I’m sorry, but I’m too American to agree. If Suzie Idiot wants to hire her boyfriend over you, she’s entitled to. As long as he hasn’t made a pattern of hiring according to race or national origin, etc, it’s her business, and if she wants to make bad financial decisions, that’s her problem. If you’re qualified, you’ll get a job with someone who isn’t so stupid.
That just sounds odd. You are talking about part-time jobs where that could be more common but it just doesn’t happen much in full-time companies. A company may hire one type of employee like a relative and fire someone else in short-order but it is extremely rare that the two are related.
Most companies are on the lookout for good employees even when jobs are not advertised. If you don’t believe me, my FIL owns and is CEO of several international companies including ones in Italy and France and a close relation owns many French companies as well and they describe it as nothing short of a nightmare. Italy is better they say as if they are debating whether herpes or gonorrhea are better choices. My FIL is a horrific manager one-on-one and it is up to my wife, the executive Vice President to do the cleanups for the screwy decisions he has made but they always try to keep good people at every level and often throw money at them to stay. No decent employee gets booted out on a whim because qualities like work ethic, smarts, hours available aren’t that common. If you have those combined with some unique knowledge or charismatic personality traits you can write your own ticket damn near anywhere.
I know several other CEO’s well and, when we get together, their mind is always finding good, reliable people that can add some value to the company. They don’t have to be the absolute best but they do need to try and serve well in a niche role like backup pitcher. They are always on the lookout because so many people suck in some crucial way
Saying that companies fire competent and productive workers is a huge fallacy on most levels although I know first-hand things like that can happen and a good person can get booted and usually early on. That is the exception however and a dynamic economy cannot cater to exceptions like that. These fallacies occur when you view businesses as labor camps where one is privileged in and the has to tow-the-line and has no other recourse about employment. That idea is so far off track I question the sanity of anyone that holds it.
Employer/Employee relations are ALWAYS a two-way street and those that are convinced that they have no power to coerce money from others and stifle honest efforts probably have nothing to offer. In the U.S., we tell people to get out the parent’s house and find your niche. Not everyone grew up wanting to be a machinist or a programmer rather than an impressionist painter but that is the way that it turns out and usually for everyone’s benefits. The fact is that France somehow managed to generate several generations of world-class pusses and I don’t know how they did it but it is biting them in the ass.
France really needs to toughen up the rhetoric and get off the philosophical tones that aren’t relevant to the real world and hurt them back on planet earth.
Look, I’d agree with you if it were a case of people competing for an available position and someone decided to hire their boyfriend/girlfriend. Happens all the time, it’s a part of life, I think we’re all used to it.
But I don’t think it’s OK to say “Well, my other half wants more more money than he’s currently getting at his full-time job, so let’s fire someone who’s here and give his hours to my other half.” If I were permanent part-time, I could go to the Industrial Relations Commission (“Heelloooo Lawsuit!”, to quote from Futurama), but as I’m casual, like I said before, it’s tough bikkies, thanks for playing, now get lost.
I’d open a Pit thread about it but I doubt anyone would actually care… 
People would care and sympathize with you…and blast the stupid folks that screwed you over. You should start that Pit thread IMHO.
But…what you have to understand is, bad as what happened to you was, its not something thats all that common. Its something that happens fairly rarely and is generally self correcting (eventually)…i.e. someone like a manager abusing his or her position will eventually fuck up enough to get booted themselves. Owners of companies who let go of qualified people to bring in their friends or relatives will eventually have a disfunctional company…if for no other reason morale will take a huge hit.
