So you don’t benefit at all from any OSHA safety rules? You don’t benefit by the employer being required to provide hearing protection if the environment is above a certain decible? You don’t benefit from required safety googles?
About the rest, perhaps instead of lamenting about the long hours and horrendeous work conditions you and your engineer colleagues suffer through, you should try forming a Guild and protecting your interests instead of complaining about the others who have done so.
From my post:
How do you read that and get that I say I’m not benefitting? 
I benefit quite a lot from workplace safety regulations, and have used them to my advantage to keep from being told to go in places where I could get seriously killed (or dirty; “No, I don’t think I should inspect the manure pit, I don’t think OSHA training covers that…yeah.”).
Who’s lamenting? I’m posting things as they are. I get paid for this level of uncertainty and inconvenience. If I don’t like it, I can work elsewhere, or take early retirement. What I’m asking out loud in my post is to what extent are exempt workers really protected from either unpaid overtime, reductions in benefits, and/or firing “at will”? Because it seems to me like there really isn’t any protection. I don’t think that’s “right” on several levels, but then I don’t know what the solution is, either.
On the other hand, without those laws the French employers might have shipped the jobs off to India, or at least cut back on benefits.
I don’t know where the notion that companies run out and hire people as soon as they have a spare buck comes from. You only hire someone when there is a need. Sure, a boss would much rather hire a part-timer where you don’t have to pay benefits than a full-timer, but you don’t let a station go empty for very long - not if you’re an effective manager.
It’s a pretty common fallacy. Ahnold said the other day that the reduction in insurance costs in California was responsible for lower unemployment. The news station got an economist on who said, bullshit - no company hires anyone because costs go down. Higher profits, yes, higher employment, no.
I used to think the same way - until my daughter joined SAG. There is no one more an independent contractor than an actor, but SAG has real benefits in terms of pay, benefits, and workplace safety. Not only that, but SAG monitors residuals for you, and does it very well. (She got a check for $.13 when a soap she was an extra on ran in Italy.)
Print models don’t have a union, and, unless you’re a big name, they often have to wait a long time to get paid, and have much nastier auditions.
That economist is a horse’s ass, then. Of course more people get hired if the cost of doing so goes down.
Lets say I have 10 job positions available. I could survive filling just 5 of them, but it wouldn’t be ideal.
If firing is easy, I could offer all 10 jobs to competent sounding people who may not have much previous work experience.
If firing is very difficult, I would try and hire 5 people who can prove that they have heald similar positions succesfully for a significant amount of time… I would be unlikely to find more than 5 such people.
Now, if firing doesn’t happen, how come these 5 experienced people are looking for jobs? Either they left their previous employer in order to gain more experience/money from me. Or they were fired dispite the difficulty of firing people?
What do I do for the other 5 positions? I hire 5 seemingly suitable students as cheaply as possible for the most moinor jobs possible. Then I see if they have a good work attitude and skill and potentially promote the ones who work hard.
As far as I can tell if firng is hard, it costs me as the buisness more (I have to do with only 5 people for some time) and I pay less to the student workers, and more to experienced workers whose reason for being in the job market is perhapse questionable.
If firing is easy, then hiring at any sort of risk becomes easy, and the job market becomes more fluid allowing those who want to work more chances to get better positions, and allowing people to move out of dead beat jobs more easily.
Good point. Of course, the reason companies would be able to game the system in this way is because the Government is putting in an artificial fix to patch over the artificial program they currently have in place. If they lifted the whole stupid thing (i.e. at will employment reguardless of time served or age) then you wouldn’t be able to game the system in this way…there would be no REASON to game the system this way. I wonder what THAT would do for French employment…maybe it would become as ‘bad’ as the US and drop a few percentage points. You think? 
Companies hire people when the economics are right or when they are trying to exploit a surge in their sales/production/whatever it is they do…or capitalize in some other way by ramping up. They downsize for the same reason…to maintain their profits during the lean times (and thus stay in business). The notion that companies fire people randomly for no good reason is quite strange.
Its really simple…companies in France hire the minimum work force basically because of the above factors (i.e. they need to have a minimal work force in case there is an economic downturn…otherwise they will have to carry all those extra employees they can’t get rid of in the lean times and thus risk going out of business)…and also because once someone is in they are pretty much in…forever. If they come to work and do the minimum amount of work, or no work at all, or they are disruptive, or just don’t work well with your other employees…or any of a myriad of other things…well, too bad. You are stuck with them…at least 74% of the time appearently. Even if you DO manage to get rid of them it probably costs the company quite a bit in court fees and such to do so.
