Increasing benefits and worker protections also increases the cost of hiring employees. This is widely understood. In countries where employees have extensive benefits and protections like France, employers are very picky about which employees they hire because it will be difficult or expensive to fire them if they turn out to be poor workers. Hence, and unemployment rate over twice that of the US. The ease of enteri…
Take the wider view. Let's posit as a hypothetical that 1% of the workforce is deplorably bad at the notion of being employed (let's define that as: It'll take them 100s+ of trying things until they find a job where the employer is better off employing them vs. not employing them). Let's say a further 1% is rated as 'quite bad' (defined as: More than half the jobs they would on paper qualify for, they'd do such a bad…
This is an overly coarse grained depiction of the situation. An individual is not blanket "bad employee" who can't be productive. I'm a good software developer, but if you hired me to be a concert pianist I'd suck at it. I'd say probably 5-10% of employees end up being under productive or non-productive at their jobs. This is consistent with the performance review scores I've seen.
When firing an employee is easy, employers are much more willing to hire because they know that they will be able to terminate employees that are not productive. When firing an employee is hard, employers will be reluctant to hire employees and will only hire the ones that they are confident will do well. This usually makes it very hard to get started in an industry, because companies are leery of workers without experience.
> Why employ these people? In western europe the common song and dance routine is a calvinistic 'because work is good for you, otherwise they'd be lazy gits'... at which point apparently the argument becomes: The employers of the notion must carry the burden of dealing with these folks, for the good of society.
This doesn't seem to be the case seeing as how most of Western Europe has a higher unemployment rate than the US.
> In the US and a lot of right wing euro parties the sentiment is more: Well, they are lazy! I don't wanna pay taxes to enable these morons. Except that is an economic falsehood; they drag society down no matter what you do. I guess unless you're willing to take the moral position of just casually killing them in a way that is really cheap and easy (and thus, probably quite imprecise – few to no people are morally okay with this I assume), you just have to grin and bear it. Yeah, they drag a bit. It's fine; the economy can easily accomodate them.
You're seriously saying that if we don't employ people who are incapable of doing their jobs, then the only other option is summary execution? This is absurd to the point that I can only assume this is a bad joke.
The much more likely approach is to let them continue to be unemployed and search for a job that they are capable of doing.
> The point is: A system that does let such people be employed here and there for a while is not inherently better than one that does not, and, 0% unemployment is a crazy goal.
0% unemployment is a crazy goal and I don't know why you seem to think that making it harder or easier to fire employees will ever bring it closer to zero. Even in fields where the number of job openings vastly exceed the available positions, unemployment is still usually at 1-2%.