So, as bad as what happened to you was, making a GOVERNMENT policy to stop it would be nuts…and yet thats exactly what the French have done. They have looked and seen that occationally people get fired for no reason, or for stupid reasons…and so they have mandated against firing ANYONE (unless you jump through a ridiculous set of hoops and cost your company lots of money). And the unintended consequence of this monkeying with their system is…high unemployment and a disfunctional economy that could potentially implode sometime in the future. And a generation (or more) of people who have gotten the goodies and lived the good life…and who now faced with the necessity of change don’t want to give anything up. Hell, who would? If I could work 35 hours a week, get 6 weeks of vacation, free health care and have virtually no chance to be fired short of being caught with my fingers in the cookie jar…I wouldn’t want to give that up either! But (hopefully) I wouldn’t be surprised when the house of cards started coming down either.
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I’d sympathize quite a bit. The problem is that you seem to think that a law to support your position would be nice, sensible, and as precise as a scalpel. That never happens.
Government-enforced legal mandates are like gigantic, blunt objects. They’re absolutely great when you want to hit a large, slow-moving target. They’re really, really bad once you have all kinds of individual scenarios. This is one of the problems in France right now. True, the law theoretically allows the employer to fire people. But he has to jump through all kinds of hoops, and then has to somehow prove that the firing was justified absolute-last-resort to a court of law. In practice, it usually can’t be done. Sure, it’s great for those unfortunates who are truly screwed by the Man. But it’s also really unfair to employers who try to do the right thing and get caught with a bad employee.
Rubbish. Employers always need employees - at the moment they have to be careful (as they do in the UK) that whoever they take on is suitable, or they have to have a good reason to fire them.
It isn’t a case of having some jobs than no jobs. It’s a case of having secure employment or knowing that the chances are you will be sacked in <2 years to make way for equally cheap and expendable employees to take your place.
I think I misunderstood your point. There really isn’t much protection for exempt employees who aren’t in a Union.
Absolutely not true. Do they need any employees? Yes. But without the capacity to hire and fire to the extent they desire, they will employ fewer workers, hire less often, and be much, much more conservative about expansion.
Why are people so shocked at this idea? It’s well documented and well-correlated. The easier to it is to hire and fire, the easier it is to grow an economy (and therefore employment). It’s not the only factor, but it usually goes along with other economic liberalization rules.
And yet the unemployment rate is still incredibly high by most standards, you can’t escape that fact, and it requires some explanation. The other explanations would be a lot more unflattering than this one and yet people keep rejecting the obvious explanation at hand.
Sure they need employees, but they need employees can can provide value. A 2-year employee is going to be more valuable and worth more to the company than a new hire.
Employers are not going to churn their employees every 2 years just to save a bit on salary. It just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen in the US and it won’t happen in France. The loss in productivity and morale would outweigh the savings in salary.
As I’ve said before, it’s a bit hard to buy anything when you don’t have a job.
How does an economy grow if people are uncertain about their income tomorrow, or next week, or next month?
Sure, you might earn enough to pay the bills, buy food, pay the mortgage/rent, run a car, etc, but you’re not nearly as likely to buy that $2,000 Home Theatre/ Hi Fi System or take the holiday to Hawaii if there’s a concern you won’t have a job to come back to.
Similarly, you might not go to the movies this week, when you can rent a DVD and stay at home for less money, and rather than paying to see a band in concert you’ll just buy the CD and listen to it on the $2,000 Hi Fi system you don’t have because you might not have a job next week.
I maintain it hurts the economy to have a large pool of people who are forced to take whater jobs they can get to keep a roof over their heads- it hurts companies, it hurts people, and it certainly doesn’t encourage spending and economic growth.
At the risk of sounding like a Student Revolutionary, how much profit do some of these companies need to make? Yes, I know they have shareholders to satisfy, but at the end of the day even a modest size company can have an annual profit that would fund a large-scale guerrilla war in a smallish African Nation.
Being able to fire people for no reason at all might make the employment figures look better, but it doesn’t change the human cost- someone, somewhere is going to get the short end of the stick, and it’s not the CEO or Board of Directors.
This is so far in reality-denial loony land, I don’t know where to begin.
You maintain that it is better for large groups of people to just sit around and suck off the tits of others rather than doing something that is in demand but may not conform to their deluded life expectations?
