Comment by wafflemaker
5 days ago
In Norway there's laws for that, but other places do it even without them. You just retrain the person to do something else. He might take a job of a temp that was hoping to get a fast contract (instead of a few weeks at a time during trial period). Other than that, it's good for the person (not losing job) but also for the company - you get a tried person with good work ethics that comes on time. It's not zero cost to find somebody like that.
A lot of places in the US are not, in my experience, that intelligent about hiring people.
Or, say rather, the externalities of the cost of hiring are not imposed on the people choosing to fire, directly, so they can say they "improved efficiency" by firing someone, and then the people trying to find reliable labor do not experience any improvement that might have been available by migrating the person.
agreed. the "lump of labour" fallacy is a thing -- the idea that there are always more bodies and that it's trivially easy to hire, train / get up to speed, and work them.
in practice hiring and firing is expensive and often very risky. Bjorn the office worker may now be redundant and have a room temperature IQ but he's shown he'll show up on time, sober, and is liked by his coworkers enough, so throwing $5k to retrain him may be a far, far smarter investment then blowing $7k to hire a rando for another position...
Yeah the bar for competent is surprising hard to hit. A human being that shows up on time and it's reliable, doesn't have a problem with drugs or alcohol, or has a sick family member and just needs an advance. Good help is hard to find!
If you're only getting those kind of candidates, then your job offer isn't attractive enough.
then the pendulum swings the other way and now I have ruthless mercenaries chasing $$$ who will jump at the first opportunity
and not every job needs to be top-shelf.
Betty in Accounts-Payable just sorta needs to be there and not screw up too often. I don't need a super-star, and if we have to move her to another part of Accounting that's fine; I'll save my money for a solid CPA or two, etc.
I understand the rest, but an otherwise capable person with a sick family member does not clear the bar for competent? Saddening if that’s where we are as a society.
I think the key part of that sentence was "...and just needs an advance", implying that they're going to take the job, ask for a cash advance for a (possibly fictional) sick family member, and immediately quit.
It’s hard for some people to understand that situation until they are in it. Unfortunately.
Totally agree with you.
Why do the laws exist if its better for (almost) everyone involved? Without the laws why would people not do it that way if its the better approach?
Many laws solve the problem of high initial cost dissuading globally good actions. Laws forcing everyone to buy insurance, for example. It's very easy to see that where such laws don't exist, almost no one buys insurance, making everyone worse off.
This is also an example of the same kind of law.
Insurance is an interesting example, I would have expected one that causes more direct harm to others like drunk driving.
How are we all worse off when fewer people have insurance?
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Norway has very strict pro-workers laws in general, it's just one facet of them. One Norwegian explained it to me like that: in the late '60 when Norwegian oil industry started developing, workers realized that they can incur great losses on the companies if they organize/unionize and strike together. They used that as a leverage to both change their contracts (to include paid sick leave and such) and also get better working conditions (Norwegian platforms have both better safety and on platform to on land ratio).
And later other trades did the same. Some of the things in contracts trickled down to the law. But still some laws apply only to companies where at least a certain % (is it 50%?) are unionized.
The general picture is more or less like that, but please verify the details.