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X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

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291–300 of 474 posts

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are you nuts? There's a new law still in committee: https://www.scstatehouse.gov/billsearch.php?billnumbers=4226... > What? Why is it called vacation then Having more than two weeks off in a year is pretty strange. I worked at a place with "unlimited vacation" once, and you weren't allowed to take off more than two weeks at a time until someone took off two weeks every three weeks ... and that ended that policy. Th…

In most EU countries it is mandatory minimum to give 4 paid weeks off per year, otherwise the company is breaking the law. And maternity leave obviously is almost a year, paid, not 2 weeks unpaid. I find it hard to justify living in a place that cares so little about its people. I get its your home country, but I mean, if your home country is actively hostile towards you, why stay?

> In most EU countries it is mandatory minimum to give 4 paid weeks off per year, otherwise the company is breaking the law.

Make that five weeks for France plus up to 11 days of public holidays. That's a minimum too, we have a whole bunch of additional stuff that can stack on top of that, so many I can't even make a complete list from memory.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#292
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess people in Europe find it strange that people in the US are willing to accept the status quo there?

Presumably, you think we should what? Take the to the streets? Standard of living of food security is still far too high generally for this to seem reasonable for most. Shall we lobby our representatives? This does happen at the state level, and accordingly many states have more pro-worker policies and laws. But change at the federal level is a substantially harder thing to bring.

Exactly. It's not a matter of accepting or not accepting. There's practically nothing that can be done about it.

At the federal level, no major presidential candidate supports EU-style worker protections and mandatory benefits. And not enough congressional candidates support it, not even remotely enough to change anything. In fact, the vast majority are outright hostile to worker rights due to lobbying/capture by corporate interests.

At the state level, there is lots of variance, but even in the states most friendly to workers, it's not remotely possible to reach Europe's level of benefits around vacation, sick leave, maternity leave, let alone the right to organize for these things. There is no political will, and any political candidate who actually has the will could never win a statewide election.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#293
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess people in Europe find it strange that people in the US are willing to accept the status quo there?

Presumably, you think we should what? Take the to the streets? Standard of living of food security is still far too high generally for this to seem reasonable for most. Shall we lobby our representatives? This does happen at the state level, and accordingly many states have more pro-worker policies and laws. But change at the federal level is a substantially harder thing to bring.

The way this worked in many places is that workers formed political parties. In France people did and still take to the streets over labour issues. You can also unionize. Or sure, lobby. But if people are happy with the current system then that's also fine.

All in all the US has been a success story. Whether there's correlation or causation between that and some of the regulatory and legal environment is hard to say. Maybe its success is primarily due to resources and geography and maybe the US would be even more successful with a more European style system.

[EDIT: it's should have been its ;) ]

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#294
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume Ireland has something like bailiffs in the UK. Delta tried not paying around £3000 owed to a customer. He got a court order and sent bailiffs who went to the airport, closed the checking and said they were going seize the plane to pay for the debt. There's a good short documentary about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QSj9odUD_c&t=320s . This link starts at 320 seconds, where the action starts. S…

What physical assets does X have in Ireland to seize? The Fenian street office in Dublin is leased and TikTok took over most of that space anyway.

If X owns the building they can seize that, tennants be damned.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#295
post #135

Fwiw... As a tendency, Irish labour courts tends to find in favour of employees... but also tend to award relatively small compensation. A headline making award is pretty rare. Judge must not be a Twitter fan.

More likely that the offense by twatter was more egregious than what the courts are used to.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the development of maternity leave sort of happened backwards from how we typically think of it happening. Like most people talk about it as if culturally we used to expect 0 accommodations for working mothers, which was bad, and the expectation has increased over time. But, actually in the past the mother would have spent many dedicated years with the infant/baby/toddler/child, until they entered school.…

> If the mother has multiple children, it’s not really practical for a company to hold their spot open for like 8 years and I don’t think this happens even in the most progressive of European countries. Almost no one in Europe has 8 children but I know women who went on maternity leave 3 times. Generally kills your career as you don‘t advance during those years (and most only work part time afterwards) but the origin…

> Almost no one in Europe has 8 children

You don’t need 8 children to get to 8 years of dedicated child care with the pre-daycare-normalization worldview. You only need 2 children with an offset of 3 years, or 3 children with less offset.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#297
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collecting debts from a delinquent company is generally easier in Ireland than the US.

There are two Irish state departments that are hyper competent. The IDA and Revenue. This can involve both. I'm not at all worried or the political blowback will see them functionally banned from Europe and an acceleration of the social media regulation and hate speech laws introduction.

Oh man I almost hope that they try not paying. The consequences will be fun to watch.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#298
post #4

Would this be legal in any jurisdiction (click-or-be-fired)? I am not familiar with US labour laws, are employees actually at the level of indentured servants considering terms of employment (which I would expect to be a contract between TWO parties)?

In the US, in most (all?) jurisdictions, your employer doesn't really need to have a reason to fire you. They can fire everyone wearing red shirts, if they wanted to. There are also very few places providing leave (outside of white-collar positions). For example, my wife was given two weeks off from her job after having my son. The state we lived in only required maternity leave to be implemented at companies having…

> The state we lived in only required maternity leave to be implemented at companies having more than 50 employees. Oh, and those two weeks were unpaid.

Likely the only reason for this minimal amount of statutory leave is a federal law:

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla

Though it does mandate twelve weeks of unpaid leave, not two, but it only kicks in if you've worked there for a year already.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#299
post #67
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, and the peace of mind of not being fired at-will when economic times aren’t so good.

this also means companies are much more hesitant to hire

Ehh, this is bullshit. Companies will hire when they need.

It actually makes companies more hesitant to fire.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#300
post #260
post #80

Good luck collecting: X is notorious for stiffing on debts.

I'd assume Ireland has something like bailiffs in the UK. Delta tried not paying around £3000 owed to a customer. He got a court order and sent bailiffs who went to the airport, closed the checking and said they were going seize the plane to pay for the debt. There's a good short documentary about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QSj9odUD_c&t=320s . This link starts at 320 seconds, where the action starts. S…

That was amazing, and we absolutely need this kind of enforcement of court ordered judgments in the USA. It's mind-blowing 1. that Delta fought/ignored to the point where police had to shut down their operations, and 2. how much they even fought back when their counter was already closed down! This corporate mentalities of "We'll do anything except pay what we owe." and "We should always be able to throw more lawyers at a problem to delay it."

Not to mention having the manager pay the police out of her own pocket. Doesn't Delta have a petty cash policy giving discretion to managers around payments of small amounts like this? The whole thing was both bonkers and very entertaining!

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