From what I've discussed with a lot of small businesses in France, workers-friendly laws are not an obstacle at all and unlike what you can see in the news, it plays almost no part in hiring (the laws are actually very reasonable and it all makes sense). The main obstacle is by far the high taxes.
This is incorrect. The French like to complain about their taxes, but it's not that different from California.
Employee protection regulation absolutely is problematic in France, because it over-protect relatively small groups at the expense of everyone else.
Small and medium-sized businesses are most affected by this. The transition from 40-ish people to 200-ish people is where the system really breaks down for French startups, because you are too big to benefit from the early-stage incentives, and not large enough to have political clout and bend the rules.
No different than California? Let's see. I don't know the numbers well in Cali but I know what I paid in France. I'd be curious to see what one would pay in California for a similar situation.
For a 100,000 euros income as a sole proprietorship, I paid 42% altogether. From those 42%, 7% were income tax, the remaining 35% were Charges sociales which covers healthcare, unemployment and retirement benefits. When French people complain about high taxes for hiring, they complain about the Charges sociales.
When ones is employed, most of the charges sociales are paid by the employer so do not come out of the employee salary (but it's the same in the end).
Honestly, it's not as big a problem in tech where wages are quite a bit lower than the US to account for the high charges sociales. But for smaller companies hiring low skilled labor or for jobs that are traditionally less paid (customer service, etc...), then it is rather high.
And to add insult to injury, the organisms that are charged with collecting those charges sociales are a complete clusterfuck. For the same year, they calculated 3 different amounts and none matched what my accountant had calculated. Closing down the business and getting out of the RSI's list took 2 years and repeated letters.
That said, I do agree with you regarding employee protection. Those regulations are helpful and should be there but there's a balance to be had between both extremes. It's the same with renter's protection in France which are way too biased against landlords and also create a lack of available apartment (coming back to France after living abroad for multiple years meant that I didn't qualify for the new unpaid rent insurance the government created and locked me out of a third of the apartments in the city I wanted to live.
100k euros would be ~$124k. At that salary if you are single your marginal tax rate would be 28% federal + 6.2% employee social security + 6.2% employer social security + 1.45% employee medicare + 1.45% employer medicare + 9.3% California income + 0.9% California disability insurance = 53.5%. This doesn't include unemployment taxes (California or federal) which might be another 0.3-0.5%. Though for real math, the employer paid taxes should increase the denominator when calculating rate. This number includes employer-paid taxes, but you were doing the same.
Of course effective tax rate is much lower than marginal tax rate. Effective federal income tax would be 17.1%, effective California income tax would be 6.9%. This would make effective total tax 40.2% (it was 42.6% in 2017, before Trump's tax cuts).
They're higher in France but not meaningfully higher, hence my comment "not that different". In fact if you take into account the cost of typical private employer-paid healthcare, the cost might actually be higher in California.
And I maintain that taxes are just not high enough to be a major obstacle to entrepreneurship in France - and yes I am aware of the dreaded "charges sociales". The reason we hear so much about them is because complaining about high taxes is easy and not controversial. Unlike the topic of employee protection, which is deeply polarizing.
Looking at the numbers, you do indeed have a point. It would be interesting to look at the taxes and charge sociales for different ranges of income but, for software startups who hire highly qualified people, taxes wouldn't be an obstacle compared to Malaysia.
And I very much doubt that availability of qualified hires is the obstacle either since the level of engineering Grandes Ecoles is quite good (I might be biased there)
So, I guess factors for why France is not doing that well re startups would be Employee Protection, Kafkaesque bureaucracy when dealing with creating the company and paying the said Charges Sociales and lack of capital.
I guess it depends on what do you consider meaningfully higher. And we didn't mention VAT: from your "post-tax" income, 20% of it will be paid as tax anyway when you buy products of services. A reduced rate is applied for some products/services but it should be kept in mind that France collects more money from VAT than from all the other taxes combined.
When you compare California tax you should then add the cost of private health insurance and retirement plan.
I'd be be really surprised if the sum would come under 42%. It seems to me you're getting a very good deal! I would not have expected the 7% average income tax in particular, is it due to the sole proprietorship? Would you pay more if you directly invoiced as a person?
