51–60 of 146 posts
Innovation at the expense of crushing workers and increasing the gap between parasitic management compensation and worker wages. No, thanks. Europe may need reform but it’s not the USA way of doing things, except for the elite for which “ the economist “ is a already known and tired sockpuppet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can have your cake and eat it too. It's called the Danish model, although Denmark does not completely implement it. Make it cheap & easy to both hire & fire people, but then take care of people who are fired through a generous safety net. High taxes pay for the safety net. Explicit taxes are better than implicit taxes. Forcing companies to provide social services such as employment guarantees or health insurance…
How does that work with immigration? Does Denmark allow anyone to receive these benefits?
It is indeed pretty impossible to fire people who don't want to be fired. It's still possible to spin up a subsidiary and hire people into it and if doesn't work out, well, it didn't work out. Is it even the most commons reason why companies do layoffs? Sounds like a propaganda piece to suppress both wages and rights here.
https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/entlassungen-wie-unternehmen...
The headline text translated:
> “I'm currently trying to get a severely disabled works council member out. We're well on our way.”
> Removing high earners from the payroll, compensating employees who cannot be dismissed: employer lawyers like Alexander Birkhahn are booming. Here, he reveals how companies can get almost anyone out—and how employees can secure their jobs.
The article is really making the point that shitting on workers is OK—desirable even!—so that individual companies can make trillions of dollars. “Innovation” to the author equals making money, and being unable to sack hundreds of people at once with complete disregard for them or the social impact it causes is seen as a negative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really? Or do you actually want to sustain your standard of living as safely as you can? Because then the question arises: What if the current way of handling labor protection in the EU (as one of many components) leads to destroying yours and everyone elses standard of living, simply because it's unaffordable? Would you still argue that this is the way to go? Everyone going down with the ship together? I don'…
> destroying yours and everyone elses standard of living, simply because it's unaffordable? As opposed to what has happened in the US, where everything is happy and everything is affordable. Innovation!
The business enterprise, in this hit piece, should not be simply another tool for improving the quality of life and helping create a society that's worth living in, but the sole purpose of the society itself.
The "cumbersome process for letting go workers comes with hidden costs" aren't really hidden, unlike the author, but transparent social protections ensuring fair treatment, preventing arbitrary dismissal, and stabilising demand. Something a decent society should fully embrace.
> the sheer difficulty of shedding staff en masse—a reality of corporate life—steers Europe’s biggest companies away from making risky bets in innovative fields
No, thank you. Europe's lag in high-tech sectors stems mainly from underinvestment, fragmented capital markets, and US monopoly power, not employment law. Labour rigidity has no strict correlation with innovation deficits (Germany, Scandinavia, France, Japan, and South Korea all had stronger labour protections than the US and managed to become rather innovative), but why bother with data when the point was simply to bash Europe for protecting its workers from predatory businesses? At best, the evidence is mixed and context-dependent (focusing on patents, for example, instead of genuine innovation)[0], and OECD and Eurostat long-term data show that some high-innovation countries have some of the strongest worker protections and unions.
> investments in disruptive breakthroughs [...] require the ability for big companies to hire lots of staff, then later fire most of them if the projects don’t pan out
Likewise, nonsensical economic justification for precarious work. For the most part, innovation depends on R&D funding, talent, and public infrastructure, not firing freedom (which businesses are guaranteed to abuse). Rather than treating humans as disposable risk capital, the author should take a look at US's own history and they will undoubtedly notice that a significant part of the innovation that it benefits from today was developed when the US had huge taxes, immense investments in R&D and public infrastructure. [1]
Strong social and environmental protections should be the bare minimum for any democratic society. Remove that, and no economic system, whether capitalist or not, is worth having.
[0] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259014512...
The american style lack of employment protection may play a part in fostering innovative companies, although I suspect being the primary superpower with the world's reserve currency may also play a part too.
How is being incredibly innovative making everyone in the US happy? I just see a lot of division and unhappiness right now. And some very rich people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because then the question arises: What if the current way of handling labor protection in the EU (as one of many components) leads to destroying yours and everyone elses standard of living, simply because it's unaffordable? It's quite an assumption that it's unaffordable. In the last decades efficiency has been only increasing, but working hours per week aren't significantly going down nor are the salaries noticeab…
It's absolutely fantastic for the people, as long as you get companies to agree with you. Looking at the EU market: Does it work? Is that your reading? I am sure there are ways to try and force companies, but I would suspect it's fairly complicated politically, given that that's usually not how that goes.
The EU single market isn't really single yet - and that is in my views the biggest obstacle to innovating start-ups being able to scale. If you want to release EU-wide you have to make sure you also comply to 27 national jurisdictions. It's hard. I work at financial services, and we really have to carefully grow and release per country. The UK would have been nice, but being even more different, for the company of our size they are a total no-go.
But I do think it works. The European countries with strong workers' protection are very attractive destination for knowledge immigration, they make a good chunk of top-10 in Human Development Index, and the whole of top-10 if you adjust it by inequality (so if you look at median at not an average).
> I am sure there are ways to try and force companies, but I would suspect it's fairly complicated politically
Less complicated in the EU than basically anywhere else in the world.
Did anyone got the funny part? Here is it: they assume the "innovative" one to be the U.S., not China.
The article is really making the point that shitting on workers is OK—desirable even!—so that individual companies can make trillions of dollars. “Innovation” to the author equals making money, and being unable to sack hundreds of people at once with complete disregard for them or the social impact it causes is seen as a negative.