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

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

#431

Post by littlestymaar » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 1:34 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #67

nudgeee wrote: 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

Employment figures for Ireland or Germany aren't far from their US counterpart.

And on the other hand, the French government dramatically loosened the rules around layoffs in 2016 (you can let people go as soon as you have a decline in sales over a few month, a negative cash flow over the same period, if their are new competitors on your market, or even just if there's technological change in your sector that justifies getting rid of people). It was 8 years ago and it has had little to no impact on France's unemployment, which is still very high.

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

#432

Post by askonomm » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 1:47 PM UTC

thayne wrote: post #314

pintxo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language, culture, family, friends, and missing awareness that conditions elsewhere might be actually better, to name a few?

Also, not everyone has the resources to move to another country.

People have migrated throughout thousands of years on much less than most people have today.

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

#433

Post by gpvos » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 2:07 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #421

gpvos wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a company allow that, can't they put a limit on that themselves? All my employment contracts in the Netherlands had a clause about that.

Legacy mistakes from decades ago that cannot be fixed because the employment contracts are collective contracts signed with unions who refuse to introduce limits into new collective contracts.

Legacy legal mistakes, the worst kind.

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

#434

Post by giaour » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 2:48 PM UTC

psychlops wrote: post #401

surgical_fire wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, this is bullshit. Ireland always had labor laws, and most companies operating there had little problems navigating through it. Of course, those companies were not under the whims of a moronic buffoon.

Crass as your point is and it may be true, each time they fine companies it raises the cost of operation and changes the nature of the decision.

What you're describing is a political calculation that I doubt Irish courts have the discretion to make. The law was in place, and Twitter chose to either knowingly break it or act without assessing the legality of their actions.

Inconsistent application of corporate/employment law is a strong disincentive to business participation because it makes the law feel capricious (and because there are plenty of disputes between businesses where there's no obvious way for political actors to put their thumbs on the scale in a "pro-business" way).

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

#435

Post by lazide » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 3:28 PM UTC

badpun wrote: post #422

lazide wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely aren’t a FAANG.

How is Netflix special then? How’s it different from Disney, HBO, Sky, or dozens of other companies that also do paid video streaming?

Hey, I didn’t make the rules.

They always seemed a bit weird to me. Near as I can tell, they were first, bigger, and invented most of the tech at scale (well, kinda - porn companies were first I think?).

Also, without the N in the acronym it becomes a lot less cool sounding, and well, a lot more derogatory.

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

#436

Post by perlgeek » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 4:08 PM UTC

2716057 wrote: post #144

perlgeek wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW in Germany, if a company decides to lay off people just to save money, they have to coordinate with some government agency -- and if the company doesn't have financial trouble, those layoffs can be blocked. This happened to Alphabet/Google when they wanted to lay off 6% of their workforce, but were wildly profitable. They couldn't in Germany. (This probably wouldn't have applied in the Twitter case, because Twitt…

German here. I would be very interested in the government agency you are alluding to. There are laws regulating layoffs due to operating conditions (Kuendigungsschutzgesetz). But these laws do not allow the government to intervene directly in company affairs - that would be communism! If a company wants to restructure "for internal reasons" (rationalizations are specifically mentioned) it is allowed to do so. This in…

I've read up a bit on it, and it seems I was wrong. I was under the impression that some kind of regulatory body that told Google that they don't have a good enough reason to lay off people, but it might have been their own council.

To lay off somebody, a company needs a reason, and the bar for being laid off because of redundancy is pretty high. You have to be able to proof that either the economic situation is bad enough that other measures don't help, or that their labor had been automated away, or other possible reasons that don't apply here (like seasons for seasonal workers).

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

#437

Post by ghaff » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 4:38 PM UTC

Schiendelman wrote: post #429

ghaff wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really disagree although you can't really keep people from working on their days off if they want to, at least in a remote/WFH situation.