In California it probably adds up to 35% for an average person making $100k. Lots of variables like if you are married, have kids, own a house, etc. And health care benefits depends of the employer through the ACA is helping for the time being.
You might want to also talk to small businesses in France that deal with with unexpected setbacks -- from what I have observed, this usually ends up with a dead startup.
I don't know what perception of the country you have but it's not the Soviet Union you know, having financial issue is a valid reason to fire employees. The US is the only developed place without reasonable workers laws so it's more an exception than anything else.
In the US, we call this argument "Red Baiting". Sure, let's accuse our opponent of starving 10s of millions of people to death!
When there's a financial problem, there are multiple differing opinions as to what's reasonable.
But if you want to call the US the "only developed place without reasonable worker laws", you might want to consider Denmark. Because they don't have the opinion you're propagating.
Yeah but in Denmark they compensate with very high unemployment benefits paying up to 90% of your previous salary for up to 2 years (that's much higher than in France), I don't recall any of that in the US.
Comparing to Denmark, which has way better employee laws than the US, is weird regardless because of the difference in unemployment benefits and general safety net there is in Denmark. Free hospitals, free education, etc.
If you want that view, then I guess nothing is ever free then, and it's a pointless word, so why even bother?
Also, the tax is more complicated than simply throwing out 60.45%. It goes:
- From 0 - 50,000 you pay 0% tax
- Everything above you first pay 8% work market tax, and then from the leftover you pay
- the amount you earned above 50,000 - 498,900 is 37%
- the amount you earn above 489,900 is taxed 52,2%
So you don't pay 60.45% of the full amount. Never. You pay progressively as you go up.
Monthly that'll go something like, deduct 5,000 form your paycheck, deduct 8% of the remaining amount, and then 38% of the remaining amount of that. Now, what you have left is the remaining amount + the 5,000 tax free. And of course a bit more of the amount if you go into the top tax bracket.
Proponents of a largely deregulated labour market love talking about France. As someone working in Australia—a country with labour laws that are more sane than France (and definitely the U.S.)—instantly bringing up France just tends to stink of a false dichotomy and a line of rhetoric from people that try to justify the U.S.'s unjustifiably unfair labour laws.
I suggest that people who aren't familiar with Australia's labour laws have a quick look at https://www.fairwork.gov.au/. There are some problems, but it gives you an idea of practical alternatives to at-will employment.
Main relevant takeaways:
- Unfair dismissal legislation preventing employers from terminating employees unless they were grossly negligent, malicious, or didn't respond to performance management.
- Unfair dismissal claim protection for small businesses provided they can show evidence of following a (very short, fair, and easy to read) code with regards to the employee's termination.
It's extremely hard for me to empathise with business owners who openly have issues with these protections. At the very least, it's apparent that this dismissal wouldn't stand in Australia, as it shouldn't. Executives dismissing a support employee—out-of-touch executives who have probably forgotten how important an ongoing income stream is for people on low or even normal incomes—just to save face in a business relationship is in my opinion unjustifiable. Regardless of your view on labour laws I think most people agree on this.
I'm the GP who brought up this topic. I actually am American and now working at a managerial level in Australia. When I ran into trouble with someone on my team performing at a poor level, I was a bit exasperated with these regulations and how they required me to put him on a performance improvement plan rather than immediately dismiss. I was frustrated, but it forced me to talk it out with him. We did a bit of a reset and had a smoother period. Ultimately issues arose again, but he was able to find a new job in the meantime which is a much better fit for him and moved on amicably. It was a positive result for both parties, definitely not without some stress, but it was achieved because I was forced to have patience -- and we should have patience, because people aren't disposable.
Plenty of white collar businesses in the US use performance improvement plans. But that would be a ridiculous remedy in a business with thin margins like a restaurant - some businesses need the freedom to hire and fire quicker.
No they don't. If they need it their business is terrible and should not exist. I live in the Netherlands and our restaurants do just fine without being allowed to fire at will and without the need for tips to give employees a decent wage. It's called sane labor laws.
It’s a different world. The US is a free country. You are free to work wherever they accept you. A job is not a right: you cannot demand anything that someone else must provide you. And people for the most part are free to start a business pretty much whether it should exist or not regardless of anybody else’s opinions.
