Employee commits suicide after MongoDB fired her during mental health leave

This gets into "my French is rusty... and legal French is non-existent".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_(employment)_in_Fran...

https://www.rippling.com/blog/termination-in-france

In particular the parts:

> French laws don’t recognize at-will employment. In France, you can’t simply dismiss an employee without reason. In fact, the French labor code makes it extremely clear that it considers termination to be an absolute last resort, especially in cases of voluntary or involuntary personal grounds for dismissal. Instead, it encourages employers to try to find other ways to resolve the problem. For example, let’s say the employee in question is having serious interpersonal issues with their manager or a coworker. You can only dismiss them after you’ve tried everything else, such as holding a meeting in which you talk to the two of them and try to find a solution, or by putting them on different projects so they don’t have to work together directly. If the company is putting technological changes in place to increase its competitiveness, before you can start the dismissal procedure, you must demonstrate you tried another course of action, such as redeployment or employee training.

> Everything must be documented. This is extremely important: You must document evidence of all events and/or incidents that led to the dismissal of the employee, even if the reasons have nothing to do with their conduct specifically. You’ll use this evidence both during the interview when you’re telling the employee why they’re being dismissed and should also keep it in case the employee decides to bring a lawsuit against your company.

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If someone is having difficulty with their job, you first provide them training before you can fire them. From what I understand, it has to be a "we tried everything for the past year, here's all the documentation and they're still unable to do the basic requirements for the position.

And whether they have stones or not, or whether their manager is a bully, and so on and so on ...

> companies shouldn't be allowed to fire someone except for actual negligence / malice

France sure does a lot of things right here but above is what OP stated that I commented on which isn't the case for France. While one might have to go through some additional paperwork / procedures / ... you can in fact fire an say an underperforming employee

Good points. But notice that, if the overall unemployment rate is the same, and in one country there's higher unemployment rate for youth compared to another, this means in the other there's higher unemployment rate for older workers compare to the first. The question then becomes: which is worse, more unemployed youth people, or more unemployed mature/elder people?

I'd argue more unemployed mature/elder is worse. Mature people in an at-will system don't become younger over the years to start finding better and better opportunities, rather their prospects become worse as time goes by. Conversely, young people become mature and find more and more opportunities as they age, so long-term not-at-will systems favor everyone, at the cost of making the start more difficult.

In both the corresponding difficulties can be reduced via welfare. But at-will systems tend, or at least it seems so to me, I may be wrong in this, to provide worse welfare, which may add weight to the comparison.

You can get the overall unemployment by demographic breakdown at https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm (this also gets into how do you count unemployment https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm - the reported numbers tend to be the U-3 rate, but people also like to quote the U-6 rate if they want bigger numbers ... the demographic numbers are likely based on the U-3 rate).

The United States is currently showing 4.1% for 20 and over with the 20-24 range at 8.3% and 25 and over at 3.7%.

For France... labor force participation (the flip of the unemployment number) for 25-54 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25TTFRQ156S is 88% and for 15-24 it is 43%.

The United States shows relatively consistent unemployment with entry level unemployment trending up. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=LNU04000036,LNU0400008... (select data sets at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?eid=48595&rid=50 )

I'm also going to challenge the "US and France have similar rates".

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/unemployment-rate

United States by that measure is 4.6% while France is 7.7%. For the US at 7.8% would be the U-6 number which includes everyone working a part time job.

> U-6 Total unemployed, plus all people marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all people marginally attached to the labor force

France's 7.7% rate matches https://www.economy.com/france/unemployment-rate (seasonly adjusted)

> The unemployed under the International Labour Office (ILO) definition comprise all working-age persons (conventionally those of at least 15 years of age) that 1°) during the reference week had no employment, even for one hour, 2°) were available to start work within the next two weeks and 3°) had actively sought employment at some time during the previous four weeks or had found a job due to start within 3 months.

Note the "even for one hour" means that comparing it to the U-6 rate is inappropriate. So comparing it to the U-3 (4.6%), U-4 (4.9%) or U-5 (5.6%) would be more correct.

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With that in mind, I would urge you to reconsider your comparison about how increasing the difficulty to fire someone impacts employment.

Furthermore, there's only one state in the US that is not at will... Montana.

https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/articles/employment-a...

> Montana is the only state that is not an at-will employment state. In Montana, employers must have a valid reason for terminating an employee, and employees can only be fired for just cause.

However, that is "just cause" not "have to attempt to find another position for them at the company before they can be fired."

Comparing employment stats for Montana (45th state by population) may be difficult to compare with other states. https://montanafreepress.org/2018/11/17/where-the-jobs-are-m... -- would you compare the unemployment Mato Grosso do Sul to the rest of Brazil - and would you be able to attribute employment stats there to one difference in employment law vs the rest of the country?