You most certainly can. I work for a US company where when you're out on (paid, six month) parental leave, your system access is disabled. They don't do that for normal PTO but it's certainly feasible.

There are a lot of reasons to cut access for people out for an extended period who may not even come back.

Pretty much no one (outside of maybe something regulated who may mandate two week PTOs for security purposes) is going to do that every time an employee takes PTO. In any case, if I really want to do work I don't even need access to my employer's computers.

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

#438

Post by chgs » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 5:19 PM UTC

gpvos wrote: post #427

chgs wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anyone said they did

The question would then become why a company would impose such paperwork on itself; but someone else replied that it has to do with unions, which I guess could explain it although it's still weird.

Working for a 100 year old 5b/year company the amount of forms to fill in to do various things are extreme.

I could easily see a requirement from high up managment to “reduce risk” by having a department have a plan for an unusually long holiday stint (I.e someone taking 6 weeks off in a row), fundamentally because senior management don’t trust middle management.

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

#439

Post by psychlops » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

giaour wrote: post #434

psychlops wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crass as your point is and it may be true, each time they fine companies it raises the cost of operation and changes the nature of the decision.

What you're describing is a political calculation that I doubt Irish courts have the discretion to make. The law was in place, and Twitter chose to either knowingly break it or act without assessing the legality of their actions. Inconsistent application of corporate/employment law is a strong disincentive to business participation because it makes the law feel capricious (and because there are plenty of disputes bet…

I'm describing an economic calculation. The political decision is irrelevant and simply a cost of doing business. The higher the total cost of employees in a country without an offsetting benefit, the more likely companies will be to avoid the country.

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

#440

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 6:24 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #400

ben_w wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In competitive markets prices approach the cost of production rather than absorbing all of the disposable income of the customer. If you have uncompetitive markets, that is a separate problem with its own solutions. All markets are a bit uncompetitive — if they were not, if they were perfectly elastic and frictionless cows in a vacuum, then not only would anyone making a profit be undercut by someone willing to mak…

> All markets are a bit uncompetitive Oh sure, but there's a vast difference between "people make $1000 more and landlords take $0.05 on the dollar" and "people make $1000 more and landlords take $0.95 on the dollar". Profit margins are also not inherently determined by wages in some other sector. If a bag clip costs $1 and $0.25 of that is profit and $0.75 is cost of labor, the profit margin clearly isn't zero. If n…

The way I usually phrase the problem here is that the market strives to push average disposable income to zero. Average here means that there will be people with various degree of spending money surplus (the rich) and those not able to afford even the essentials (the poor). This is a stable(ish) state, even as people move up and down the wealth ladder. However, when suddenly a large chunk of population gets extra disposable income - say a hypothetical UBI experiment (or not so hypothetical universal or near-universal social handouts), or as two-income household model gains popularity in a country, or (indirectly) some innovation creates a new, widely-applicable efficiency - then the market absolutely swoops in and eats all the average surplus.

You mention some regulatory overhead being eliminated, but more often than not, a surplus of disposable income enables passing further regulatory requirements that improve (or at least purport to) safety or quality of products and services, and that were hitherto too costly to implement. Then, most sectors aren't nearly competitive enough to keep the margins to zero, and some degree of price fixing is a natural thing that happens without any actual collusion, so things get more expensive (per unit) (or don't get cheaper). Then, like with new regulations, you also get new products and services that had no market yesterday, become popular today, and a de-facto requirement of living tomorrow. Etc.

> Oh sure, but there's a vast difference between "people make $1000 more and landlords take $0.05 on the dollar" and "people make $1000 more and landlords take $0.95 on the dollar".

If I parse this correctly, then the latter is definitely the case. Real estate is the prime force that eats all surplus disposable income. Houses and apartments get smaller, get built from worse and worse materials, using inferior techniques, and designed for ever shorter life span, all while getting more and more expensive. Any sudden bump in disposable income across the population is, first and foremost, likely to be eaten by rent.