"sensible" is meaningless. Everyone gets to make up their own def. Parent is correct, the US is a free country, which means beyond some _very_ simple rules we don't try to think for employers, we let the consumers do that. That's the point of a functioning market.
I prominently tell companies why they don't get my business, and Marriott will hear from me next year when I call, waste their time gleefully explaining how I might have used their services but they fired a guy to kowtow to China.
Even better, this is gold on his resume.
In the US we don't pretend we are smarter than other business owners. The socialism route of adding regs to "fix" regs is self defeating. Treating people like fools makes them fools eventually.
Calling the US "a functioning market" is a bit rich.
The US society and politics are way too heavily tilted towards the employers, the people who already wield an disproportionate amount of power over their employees.
If you actually take the time to voice your displeasure over situations like this, you are an extreme outlier. Most people don't give a shit, and even fewer will even hear of stuff like this happening. Even if they do hear about it, they'll forget in a week or two.
In the end, nothing will actually change. Employers will still exploit the employees for profit, and fire people for absolutely no reason at all, while making potential new employees jump through ever more hoops in the desperate hope for a job.
"exploit the employees for profit, and fire people for absolutely no reason at all"
That is a contradiction, the entire point of a company is to make a profit by providing consumers with something they are willing to pay for. Use all the derogatory words you like, in this case "exploit" seems to mean "employ" (which is pretty odd btw), and "no reason at all" seems to mean "like a tweet".
It's a self regulating system, that's capitalism. Marriott screwed up, and now it's on their permanent record. I'm sure they just lost my business, if I use history as a gauge, and assume I live until I am 90, that's high 4 to low 5 figures in today's $'s.
A mark on their permanent record? It'll be out of the news in less than a week, and people won't give a shit anymore. Hell, I bet you'll have forgotten soon enough.
Do you write down and keep track of all your personal boycotts? Do you check the list every time you make a purchase or pay for a service? Sure, if you're like me, you remember stuff like "Nestle wanted to privatize clean drinking water for profit" and "Coca-Cola paid hitmen to assassinate union leaders", and avoid those companies. But "Mariott once fired a guy for liking a tweet"?
Yeah, no. You'll forget soon enough, just like everyone else. And companies like Mariott are counting on it. I know "the Internet never forgets", but that doesn't matter when it's soon drowned out by a million times more random informational noise. It'll stick around, alright. But only as some random mariottsucks.org website, or as a long-forgotten Facebook group.
They fired a guy for accidentally clicking like on a tweet. If the consequences for that action are so severe, why is it even possible in the situation he was put in? Was he briefed ahead of time that his employment was hanging by a thread, pending a single misclick? In any sensible system, he would have been called for a brief talk with his immediate superior, where he would have been given a warning and explained why it was necessary. He certainly wouldn't have been fired outright for something so minor.
Capitalism self-regulates for maximum profit to the fat cats, maximum work effort squeezed from workers for the absolute minimum possible pay. That's why unions are needed, to balance out the power of the employers, through collective bargaining and solidarity.
> I prominently tell companies why they don't get my business, and Marriott will hear from me next year when I call, waste their time gleefully explaining how I might have used their services but they fired a guy to kowtow to China.
Yes, some guy whose entire job is to field customer complaints will listen to you and then hang up the phone and not report your complaint to anyone.
Parent is correct, the US is a free country, which means beyond some _very_ simple rules we don't try to think for employers, we let the consumers do that. That's the point of a functioning market.
This assumes a definition of 'functioning market' that not everyone agrees on. In my view the market and the government serve the well-being of the general population. The US is starting to fail miserably in that area, because income inequality is pretty bad and has steadily been growing since the 1970'ies.
Moreover, the influence of industry lobbying in the US had become enormous and paralyzes democracy. Of course, the industrial complexes and part of the government keeps up the fairytale of 'the US is a free country, if you don't make it, you are not working hard enough, the market is self-regulating', because it is convenient for them. As long as people believe this, they will not object to having no rights and no decent income. If you are a random person, the opportunities of building up a good and secure life are much better in Nothern and Western Europe.
tl;dr: not only the government needs to be kept in check, also the market. Otherwise big companies dictate the policies.
There is a right to work under the responsibility to protect. Industry structure that produces a permanent underclass is a form of violence, and class warfare.
