Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour
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This is a topic near and dear to my heart, lol. As someone who works hard to create jobs...
R2F creates a form of nobles oblige. The employer has a job to do, to look out for employees. Not all will, but many will. And those that do get better employees, those that don't struggle to hire. R2F makes a "partner" relationship between employees and employer.
If you don't have R2F, all feelings of or pretense of employee protection are gone. When you don't have R2F, all employee protections go to the state. Employees aren't the "children" of the employer, they are the enemies of it. Removing R2F makes an adversarial relationship between employee and employer.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
Even rare unskilled labour today is generally highly mobile
When I was a waiter with at least 3 months exerpiance, you could always tell the manager to go fuck thesmelfs and walk into another resturant in the same town without an issue. The bottom and the top of the job funnel always seem to have comical amounts of "another option willing to pay me what I"m being paid". Either because your value is too high, or your pay is too low.
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@StorageNinja said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
Even rare unskilled labour today is generally highly mobile
When I was a waiter with at least 3 months exerpiance, you could always tell the manager to go fuck thesmelfs and walk into another resturant in the same town without an issue. The bottom and the top of the job funnel always seem to have comical amounts of "another option willing to pay me what I"m being paid". Either because your value is too high, or your pay is too low.
These days, with employees being in demand, it's amazing how little lock in employers have outside of paying well or acting well. Be a jerk or pay poorly, people are going to walk and the cost of acquiring, hiring, and training is high. Even in restaurants!
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@StorageNinja said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
walk into another resturant in the same town without an issue.
It was like this for me in restaurants, too. Even in fast food and pizza places. And in hotels. And in grocery. I worked plenty of entry level manual jobs and I always had "mobility" just within the small rural location that I lived in.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
If you don't have R2F, all feelings of or pretense of employee protection are gone. When you don't have R2F, all employee protections go to the state. Employees aren't the "children" of the employer, they are the enemies of it. Removing R2F makes an adversarial relationship between employee and employer.
What I find interesting is states where it's difficult to fire have problems with unemployeement for younger employees so they create systems where you can fire below xxx age, or offer incentives like lower minimum wage for below yyy age.
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@StorageNinja said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
What I find interesting is states where it's difficult to fire have problems with unemployeement for younger employees
Right, so they recognize that they are crippling the economy, but don't care when it is only crippled "so much".
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Lacking R2F also encourages discrimination. The old system was based on "once in, stay in", so people with the leverage to get hired in the first place get quite a leg up. Discrimination practices become much more long lasting. It favours men as child care and bearing become things that potentially break employment continuity, and getting favours to get jobs become a much, much bigger deal. It pushes employment more towards an "old boys club" environment.
The push towards more contact rather than employment, which is far easier to do than people realize, also openly allows discrimination in almost all jurisdictions and certainly in the US. When hiring a contracting company you can specify age, gender, possibly even race which is completely illegal and unethical with employees. But when it isn't an employee, those protections go away. Putting women, minorities, the young and the old all at risk.
Famous examples of this are firms hiring things like marketing firms and refusing teams run by younger women of child bearing age because they fear a lack of continuity from their project lead. Turning down an employee for that role for that purpose is illegal, but doing so to a consulting firm is standard procedure. R2F doesn't automatically protect people, but it makes it way, way easier to do so.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
Right, so they recognize that they are crippling the economy, but don't care when it is only crippled "so much".
It's more a "have to find a middle ground with apeasing various political interests but trying to get shit done..."
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Ok, well I might be starting to see a bit.
So with R2F, essentially there are just more job opportunities, even if temporary. And even if an employee jumps from 6 month job to 6 month job, that still means that there is less risk in quitting your job.
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@flaxking said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
So with R2F, essentially there are just more job opportunities, even if temporary. And even if an employee jumps from 6 month job to 6 month job, that still means that there is less risk in quitting your job.
Exactly. You might not stay at a single job as long. You might have to move around town (to work, not to live.) The companies themselves might come and go. But your employment is more consistent, and your pay is higher.
There are exceptions in every case. R2F lifts the average, quite dramatically. But there is always some isolated souls who get lost in any shuffle. So someone, somewhere will lose out even when the average improves. But like with anything related to employment, we'll never be able to positively identify the winners or the losers, only the averages. But yes, think of R2F as a rising tide lifting all of the ships of employment up.