It boggles the mind that anyone can defend such a screwed up artifical system…let alone admire it. (I’m not saying you are doing either btw). Understand why the French are pissed? Sure. But DEFEND this abomination? Gods…
-XT
Voyager, you’re a smart guy, so I’m sure you can understand this. Business is all about risk. You’re looking at things as if they are static, and that’s the problem with these types of laws-- they produce a moribund economy. Anything you do to increase the risk to business will slow down growth and/or expansion. Business owners and investors are always trying to minimize their risk. If I want to introduce a new product, but I have to hire people in order to do so, I’m going to be more reluctant to take on that project since it might fail and then I’m stuck with the extra employees. I used to do business in Europe and that was a constant problem. It was so hard to get something new off the ground because of the high risk of hiring new employees.
The cost per employee is small. The cost over all employees is fairly significant. The effect of this is insignificant as compared to the effect of the overall economy.
Say you’re running a business, which has the right number of employees for the market,and the right amount of capital. Someone hands you $100K. Do you use it to hire people for no work, or do you consider it a profit and make your shareholders happy?
It depends. If you’re smart, you invest it in new areas so your company can grow. If you’re stupid, you say “hey, I just got $100k which I can blow on some new toy”.
If you don’t want or need a growing economy, fine. But don’t be surprised when every other economy in the world leaves yours in the dust.
Not that business works by ‘somone’ handing corporations $100k for no good reason but…well, you know, the correct answer to this is defintely…it depends. Is there a new market we can reach by investing that $100k? If re-investing that money will make further profit for the company, even if its POTENTIAL profit, then the smart thing to do is to re-invest some or all of it in new people, new equipment, new processes, etc.
Businesses are in business to make money. Plain and simple. So, if hiring more folk will make the business more money then THAT is what they are going to do. If firing folk will save the company a loss or maintain profits during lean times then THAT is what they will do.
-XT
When I worked for AT&T we hired a whole bunch of contractors for that very reason. We had the same experience as Microsoft - they often stayed forever, were not as cheap as expected, and actually led to over-hiring, since they weren’t “real” employees.
I’m not actually defending the French system, though. I’m just saying it isn’t quite as irrational as some here are making it sound, and it comes from a different set of priorities. I was shocked, when visiting our factory in the Netherlands, to find that everyone, including the engineers, was out the door at 5. But are we in the US really better off working until 7 and then working at home? I’m just as addicted as you are, but I also had the experience of working until 9 every night at one company for no good reason except that I felt I had to as a manager.
Today in the Valley you can’t get funding unless your business plan includes off-shoring, and we’re about as at-will employment as you can get. I’m not at all sure this French rule change is going to fix their problem, which is deeper than not having at-will employment.
If you are a good businessman, you are never satisfied with your market. You are always looking for ways to expand your business.
If I were to receive a windfall of $100,000, I would put it to work expanding my business so that I can capture more of the market. This would, in general, mean that I would hire more people.
Well, the tax cut was effectively that - and interesting in that it didn’t change the competitive picture within California, because everyone got it.
But how would getting $100K make a business case not good enough to get the money from a loan all of a sudden good enough? Businesses are indeed around to make money, and you do that by only making wise investment decisions, which are pretty much independent of where the money comes from. If you thought that hiring another salesman would increase your sales enough to give a good ROI, you do it without a windfall. If hiring someone doesn’t help, you don’t.
I did work where this was not true. Where I worked in the Bell System, it turned out that our center’s money was part of the Bell System capital base, and since we were supposed to make manufacturing more efficient, we were a really good thing to show to the regulators. Thus, every $ we spent increased the Bell System’s allowable profit. We were pretty much in continual hiring mode. That’s a good example of how monopolies distort the market.
As far as I can tell, US companies (at least the one’s I’ve worked for in the past decade) have a minimal workforce already. No one gets hired just for kicks. And no one gets fired just for kicks - that’s true. But I’ve worked for good companies.
I’m not defending the policy of never firing anyone. That makes no sense. But there could be a position between that and at-will employment that keeps the social contract they want without crippling growth.
Perhaps you have noticed that the economy seems to be picking up? 
(Yes, I know it isn’t solely or even mainly from the tax cut…or at least that its a debatable point. But, to me at least, it was funny).
I was just saying that generally ‘gifts’ of large sums of money are at least rare. It wasn’t really the main point.
Well…I agree generally. Thats because we have less interference from our lovely government as far as such things go…but just ENOUGH interference to be at least marginally useful in protecting our rights. Its a pretty good balance…which is one of the reasons we have something like 5% unemployment as opposed to 11%…or 23%. As with all things, its a trade off…we get less from our system, but we pay less both in terms of money and in other terms (such as sitting around our homes wishing we had jobs…the down side is that every 5 years or so we don’t all rush to the streets to burn cars and block off people from getting to work/school/the store, etc… 
).