This is a bizarre take on a business relationship between two free entities.
Is an employee allowed to quit? What about the "violence" it does to the company, investors, and fellow employees? Must they stick around to provide continuity? If so, how is this not indenture?
Am I allowed to fire a painter I hire to paint my house if I think he does poor work? Do I need to document his performance and discuss an improvement plan? Does this change if I own a house big enough to keep him painting for a month? For a year?
Employment represents a contract between two parties. Basic freedom of association and contract law means both parties can enter and leave under the terms they negotiate and have a rational self interest in acting in good faith.
In aggregate all the employment just represents society. There is a difference between engaging services and employing someone, and the heavy preference for engaging a human as services is part of the problem. It is no different from engaging a human as a good. If we all play by the same rules, then the contours of the market are not unfairly balanced toward one player. The market and social life are not distinct; contract law should protect all stakeholders as you mentioned.
> Is an employee allowed to quit? What about the "violence" it does to the company, investors, and fellow employees? Must they stick around to provide continuity? If so, how is this not indenture?
Grotesque. Many industries in various countries have a reasonable notice period (say, 3 months), which should give the company enough time to adapt. Nobody considers this "indenture".
> Employment represents a contract between two parties. Basic freedom of association and contract law means both parties can enter and leave under the terms they negotiate and have a rational self interest in acting in good faith.
The difference is that one party, most of the time, can manage without the other. On the other hand, the fired employee still needs to pay rent/feed his family. And depending on the economy/location, finding a different job might take some time (if it's possible at all without retraining).
Three months is fascinating. That's a quarter of a year! We live in different worlds.
I've always found two weeks notice to be more than adequate in most cases and then, only as a courtesy to communicate, transfer in flight work, and alter schedules. If I'm truly mad, I'm resigning and dealing with picking up the slack is not my problem. If an employee tells me they're leaving, I want them gone soon anyway because mentally they've already left the team.
Employees are sellers of labor, so proponents of less regulation could ask the same question of you regarding an employee whose business model is doing as little as possible or even damaging the employer but expecting compensation to continue.
They use those plans to avoid discrimination lawsuits, that is really the only reason behind it. HR in the US is totally different too, it's basically "just protect the business from being sued by employees."
Australian businesses tend to employ as casuals for cafes and restaurants. No need to fire the person, just reduce shifts till they get the hint (I am not an employer).
Aside from Unions, there is no way of protecting employees where they are interchangeable cogs. Unions have their own problems, but collective action is a pretty good deterrent against 'unjustified' termination.
One interesting thing about France and Australia is that by the Ease of Doing Business Index over the last decade, France is gaining on but still behind Australia. (FRA: 44 -> 31; AUS: 6 -> 14).
So suppose we agreed France was performing worse economically than Australia over the last decade. Then we might conclude that absolute position matters and liberalization is important. Or we might as likely conclude the complete opposite, that gains on the index don't matter and liberalization isn't important.
And that's not even bringing the Economic Freedom Index into things, which has a radically different ranking based on similar criteria.
It's almost as if a lot of of what people believe about economics on both sides is under-determined by the available evidence.
But eh, maybe that's too cynical. That's just two countries. I'd really like to see some data analysis on how much "ease of doing business" (or some similar metric) matters to GDP--and maybe also to surveys of feelings of job security / satisfaction as well. Looking across most countries, maybe hard patterns would emerge. Or maybe economics is all noise unless you're at Weimar levels of malfeasance, who knows.
South Korea, Georgia, and Macedonia have skyrocketed up the EoDB chart, so I guess for any of us who suspect there's a sufficiently strong link, we have an opportunity to put our money down.
Another relationship to study is between the quasi job-for-life laws we have in France and being the country with the most population under antidepressants in the world.
> France and being the country with the most population under antidepressants in the world.
I was intrigued by this and decided to have a look at the figures and I can't find anything to support your statement. Where do you get your information from?
From Business Insider graphing OECD figures for the number of people per 1000 who take antidepressants shows France to be 50/1000 which is 16th from the top.
Directly from the OECD site is a page showing the dose consumed per 1000 people. It's very similar to the above, possibly the same data source but they are supposedly measured in different ways.
