Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour
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@flaxking said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
And if I quit in order to take another job, there is no guarantee that the other employer will honor the employment offer.
Work 1099 contracts and there certainly is. You are protected by contract law.
If they hire you on W2 and don't honor the contract, you have employment fraud protection.
R2F doesn't protect from those things, other basic contract and employment law already does.
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@flaxking said in Why Right to Fire (and Hire) May Be in the Employee's Favour:
I've attended presentations on the affect frequent moves have on your kids (based on studies of families in the military that were moved around the US), so there are considerations other than career here.
US military is not a good way to look at how moves affects kids. My kids move all the time and while it does have an effect, it is completely different. Military is moving along with a lot of other things that are part of that situation. Being a military kid has effects on its own, moving is kind of background noise as to how much it will affect you. One can argue that not moving has loads of effects on kids too. One of the reasons that we choose to move so much is literally to avoid the stagnation effects on the kids. So I agree, it's a huge consideration and doing things for my kids drives my career decisions more than anything else and giving up mobility and crippling a career are some of the worst things you can do because you are best able to care for and spend time with your kids when you maximize your career value.
Remember that while R2F might require you to be more mobile, taking away R2F makes your value as an employee decline. Literally you are worth less to every employer, a lot less. So one of the things R2F does is make you more likely to have the leverage to work from home or limit your hours. Taking away R2F encourages employers to be sticklers for enforcing crappy working conditions like requiring your butt to be in the office all day and working you overtime rather than employing someone to handle the overflow.
R2F supports families big time.
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Remember that R2F makes mobility be in your favour to empower employees. Lacking R2F you have all of the punishments of lacking mobility, even when you have it. No one wins, everyone loses. It's just the worst of all situations combined. It doesn't stop you losing your job, it just makes it harder to get another. It doesn't keep you from needing to be mobile, it just makes you less mobile.
Don't look at the benefits of R2F or the options that it brings as saying that without R2F we'd have the opposite benefits. That's not how it works. Lacking R2F simply makes there be fewer jobs and job options. But it's a myth that it protects employees. You can still fire people, you just have to do it in different, and far worse, ways.
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Something else that is often forgotten... R2F will always exist somewhere. So anywhere that implements a No R2F is simply deciding that their local jobs should be shipped off somewhere else. Only jobs that can't be done somewhere else will stay. Any job that can leave, will. So all the good jobs, the ones involving real skills leave. The ones that remain are local service jobs or the self employed.
Lacking R2F also shift people from W2 employees to contractors. Companies find ways to simply not make you an employee and end up stripping your employment rights away. So you don't just lose the protection that you sought, you lose the employment protections that are just assumed for normal people. It makes working something that requires a lot of expertise and your own CPA and lawyer just to go to work.. and no healthcare.
These days, shipping jobs to another town, state, or even country is a no-brainer. In fact, the idea that a job would automatically be local anywhere is kind of weird. Obviously manufacturing jobs have to be where the factory is. Waiters have to work where the restaurant is. But office jobs, the first question employers ask is "where do we hire that position"? They aren't "shipping jobs overseas" anymore. Now the jobs originate there - and you have to justify bringing it to a high cost, high risk locality.
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Another thing that people don't think about... when you lack R2F it causes local house prices to increase, which erodes income parity.
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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.