Certainly there could be…for the French. I’m reasonably sure there is a compromise out there for them…and in fact I think the proposal on the table in France is a fair (for them) compromise. It really won’t fix much, but it WOULD be a compromise…but they ain’t buying it, and probably won’t buy ANY compromise except status quo (or more goodies I suppose).
As for the US I think we have a system that, by and large, WE like and can live with. Oh, I’m sure it could use some tweeks here or there, but over all it suits our own expectations and desires fairly well. Its why things are so incomprehensible for us (generally) looking at their system, and vice versa.
-XT
Do the terms ROI and business case mean nothing to you at all? The return on investing that $100 K has to be greater than putting it into the bank. If the return is significantly greater, and you have a good case, why not borrow it and not wait for a windfall? Especially since then you can get the right amount of money, not just what wanders in.
If you disagree, I ask you this: why isn’t Microsoft spending their bundle of cash on hiring new people if it always is the right thing to do? If they found they could charge $50 more per copy of Office, and sell the same number, do you think they’d hire more people with the extra money?
You’re kind of mixing apples and oranges here since that was a company opperating under it’s onw guidance. Would you want the gov’t to step in and tell the company when to and when not to hire temp workers? That would be more analogous.
OK. that makes sense. Yes, it’s a different set of priorities, but we can also look at it objectively and decide what the trade-offs are. The danger with these types of proposals is that they’re not bad for the majority (note I said not bad and didn’t say good) because it gives them security by they suck for the minority because they end up with no jobs at all. As someone noted earlier, the university students are the lucky ones who will probably get jobs, so of course they want to get as many goodies to go along with those jobs as possible. This was part of what caused the riots not that long ago amond the Arab youth-- they largely are locked out of the system.
But my feeling is… hey, if the French want to send their economy into the tank, let 'em. That gives us a better opportunity. I’d love to work a cushy job with great benefits and little risk for me. But that’s no way to be a steward of an economy that has to serve the next generation, too. Like or not you have to compete in a global economy these days, and if you cling to the past, you’re kids will pay the price.
No one is saying it is always the right thing to do. You have lots of choices of what you can do with that money, and if you put in the bank, what do you think the bank is going to do? It’s going to invest it.
But you need to stop using Microsoft as an example. It’s a unique company, and has limits on its growth that aren’t so much a factor of cash. Besides, it’s the small companies that provide the growth for an economy-- the ones that will becoment the next Microsoft, Intel or HP. Businesses are going to fail in every economy no matter how busniess-friendly the government is. But what you don’t want to happen is to let the rate of new business formation fall below the rate of busniess failure. That’s the problem. Microsoft is going to survive any draconian government regualtions, just about. But Bob’s New Software Start-up is going to have a tougher time getting started if you add extra risk to hiring new employees.
Where’s the French equivalent of Microsoft, Intel, HP, WALMART, Google, Dell, etc? Imagine the US without any of those companies.
Actually, this is a good thing. It works out the best for everyone in the long run, though it does hurt a small group of people in the short.
Not as soon as they have a spare buck. But certainly as soon as they sense any greater opportunity. Businesses which constantly try to flog more work out of existing employees quickly run into serious trouble. I’ve seen it happen many times, and it never works out in the end. Indeed, most business not only spend their own profit on expansion and taking new opportunity, they borrow money to do it faster.
Guilds are something else. I won’t pretend I like all the effects of all of them, but they serve purposes well above and beyond sucking off money for the union reps - which I think most real unions have become.
Same thing with professional organizations. I think some of them are a bit hidebound (the Bar associations are way too stuffy and seem to have an awfully high opinion of themselves) but they do serve an important purpose in ensuring quality.
I can’t comment on US companies (because I don’t live in the US and have never worked there), but I can tell you that in some parts of Australia- mainly tourist areas, but it does happen elsewhere- the scenario I described is all too real. I’ve been a victim of it myself several times, most recently on Monday when I lost my part-time job because the Office Manager’s boyfriend wanted it. As a casual, I have no rights at all (“Oh, you’re not fired, we’re just never going to give you any hours ever again”), and there’s no way you could legally prove that’s what happened, but it’s a bit much of a coincidence that he starts work two weeks ago, finishes his training last week, and this week I’ve got no job. And it’s not like this was an especially difficult or skilled job, either. (No, I’m not going to name it.)
Fortunately, I’ve got another job (I saw it coming and starting hunting early), but that isn’t the point- no-one should have to worry they could get canned for some trivial or inappropriate reason. I fully support the French who disagree with this law, and the fact that there were 1,000,000 people in Paris protesting it suggests a fairly sizeable chunk of France disagrees with the new laws, too.