The parent replied to a comment as a rebuttal against the claim that France's employment laws are what you get when you give employees rights.
They specially stated the false dichotomy, and made a strong argument.
No one here knows if the other option has to be Marriott losing business, so you putting that out there is wrong, and ironically, again a false dichotomy.
I was responding to this point, which is specifically about the Marriott case.
>Executives dismissing a support employee—out-of-touch executives who have probably forgotten how important an ongoing income stream is for people on low or even normal incomes—just to save face in a business relationship is in my opinion unjustifiable.
But that wasn't the other option. They could have fired the executive who was responsible for managing and training the staff (who clearly failed to do so) or the executive that implemented a customer support system that allowed staff to like tweets that could cause significant damage to the company.
Or they didn't have to fire anyone - it's not like China actually gets to see employment records for random staff in Omaha.
See, this is an interesting thing about labor law: it can actually protect both parties.
If Marriott was forbidden by law from firing the employee in this situation, then they could much more easily deflect the pressure from China. Make some token gesture and then say, hey, we'd like to do more, but those pesky laws prevent us from doing that.
This is a case where everybody wins when there's stronger employee protection.
Nah, the better outcome is Marriott showing it's hand. Better to know who is running the show, the consumers do just fine sorting it out. PR is extremely powerful and at least in the US many of us are very conscious about voting with our money. The alternative, where influence by people that are antithetical to our core values stays under the radar is much more damaging. My whole family will soon know this story, and they _love_ voting with their money.
This can work sometimes and may even sound wise, until you realize that a lot of people's character and behaviour is determined by their environment.
So I prefer the direct approach that is known to work by directly helping people do the right thing, over the indirect approach that may or may not work, depending on circumstances.
yup, redundancies can be used to dismiss employees. The caveat is that you can't rehire for that role for a certain period of time. This is simply to avoid the problem of companies claiming random employees are no longer needed.
It is not uncommon for smaller employers to fire a manager, and hire a new supervisor though. Same job - different title.
I'm unsure if it's been challenged at the FWC - I doubt it would stand.
You also need to offer other options within the company if they exist.
So if you're reducing the number of staff employed to support "system A", but you have vacant positions supporting "system B", then you you need to offer those positions to any affected staff, or show why those employees would not capable of doing the new job.
You don't have to empathize with a business owners. It's their resources at play. So they simply will do business elsewhere. I don't have to open an office in France. I just don't. It's too much hassle. I open it wherever I want. So if an employee loses out by not being hired by me (or I lose out by not hiring some French awesome person), then so be it. But the point is that the US environment is more friendly for businesses, and as a result we have a lot of them. Maybe other places also have a lot of them too, but if you did a poll all over the world of what country they would want to emigrate to, it would be the US who will lead the worldwide poll.
Different people are attracted to different potential outcomes. Compensation is a vector, after all. It’s the usual question of risk versus reward. Some will find the perceived safety of generous government protection and benefits desirable, even at the cost of lower remuneration. Others prefer to swing for the fence.
I have launched international hiring processes for PhD studentship positions at my lab. More than once, I have had good candidates who ended up rejecting an offer and going to the US instead because their universities have more prestige.
Sometimes the convenience of these decisions for them was, let's say, highly questionable (although I really hope I'm wrong and wish them the best of luck!). For example, a person from Iran who went there to first be hit by Trump's travel ban, and then the graduate student hike. Here that person would have had a good salary, enough to live well, and no such worries. And even though my university as a whole is ranked worse that the university they ended up in, my group/lab is better on any metric.
I have also had a candidate from an Asian country who really wanted to come here, but their parents wanted their child to go to a "prestigious US university" so they didn't let them.
I do think that if you ask in Europe, almost no one wants to go to the US. At least that's my experience. But in other areas of the world the inertia of the US's reputation is strong.
This is also why people in France have stable, long-term jobs, instead of being fired by Wallmart every 6 months due to some war veteran scheme that allows them to save 0.1% on employee salaries.
In this particular case, if the man wasn't trained appropriately to handle international PR while doing so, the wrongdoing lies with the company.