Imagine that the economy is a communal farm that isn’t doing all that well and it is even hard for the commune to bring in the crops and sell the crops at the market because their efficiency is way lower than that of neighboring communes. Is it better for 20% of their members just to sit there and play the guitar and let the others support them or for them to pitch in and pick apples because no one seems to want to do that.
The economy is not just imaginary money that is printed up buy capitalists. It represents very real things that the country is producing and more people participating in that, the better almost by definition.
Because it’s better than the alternative. You don’t seem to get it: we’re not talking about having secure jobs versus unsecure jobs. We’re talking about 20% of the population having unsecure jobs versus having no jobs at all, which is exactly the trade-off.
What’s your point? It has drek-all to do with the situation.
First off, profit is illusory. It is always paid out to the investors, to compensate them for their loans, or paid into new investment. It only exists to the degree that it temporarily belongs to the company. That means it is always being used in ways which enhance people’s livelihod in concrete fashions.
Second, those companies want to expand as much as possible. Being as profitable as possible allows them to do so. That means they employ more people. But if they can’t fire people, they will not hire them. Period. It’s been proven as much as gravity, mate.
So what? They would have gotten an even worse end of the stick had they not been hired in the first place. Get it now, mate?
And yet the US economy grows at a pretty nice clip. Why is that? And yet France’s economy is growing at a much slower rate. Why is that? (And I’m talking long term trends here, as every economy is going to have ups and downs during short term business cycles.)
Except for jobs that require absolutely no skill, there is a natural disinsentive for employers to fire people-- it costs too much to replace them. Even in jobs that require no training, you still face an unknown in hiring Bob to replace Jane, when Jane has been working for you for several years and is a known quantity.
Despite what you see in the movies, businessmen do not sit in their offices with their feet up on the desks, smoking cigars while they mull over employment lists to see who they can fire just for sport.
That remains to be seen. And I’m not talking about employment, but about companies outsourcing their core competencies, so that all they do is stick labels on a product. There have been cases of intellectual property wandering out the door in this model.
Exactly! Smart companies get money to capitalize on opportunities. Dumb companies try to invent opportunities when they see money. The dumbass business plans during the bubble are a great example. A cut in expenses will increase profit, and might increase sales if prices are cut - but not if everyone can cut prices by the same amount. in an inelastic market.
SAG is definitely a union, and more hardass than most. SAG members are not allowed to work on non-union shoots. You even need a waiver from them to work on a student film. You get your first job free, but before you start your second you have to run over and sign up - or no job. (And it isn’t cheap, though dues a proportional to your earnings for the year.)
Heh? How does this have anything to do with my point? The eocnomic effects of outsourcing are well-understood by economists. I don’t claim to have studied the affair, but it works a lot like other trade. Services are commodities.
And it certainly doesn’t reduce costs. It only reduces costs only when the company the serve was outsourced to provides adequate quality for less money. Which is actually rather rare.
Lastly, few companies can get away with the kind of holding actions you describe. Outsourcing “core competencies” is rare because it doesn’t usually work.
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Never knock the power of market invention. Some markets may have great potential but just don’t exist… yet. Sometimes, products don’t have a good niche until further R&D, or the best market just hasn’t heard about it.
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Elasticity of the market has nothing to do with whether or not you can cut prices. Alright, maybe you could make an argument that it allows you to push down quality, but I doubt it has many practical
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None of this has much to do with jobs, either. What I said still holds: companies try to cut jobs to become more competitive. That makes the company more efficient and more economically useful. More people are freed itno the labor markets, lowering the costs for other companies to invest, and the economy as a whole becomes stronger, making new opprtunities to invest possible.
It is a union. But it’s also a guild. And as I said, it has some practices which I think are unhealthy, but I don’t object to guilds as a matter of course. Neither do I object to collective bargaining. I just don’t like sitting unions; they tend to get lazy, destructive, and greedy. I think several SAG practices fall into that camp (and it’s dues are pretty rough on new, young actors).
