At-will employment is a contract, but when Americans talk colloquially about a “contract” in employment law, they mean a written contract that sets out specific employment duties, how the contract can be terminated, etc. (This also applies to other areas, like phone plans and gym memberships, where “no contract” means the membership can be canceled without penalty.)
I hope this is OK for factual questions.
I used to report directly to the London office (but I was based in the US). My experience was that Brits know (naturally) that the UK is IN Europe, but they don’t really think of themselves as European. Of course this is a generalization. But one of the ways I used to tease them was to make a point of calling them European. Then, like all in jokes with a script, they’d feign offence and I’d ask “so, what, the UK is in Asia now?”
This.
We Brits don’t help the confusion though by using the word “Europe” to variously mean lots of things. e.g. “The European Union”, “continental Europe (i.e. the connected landmass not counting Ireland, Iceland etc)” and “the rest of Europe (every European country that isn’t the UK)”.
(hijack)
Is the term “The Americas” similarly ambiguous?
This is an interesting question to me, because I’ve often noticed when there are discussions of what it’s like to work hourly/labor jobs in the US Europeans always bring out the “What’s in your contract?” bit, and seem rather confused when we Murricans explain that’s not really a thing here especially when it comes to working class employment. I haven’t interpreted that as it being impossible to get fired, but it’s just a given for anyone who works in the US that there is zero job security and pretty much no labor laws on the federal level. And apparently other countries at least have some sort of obligations and expectations.
What if the situation that makes you redundant is sudden and unexpected?
Generally that’s the employer’s problem, not yours.
However, in situations where many people are made redundant at the same time the law might be somewhat flexible. e.g. during this covid crisis, a lot of whole industries have been gutted, so I would guess that there has been some combination of the government easing laws somewhat and also picking up some of the tab. But I don’t know for sure.
Somewhat.
Don’t want to go off on a complete tangent here, but give as just one example the phrases “continental US” and “lower 48” to refer to the contagious 48 states, separate from Alaska and Hawaii which seems analogous to your phrase “continental Europe” in some ways.
Yes, I was imagining something like a Covid-related shutdown, that eliminates both your employer’s use for your services and their ability to pay you.
Another concept in European labour law (this one comes from an EU directive, so it should be present in all EU Member States and, I suppose, still in the UK unless British legislation was fast enough to have already changed since Brexit) that might seem strange to Americans is the notion of “transfer of undertaking”. The idea is that when an entire business or part of a business is sold to another company, the employees working there have the option to have their employment contracts transferred to the new company and continue working there under the old terms. It can often pop up (sometimes unexpectedly) when business try to save money by outsourcing a function that was previously done in-house, and it can lead to a lot of litigation if companies argue that they’re simply downscaling rather than transferring part of their business.
The thing that always confuses me in these conversations is when someone mentions that in Non-US Country A , everyone has a contract and them someone else mentions “zero hours contracts”. I cannot figure out for the life of me what the difference is between a “zero hours contract” and a US employer hiring someone and giving them a variable number of working hours each week. I mean, it could be just a matter of a zero-hours contract being in writing but in the context of these conversations, that doesn’t make sense - people talk about it as if it’s a real, day-to-day difference.
I have a friend who was compulsorily transferred from British Telecom to ComputaCenter when their IT dept was outsourced and under the Transfer Of Undertakings (Protection Of Employment) law she would have to be made redundant under the same terms BT would have given her at the time they got transferred. This makes her so expensive to get rid of that she’s effectively fireproof.
This is a big part of the ruthlessness of American (USian) life perceived over this side of the pond.
In the United States, most hourly employees with variable hours are part time workers who typically work fewer than 30 hours each week. The waitstaff of restaurants are a good example of workers who don’t necessarily know how many hours they’ll work from week-to-week. I do work with contractors who don’t necessarily get any hours during the week, but they’re not employees and they don’t just work for my company they work for others as well.
In Switzerland, during the probation period, it’s possible for either party to cancel the contract with one week’s notice. There doesn’t need to be a specific reason, except that somebody decides that the new employee and employer are not a good fit.
After the probation period is over, the contractual notice period will be enforced. The notice period is typically 3-6 months, and this is for both the employee and employer. When an employee gives notice, they have to respect the notice period.
It also means that when someone does get fired, they still get paid for the notice period.
Depends if you’re speaking English or Spanish.
I understand that - what I don’t understand how a “zero hours contract” in the UK/Europe is different. Every description of a “zero-hours contract” I’ve seen says the employer doesn’t guarantee the worker any specific number of working hours, that the worker may not be scheduled for any hours in a particular week and that the worker is not required to accept any work. Some mention that an employee who doesn’t accept work might not be given work in the future and/or that an employer can require workers to be available for work on little notice. Sometimes there’s a reference to simply giving people no hours for weeks until they get the picture and quite rather than firing them . But I just don’t see how the practices described in this article are all that different from how McDonald’s and Subway operate in most of the US. ( There are a few cities/states that require schedules to be posted a week or two in advance and penalties to be paid for changes after that deadline and those requirements tend to eliminate on-call shifts)
It might well be that “zero hours contract” is simply a British term for something which also exists, under a different name, elsewhere.
I’m interested in this part, which naita also alluded to above. In the US, there are AFAIK no laws at all protecting the employer’s right to receive a certain amount of notice. Often employees contract to provide a certain amount of notice, but in practice those are basically never enforced. Maybe if you’re an executive rushing off to take trade secrets to the competition or something, but for any ordinary working or middle class job the only consequence for quitting without notice would be the risk of not getting a good reference. Would, say, a grocery clerk in Europe be realistically likely to find themselves facing some sort of legal penalty if they quit without the requisite amount of notice?
Yes this. As I tried to imply in my previous post, they are in some respects a “contract in name only”, existing only because a contract is a legal requirement.
No.
If you’re in a relatively low-level job I would think the penalties for not giving notice are similar in Europe and the US; a bad reference, and just generally being a jerk (even if you hate your boss, you may be conscious of putting your coworkers in the shit).
For higher status jobs, reputation becomes even more important.
Furthermore the contract itself may contain details of penalties for not following the leave period (they can’t fine you or anything, but some of your benefits and bonuses might end in a way that makes it substantially better to serve out your notice period than cut and run).
If people are made redundant because a business declares insolvency, they typically go into a high priority position in the list of creditors to be paid from any funds released by the dissolution of the business and the sale of assets etc. There is a government scheme that pays out a portion of the redundancy payment due in cases where there are literally no funds to pay redundancy