The article itself seems to adopt a certain attitude that I really dislike. For one, I don't believe that the employee clicked accidentally. It really sounds like a lie. Then the arguments alternate between "it's not my job" and "Why should we care about China/other countries? Why should just tell them to f-ck off!". The truth is that both the US and the company seem to have an opinion. The employee, either due to negligence or ignorance, broke that line, and the company faced a backlash. It's not like China is exceptionally evil or something. I hate people trying to vilify entrire countries and politicize everything. It sounds like the author is just looking for a reason to bash China.
A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire.
Imagine that you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. Today, that means your startup is dead and all employees are screwed, but in the US, your startup continues with a much lower valuation. Which is better for the worker? There is no right answer, but in France, there's a startup-killing answer.
> you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half.
You dismiss employees equivalent to half of your expenses on economic grounds, and after the appropriate notice period (1 month for employees with 6 months - 2 years tenure [1]) you now have half the expenses.
If that's not fast enough, I doubt your startup would have survived for more than 2 months with an instant layoff.
Surely at-will employment is not all it takes to suddenly have lots of successful startups. Otherwise the US would have a more spread-out distribution of startups, instead of the cluster in Silicon Valley.
When you do get interviewed by French TV, I hope you won't pretend like this is a single-cause issue with a simple fix.
California's advantages are existing tech employers, wildly risk taking investors, and above average US workers' rights like banning non compete agreements. The EU has the first, none of the second, and I wouldn't know about the third.
> why the EU doesn't have as many startups as Silicon Valley
I'm french. I can't speak for sure about other EU countries, but I can speak about France.
The REAL and main reason why tech startups are less frequent here is cultural.
In France we have a HUGE problem with elitism & a widespread negative attitude toward anybody who tries to innovate/change/make things. It's a pervasive problem, I've been MANY times hit HARD by that problem.
Initiative is strongly discouraged (even if most people will claim the opposite): no matter what you do, a LOT of people will immediately give you _negative_ critics of all kind, sometimes mind-bogglingly stupid: "it'll never work", "that's not a good idea", etc. The more clueless they are, the most aggresisve they are about it. It's really hard to be motivated in such an environment, and of course it also has a direct impact when you try to find funds or associates...
Also, many people, especially the managers & the elites only see the BIG companies as being worth anything, despite the fact that small to medium businesses make the majority of employment & create the most value.
Add to that the HUGE problem that managers and all the elite (politics, leaders, whatever), salespeople, and many others, have an extremely TOXIC attitude toward people who DO THINGS. For instance I was given shit many times because while being a team lead I was involved in the programming part. To them, a manager does NOT get his/her hands DIRTY. Which is stupid of course and explains a LOT of the problems we have here.
And trust me, this goes very far, there is a real CONTEMPT toward people like me, who are the ones who build the products & services that bring all the money. I've been mocked to my face because of that by people (sales & managers) who have no clue about how to manage a project, a team, and even less a programming project... (And I've worked on HUGE telecom projects, not a couple of PHP pages). Same goes for everybody in my family, who are mostly scientists/engineers. This in turn creates a big dissatisfaction -or worse- in the people who are in the trenches, creating an awful "us versus them" mentality that kills productivity & often creates a very bad work atmosphere.
And don't get me started about the awful prejudices against programmers (and everybody involved in computer projects). It's REALLY bad! So bad that I regret choosing that field. Here also there is a huge contempt & all the ridiculous prejudices that you probably know about nerds, programmers, etc. (Of the hundreds of developers/SE I've met, I can count on the fingers of ONE hand the ones who somewhat fit the stereotypes, and those were people with severe mental issues, something not related to the job). Another BIG problem is the "programming is easy" B.S. This leads many managers to think that they can replace experienced people like me with cheap beginners, sometimes in foreign countries, with disastrous results (as I wrote above, I worked in BIG projects, with crushing responsibilities, not the stuff that beginners can handle by themselves even if they are good which was not the case because being cheap, they were not the best, not by a long shot).
The huge bureaucracy does not help either, but it's not the most important issue.
In case someone points out the few recent initiatives to encourage startups in France, let me repeat what I just wrote: the fundamental issue is ATTITUDE. Until we can fix that, everything else is basically useless.
> A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire.
Having a long-term contract where you can be fired at-will any day is effectively the same as cumulating short-term contracts, so instead of a lot of people on short-term contracts, you just have everybody (100%) on short term contracts.