I think we’re talking at cross purposes here.
Your average 18 year old is NOT working in a white collar job- certainly not around here, anyway. (I don’t know what the situation’s like in France).
The area I live in is heavily focused on Tourism, and as a result, most jobs are “Casual”- ie, not permanent.
I’ve been living in Australia for 6 years. I’ve had 12 jobs in that time. The longest I’ve had a job here was for 3 years, and I recently left that because it had stagnated and I decided to go to university full-time (which, it turns out, I hate).
Bosses here (and by here, I mean the city I live in) DO fire people for because they simply don’t like them, or to improve the departmental budget (or hire someone younger and cheaper), or to give a job to someone who looks more attractive to customers.
The population here is highly transient, so they just take the view that “there’s plenty more where that came from”.
I have skills- I’m halfway through a Law degree and I can touch type at 55wpm with 85% accuracy, and I’m a published writer, but can I get a permanent full-time job? Nope.
I would LOVE a full-time job where I can use the skills I’ve got, but I just can’t get one, and I’m seriously considering some form of self-employment. Unfortunately, being a writer doesn’t pay especially well until you get published, and that’s often months after you’ve done the writing…
So yeah, I’m not pulling all this stuff about bosses firing people who’ve for trivial shit out of my ass. It’s happened to me far too often to be isolated incidents, and I’ve sat down and talked with employment counsellors and the guidance staff at University about it (“What the fuck is wrong with me and why can’t I keep a fucking job???”), and they keep saying the same thing: That’s the way it is around here, start your own business or win Lotto if you want it to change.
And now, back to the Studio…
What are YOU SAYING exactly? You seem to want someone to pay to publish your unknown writing for only God knows what purpose or to pay for legal services from someone who hasn’t even finished a degree. You sound like an immature, self-serving prick with crap like that.
If you are into communalism, stop and think what you are talking about. You seem to advocate paying people to do things that nobody else sees value in. That money comes from them working themselves in ways that are valued and you just seem to want to forcefully take it from them so that you can pursue the most ill-defined mission statement that controls others lives.
It is exactly the same as an untalented struggling artist stealing from the farmer and every store in town because he feels that he justified to do this by his earth-shattering crafts that will take the world by storm every day. It won’t work out that way because the thought processes are all FUBAR in the first place.
I like much of what you post so please don’t take this as an overall condemnation. This stuff shows extremely immaturity, selfishness, and cluelessness about facts and not just ideas. Please learn some economics and learn to think critically and ground that in facts. We can discuss theories that are well-thought-out anywhere on these boards. We cannot support Alice in Wonderland type things where our reality is not your reality and your reality contradicts itself wherever we try to understand it.
The important thing to know about this board is that we will dive right in and discuss any idea, no matter how outlandish with gusto as long as it is backed by some facts and critical thinking. If you sulk off and think that people just misunderstood and persecuted you here, you could not be more wrong. In my 6 years here, the one thing that always holds true is that every position is welcomed as long as it is supported by hard facts and some debating skills.
As an aspiring writer, you might want to polish up on that, provide some actual evidence, well thought out ideas and so forth. If there aren’t enough to support your position, then you have identified a potential problem that you may want to rethink.
You know, just after I posted that, I went to make myself a coffee and realised I was probably coming off like a 19 year old Che Guavera T-Shirt wearing Lefty Pseudo-Communist, which is about as far from who I am as it possibly gets (I’m 24, for a start!).
Firstly, the writing I do: I write about historic and collectible firearms and the history behind them. So far I’ve been published in Australian & New Zealand Handgun and Australian Shooter. It’s a sideline that helps fund my shooting, hunting, and collecting, and I enjoy writing about it, and I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from magazine readers and local shooters (“I was talking to the bloke at the gunshop about this old rifle my grandad bought back from Burma, and he says that you’re the man to talk to about this sort of thing…”). Unfortunately, the Firearms Industry here is largely non-existent (Shakes fist at John Howard), and so I’m looking for some magazines in the US to publish my material as well. The problem is, a lot of the guns that are very common in this part of the world (Lee-Enfield rifles, Enfield No 2 Mk I revolvers, etc) aren’t all that well-known in the US, which means my expertise falls into the “Niche Market” category.