People have been taught to fear changing jobs, and all humans are naturally averse to change even when it is good for us. This is one of those cases where the increase rate of change feels scary, but actually makes us safer. It's not unlikely flying vs. driving. Driving feels safer, but flying with the pilot in control is actually safer.
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@flaxking said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
that still means that there is less risk in quitting your job.
More importantly, less risk to being fired. Quitting always carries risks just from being a quitter
But you can always opt not to quit. It's when you lose your job without it being your choice that we really fear. And being laid off in a R2F locality carries far less risk because there are way more places that can hire you. -
Why is most of the world against R2F? It seems like Europe, Middle East, and Asia all have laws against it? Not sure about the Americas outside of the US.
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@IRJ said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
Not sure about the Americas outside of the US.
Very rare there. Most of the Americas are R2F. Those that are not, are under certain circumstances.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
People have been taught to fear changing jobs, and all humans are naturally averse to change even when it is good for us. This is one of those cases where the increase rate of change feels scary, but actually makes us safer. It's not unlikely flying vs. driving. Driving feels safer, but flying with the pilot in control is actually safer.
Basically the same argument as for CI/CD. Painful experiences cause the reaction of people pushing to do it less and implement things to make it harder for people to do, when the solution is actually doing it more.
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If R2F generally empowers employees, does no R2F only empower bad employees?
If I'm an employee in an environment where jobs are hard to come by and have to maintain a certain level of income to not have my life crashing down. As soon as I'm in this situation where I really want to keep my job, my employer has full control over me.
With labour law fines being a slap on the wrist, and reporting essentially being quitting or being fired, (and suing being challenging in Canada) pretty much the only way I have power is by being a bad enough employee just to ride the waves for a while, and if I get fired I can at least claim unemployment.
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@flaxking said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
People have been taught to fear changing jobs, and all humans are naturally averse to change even when it is good for us. This is one of those cases where the increase rate of change feels scary, but actually makes us safer. It's not unlikely flying vs. driving. Driving feels safer, but flying with the pilot in control is actually safer.
Basically the same argument as for CI/CD. Painful experiences cause the reaction of people pushing to do it less and implement things to make it harder for people to do, when the solution is actually doing it more.
Odd example, but yeah, exactly
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@flaxking said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
does no R2F only empower bad employees?
Yes, much like unions. Unions and Anti-R2F are very related. Not the same, so don't want to over generalize, but they share a lot of trends and traits. And both work from a "useful in really niche circumstances, mostly from long ago" but "generally only serve to stop worthless employees from being replaced by good ones today" position.
If you think about it, if you need to hire staff, but can't fire bad workers, that's just another way of saying you are blocking the hiring of good workers. R2F is what protects good workers so that they can replace bad ones. Anti-R2F is so that bad workers can hold on to positions even when someone better wants to work there.
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@flaxking said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
With labour law fines being a slap on the wrist, and reporting essentially being quitting or being fired, (and suing being challenging in Canada) pretty much the only way I have power is by being a bad enough employee just to ride the waves for a while, and if I get fired I can at least claim unemployment.
Canada is one of the strongest Anti-R2F countries and one of the worst working markets in the world. Don't get me wrong, I love Canada. But it's at the very top of my "won't work there" lists and, more important, it's the absolute top of our "will never hire there" list.
My company does work in Canada. But every, single person who works there in person is flown in from the US because hiring Canadians is out of the question. And almost all of the work is done remotely from Latin America. So the Anti-R2F movement in Canada is literally a key factor in Canadian jobs being shipped out of Canada. It makes it essentially impossible to even consider using a Canadian for anything. But doing the work from outside the country is trivial.
It's not just something you can work around, it's so dramatic that we consider Canadians to simply not exist as potential workers and everyone else is able to just work there. So it's not a work around, it's just how work is done. It would never occur to us to consider local labour up north. Nor is there any need as cheaper, more abundant, R2F labour is already on hand from everywhere else.
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@IRJ said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
Why is most of the world against R2F? It seems like Europe, Middle East, and Asia all have laws against it? Not sure about the Americas outside of the US.
A lot of the world are still driven by lots of low paid task worker jobs that are relatively speaking easy to replace.