There is one big difference. If you have a long term contract in the US where you can get fired at will, you can still get a mortgage. If you're cumulating short term contracts in France, no bank will agree to let you get a mortgage or will make it very difficult.
This creates an underclass of people who are unable to buy their own house because of the employment situation
That's not the case in the US: employees have a lot more protection if they're a part of a "protected class". And, surprisingly enough, it works pretty well.
I, personally, have a limited ability to be a part of a protected class, but that appears to work out ok for people like me. I've been fired once, and I got a better job as a result.
> A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire.
A lot of American workers are on short-term contracts, too, for nearly the same reasons.
> Imagine that you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. Today, that means your startup is dead and all employees are screwed, but in the US, your startup continues with a much lower valuation. Which is better for the worker? There is no right answer, but in France, there's a startup-killing answer.
The risk that it will go out of business is part of working for a startup. It doesn't make sense to punish the rest of us to save a handful of startup employees.
Yeah, that sounds great... economic strife for everybody so that a few well connected college dropouts can get rich on "Uber for Food" or a viral phone game.
Startups are a form of volatile research projects that could be done better in a corporate environment. Startups provide precarious and unstable employment, and on average they fail and lead to unemployment.
I personally love working on new, potent ideas, but this is not a viable model of development for society. "Gig economy" is getting out of control, and it's better to kill the startups than to let people abuse the legal loopholes they require.
If you cannot provide a certain minimum of employment time, you shouldn't hire people. As for short-term contracts, they were misused a lot post-2008, but the situation is much better now and most people won't work under such contracts.
In "The Innovator's Dilemma" Christensen makes a compelling argument why startups can eat an established company's lunch, but it doesn't go so far as say innovation cannot come from established corporations or only comes from startups. There are examples where established companies have innovated. Three off the top of my head: Bell Labs as part of Bell Telephone made many critical innovations; Apple has also continued to innovate over the years. IBM isn't always thought of as innovating nowadays, but they've had a long history of not only patenting new ideas but also bringing them to market.
The top companies in the US are all new ones (except for GE). AT&T is irrelevant today, as is IBM after it got disrupted by startups Microsoft and Compaq.
Sure, there's turnover. And there will likely always be cycles like that. That only means that companies don't last or innovate forever, not that they can't innovate.
Out of curiosity, what criteria are you using for "top companies"? Looking at the top 10 of the Fortune 500 (http://fortune.com/fortune500/) and their founding years:
I'm not listing these as counterfactual, but only as an example. I know there are different ways of measuring "top" companies, and these are two. It's also arguable that these don't capture the idea of "top innovators". I'm interested in knowing what you're using. I'm probably missing something obvious.
I looked them up on Wikipedia. Good catch! Typo. And if I were consistent, I would have made a note on the restructuring as I did in a couple of other cases. The commenter apologizes for the error. ;)
I also checked Berkshire Hathaway (1889). It actually goes back to 1839. But does a series of mergers and acquisitions actually count here? The modern form came from Warren Buffett buying shares in it in 1962, and eventually buying them out years later. Buffett's version of the company has pretty much no resemblance to the company he bought out, they aren't at all in the same business, and he mentioned in 2010 that BH was more of a hindrance than a help.
My point (which I'll repeat once and then I'm done) is not that established companies never get disrupted or innovate forever, but to push back against the idea that established companies can't innovate (and that The Innovator's Dilemma contends that disruption is the only way innovation happens), which I took from "Innovation doesn't come from established corporations." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16665304) I don't see anything you've added that contradicts that.
Yea I'd disagree. Like the process of evolution, I believe that ideas and the mutation and the proliferation of those ideas are what leads to progress. More seeds.
Hey, I'm all in favor of you working on new ideas, but only within an existing corporate environment. But there's plenty of proof that that's a terrible way to advance society at large.
If a number of people(experienced/experts in a field) are willing to volunteer their time and/or capital in exchange for equity/patents/stock, then it's all good. My problem lies with externalizing the cost and risk to employees.
If they need something done and they can't guarantee long-term employment, they can buy commercial services for what they need. Engineering firms and temp offices will be happy to send you a secretary, a software solution or a CAD file with what you asked.
http://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/knowledge/publications/14...