave because nobody wants to risk it.

>Then you have extra 3-6 months of work to pass your knowledge, train replacement and document everything.

Yeah, that happens sometimes like for CxO's, managers, execs who get generous golden parachutes/severance packages, but for rank and file workers in the trenches, having to show up to a workplace you know you'll soon loose, for several more months of work till it's finally over, feels like torture unless you're getting a crazy severance package. That's like your wife telling you "honey, I'm divorcing you, but I still want you to live with me for 3-6 more months, and perform your regular duties".

[calgoo]

No this is labour law in the UK, I just had this last year. Its 3 months where you get paid and you can search for a job etc. Made our new American CEO livid that he could not just fire people.

[michaelt]

More specifically in the UK there are a few ways employees can be dismissed.

You can be dismissed when you have done something wrong, in which case there's no notice period but the employer has to be able to show they've followed certain rules.

You can be dismissed when you haven't done anything wrong, in which case you either get several months notice or several months pay ('in lieu of notice') or a 'voluntary settlement agreement' (more pay, negotiable terms) all subject to slightly different rules.

So a US employer can cut a UK employee's computer system access the same day, it just costs a bit.

[joe_mamba]

How does that go against anything I said?

[lazyasciiart]

All the couples I know who are divorced did continue living together after one of them said it was over, I think the longest time actually was about 6 months.

[joe_mamba]

Yeah but did they still keep banging and cuddling like before the divorce announcement? They probably weren't doing much of that anyway if they got divorced but you get my point.

[ddosmax556]

Looking at it from Europe, this definitely also happens. It depends on the situation. I know of ppl who were kept bcs the parting was in good faith (which was less a firing and more an agreement that parting is in everyone's interest), but I also know of ppl who had their access revoked before firing bcs it wasn't. The latter had unilateral system access as well, which added to it. It's not about humane or inhumane, it's about risk. The 3-6 months being nice is also a fairytale that I have only ever heard in a positive light from employees who are not particularly ambitious or awake or in any way satisfied with their jobs or the prospect of a future job. On the other hand from the perspective of employers it's consistently hard to effectively restructure, it's expensice and awkward to have to pretend to want to keep someone around that you or they don't want around.

It's just one of these rules that unfortunately in Europe allow people to view life purely as the time between jobs. I'd never tell that to someone's face but it's simply a fact that the world stops of people don't work and no matter what the ideal world looks like in your dreams, working is the only real way forward for anything. It's part of the reason why Europe is falling behind on everything.

[coredev_]

Europe is not falling behind on anything that is not reasonable.

The increased growth in USA the last decade have largely been created by means that one day will be quite costly for you (debt).

The USA under MAGA is falling apart. EU and others are actively minimizing risk by selecting non-US IT providers. EU and others are actively selecting non-US defence aystems.

I say that it is very positive to protect your citizens. Russia (sending their citizens en masse to a certain death on the front lines) and USA have more in common politically than USA and EU.

[ddosmax556]

I agree with everything you said, it's great that they're trying to detach from US IT providers & alternative, and I do think Europe is doing a lot things better than the US.

But there's nothing like AWS, Google Cloud, facebook, Azure, ChatGPT, Tesla, etc etc the list goes on and is very long, in Europe. They're switching way too late. Why did it not happen before? Why do we have very limited IT providers, for example? Due to the culture and regulation that doesn't incentivize it sufficiently.

I'm European too btw and live in the EU and I'm happy about a lot of things we have that the US doesn't, I'm just personally worried that we're setting priorities wrong. Having a chill life in the park is good in the ideal it's just detached from what's needed to make a state run; and it will end in the EU having even less power that is has now, resulting in fewer moral values being carried into the world.

[joe_mamba]

> It's part of the reason why Europe is falling behind on everything.

I read a news article that Orange Telecom in France was being sued by a woman they had on payroll for the last 20 years doing nothing, because due to a medical condition she suffered, she became unable to do her job, and since they couldn't fire her due to France unions and labor laws, nor did they have any available job that could fit her current condition, they just kept paying her for 20 years to do nothing at work, and now she's suing them for the depression she got to get paid for no work.

It felt like reading a Monty Python skit.

But Europe is failing due to a myriad of compounding issues and structural deficits, not just because firing workers can be a Kafkaesque nightmare in some countries. European workers' unions and labor protections were even stronger 20-25 years ago and in 2004 the Euro stock market was worth more than the US stock market, while now it's worth half the US one. But that's whole different discussion where pages have to be written to encompass the whole context and cover all aspects of European economic decline. Boiling it down to crazy labor protections would be reductionist and incorrect.

[Dylan16807]

That lawsuit sounds legitimate enough to me.

They couldn't find anything for her to do? Hard to believe, but if there's a reason not to fire her then then pay her the money she's owed and stop demanding she show up. Making someone come in with no tasks assigned is fun for a week and quickly turns into punishment detail. Putting someone on punishment detail because you're not allowed to fire them is Bad.

Unless she was allowed to stay home, in which case I take most of that back and it falls on her to go outside and find something to do. I can't find any articles with enough detail. But I'm still skeptical they actually couldn't find a job for her to do. It was 'just' paralysis on one side.

[joe_mamba]

>They couldn't find anything for her to do? Hard to believe,

If a person's now disabled, what can a company give them to do profitably, that isn't already optimized, automated or offshored?

There's plenty of civil servants whose jobs are just moving one paper from one room to the next, just to keep more useless people employed that nobody would hire in the private sector. But this doesn't really exist as much in the private sector.

[Dylan16807]

I don't think they offshored the entire office, but if they did they'd probably be able to fire her at that point.

If I found the right article, the disability is epilepsy and paralysis on one side.

Which mean she can do pretty much any office job fine. She already was doing office work, so the disability should not have changed things all that much. I'm sure she typed slower, but that can be worked around and mitigated.

[joe_mamba]

>Which mean she can do pretty much any office job fine.

Honestly, I doubt it. If you show up to an interview of "any office job" with "epilepsy and paralysis on one side" nobody will hire you simply because you won't be as productive as those without such disabilities.

Also, "epilepsy and paralysis on one side" is the legal medical diagnosis, but in practice the impact can be much greater, especially with age, which is why ageism is a thing even among people who are legally in full health because in practice your body isn't the same like when you were 19-25.

[cm2187]

She had 20 years to resign if it was such a terrible ordeal

[keiferski]

They were trying to force her to resign, so she would lose any unemployment benefits.

[yuye]

>Ithey just kept paying her for 20 years to do nothing at work, and now she's suing them for the depression she got to get paid for no work.

It's called "mise au placard" and it's illegal. It's a technique to get people to quit by themselves, so companies don't have deal with the hassle of firing them. The lawsuit is 100% justified.

It's also very common in Japan.

[joe_mamba]

Why can't they be sent on government disability instead? Forcing companies by law to keep people unfit for the job is bad for both parties.

[arjie]

If curious, the person is Laurence Van Wassenhove. That should suffice to find out more on the story. Interesting tale.

[fer]

The anomaly there is that France Télécom was a public company at the time of the hiring, and through privatisation public servant benefits were upheld for existing employees, which blocked most unpythonesque solutions.

If she had been hired after, it would have taken time but she would have been found unfit for work (she had epilepsy and hemiplegia), her contract terminated, and she would have most likely received a handicap pension instead.