To put it another way: Readers of American Handgunner want to read about the latest and greatest in ballistic offerings from Glock (the Glockenspiel, as I refer to the extolling of Glock-related virtues by Glock Fanboys), rather than why the Webley Mk IV in .38/200 is such an interesting handgun. (It’s not a complaint or a criticism BTW, just an observation)
There are magazines in the US that cater to such markets, but it’s a matter of getting in touch with them, and I need to get a few more articles published here to build up some credibility. Still, I’ll let you all know if I manage to get something published in the US!
As for the legal thing: No, I don’t want to be a lawyer or to get people to come to me for legal advice (God knows I spend enough time helping people deal with the Firearms registry as it is, never mind doing any actual legal work. Besides, I’m always worried I’d fuck up and somoene would sue me.)
When I started my degree, I was under the (mistaken) impression that people would say “Cool, a Law Degree! And you can type! And you’ve got excellent marks in Legal Research! And a Published Writer! How would you like to be an article clerk?”, at the very least. That’s a very simplified view of it, but what’s actually happened is this: “How are your secretarial skills? Not that it matters, because you’re not quite what we’re after anyway…”
I don’t pretend to be an artist by any stretch of the imagination. OK, I’ve got the Great International Novel that I’ve been working on for years, but that’s something I do when I haven’t got something else to do- which has been pretty rarely, lately. For the life of me, I just can’t create believable characters, and the dialogue is always long-winded (Hey, I like big books! 
). In short, the day I get a Novel published will be the day Scientists announce they’ve cross-bred a pig with a condor, if you will. (That doesn’t stop me trying to write short stories, albeit with the same problems as above).
So please don’t think of me as the “Starving Artist” type, and I apologise if thats how I came across. I’m just bitter that I can’t get a decent job no matter how hard I try, and whilst Economics has never been my strong point, I can speak from my own experiences, which are clearly different to everyone elses. Nonetheless, they are my experiences and I stand by them. I’m not really sure how I can provide “Hard Facts” for what is essentially personal experience,
Oh, and for the record, I’m not into Communalism, but I do support a Fair Go and treating people as human beings. I’ve always thought of myself as extremely apolitical, and even if we were to get into a political discussion it would be largely meaningless because US/Australian politics are so fundamentally different it would be like trying to solve a crossword in the clicking language of the Kalahari Bushmen.
I should mention I am actually employed as a Nightfill guy in a supermarket.
It pays well, but it has no job security, and that makes it hard to plan to have a family or get a mortgage to buy a house, which is part of the reason I see where the French are coming from- and why I’m against the WorkChoices legislation here in Australia, too.
So what it boils down to is, you chose to pursue a degree and acquire skills that other people don’t value. A bit more diligence on your part would have told you that the Law Degree wouldn’t take you anywhere you wanted to be. As to the gun problem, we can sympathize with your plight, but it’s nobody’s fault (except perhaps Aussie gun-law makers).
I don’t say that to be nasty; I made the same mistake twice. I have a BA in Communications and an MA in English, and while luckily I have a decent job for now, but at 36 I don’t like any of the probable career paths these degrees have outfitted me for. Meanwhile my two best freinds from high school, with a combined 1 1/2 years of college between them, are sucessful business owners (one is semiretired!). They chose to do things that other people found valuable, and got money for it. I instead pursued things that interested me and figured out I’d worry about money later. Now it’s later, and I’m heading back to school in a year or two to get another, more useful set of skills.
You are young – there is plenty of time to reinvent yourself and acquire new skills.