Work and work culture around the world

In My Humble Opinion
41

I guess I sort of figured most of that out on Day 1. Not that it necessarily makes it easier. Part of the culture of consulting firms is “networking” and getting in the right sphere of influence. In plain terms, you need to find the right rainmakers and suck up to them so they keep feeding you work.

But I’ve had plenty of jobs where I was on a good team with good relationships with my boss and often my bosses boss. But then something happens to change the leadership dynamic. Like your “sponsor” leaves the firm and you sort of become orphaned or persona non grata because maybe the powers that be don’t like the terms how he left.

42

That wasn’t my question. What happens if you want to leave the company? You said something about 60 days notice. How is it enforced? What’s to stop you from giving your notice and staring at the wall doing nothing or just not showing up?

Do those labor laws apply to all companies or just large ones? Like how does it work if you work for, say, a restaurant and they can’t generate enough business to keep all their employees? Can they lay some of them off or do they need to keep everyone until they run out of cash and go out of business?

43

You give your employer a letter that says “I hereby give notice of my resignation.” The law defines your notice period. You can read the details here.

If you are not productive during your notice period, your employer may choose to make a legal claim against you, arguing you have forfeited your compensation. If you simply don’t show up, they will certainly make such a claim.

The laws apply to all employers. My wife and I, for example, are technically employers, because we have independently contracted our house cleaner (vs going through a service). Her pay goes up via indexation, she gets holiday and sick protection, we can’t just fire her unless we can document she’s not doing the job, and so on. In your example, if a restaurant is struggling, they can certainly cut back staff, but they have to go through the labor council and open their books to show the layoffs are financially justified.

Compare Amazon’s recent attempt to lay off several hundred people in their Luxembourg office. Their explanation was found to be unsupported by the evidence. They were allowed to proceed with layoffs but at a lower number and with more generous severance than had been originally offered.

The bottom line is, this is the tradeoff. In exchange for extremely generous worker protections, we accept the responsibility to give our employers a little bit of extra transitional stability when we leave our jobs.

44

I’m sure that’s some of it - but that’s not the part I don’t really understand. The part I don’t understand is where the city workers complain about what the state workers get while the state workers complain about what the city workers get when it’s really not that one is better than the other, they’re just different.

And then act like they don’t understand the optics you mentioned.

45

I just want to make sure i understand this properly - are you saying you can’t just decide you no longer need a housecleaner without justifying it to a labor council?

46

Without being able to justify it.

In practice, we would say to the house cleaner either “we can’t afford you” or “we are not happy with your work for reasons x, y, z” and the cleaner would most likely accept it.

However, she has the right to contest this, at which point we begin the justification process. Which, assuming we are, in fact, justified, we will likely win. If we are communicating properly and responsibly, the cleaner will realize this and move on.

But if we’re dicks about it, the cleaner can create all kinds of trouble for us.

The worker rights built into the system incentivize everyone to behave clearly, openly, and fairly. That’s the takeaway here.

47

Thanks, but I think part of what I’m asking is whether just the fact that you have decided you no longer wish to employ a housecleaner would be sufficient justification. Not that you can’t afford it, not that you’re dissatisfied with her work. If you told the cleaner you no longer needed her services , and she contested it ( which she has a right to do) would you expect to win? I can certainly understand not allowing a large company to eliminate a position “just because” but it seems rather strange not to allow people to decide to do their own cleaning ( or gardening or whatever) so I’m wondering what “justification” actually means

48

For a house cleaner who you engage privately? That’s kind of wild from the American perspective; typically they’re not thought of as employees, but more like independent contractors, kind of like how you’d engage a lawn service, or a mechanic or something.

49

Yes, from the perspective of the law we have “closed the business” and the position is eliminated. We must provide sufficient notice in this situation.

And for the record, this additional hassle is indeed why many homeowners retain their cleaning services through an intermediary agency. It costs more but you don’t become the “employer” with the attendant headaches.

50

FWIW, in practice large employers in the USA generally don’t just fire someone “just because”. Hiring and firing is expensive and if someone belongs to a “protected class” most companies would rather not run the risk of a lawsuit or bad PR, justified or not.

Probably why so many companies hire contractors and consulting firms.

That’s very different from my world.

For me, it goes something like this:

  1. Get hired by some consulting firm or the professional services group of a tech company.
  2. After some basic onboarding which mostly consists of receiving a laptop and setting up email, I will go on “the bench”. I collect a paycheck, but am expected to find a project to work on ASAP.
  3. Soon I’m tossed onto a client leading a project with a team of total strangers for some technology or business I probably have little to no experience in.
  4. Build good will and a positive relationship with said client and hope no one on my team pisses them off or that the client runs out of budget.
  5. Eventually the client WILL run out of budget and I go back on the bench.
  6. A clock will then begin ticking for me to find a new project with a new client or risk being laid off.

I like the actual work and I get paid well for it, but the stressed caused by arbitrary nature and politics over which projects you get assigned and whether you age out on the bench. Because it’s always changing.

Perhaps the topic of another thread, but honestly your system doesn’t make sense to me. I manage multi-million dollar project budgets plus some personal real estate properties and whatnot. And we used to hire a nanny. So my mentality is “if there is a job for this person to do, we’ll pay them to do it at a fair market rate. If we don’t have work for them, then they need to find work elsewhere”. Fuck 60 days notice. I don’t want to work here anymore. You have 2 weeks to transition my shit then “peace out”.

51

Ok, great, don’t move to Europe. Problem solved.

But also, don’t cherry pick one of the very few qualities of the European workplace where the employer has an arguable advantage, versus the long, long list of workers’ rights and worker protections, and use an absurdly inaccurate and inflammatory label like “slavery.” Come on.

52

Otherwise you would not be able to attract top talent to work as politicians in the United States.

/ i will show myself out.

53

Don’t get me wrong… I am working in HR (and know those concepts) . I like me some benefits as I am an employee as well.

But when I see that laundry list I really get the feeling that unions are the greatest net promoters of everything Robotics and artificial intelligence. Who in the right Minds would hire workers under those conditions when they can get the job done (somehow) without them.

54

It’s called hyperbole. Lighten up. I’m not doing a side by side comparison. I’m just curious how they can enforce something like giving 60 days notice.

55

Especially the effect of giving 60 days notice and how it works out to having the next job lined up .

I assume it’s baked into the system and everybody does it but nevertheless makes for an interesting labor market if you are job hunting. Come to think of it that’s probably a scenario that benefits an unemployed person as they could start working basically next week whereas somebody who is working could not start working at a different company for the next two months.

Right?

56

I’m British, so the concept of NOT giving notice (either way) is weird as hell. It’s just what you’re used to, I guess. I’d pick UK and other European (or western in general?) employment rights over the US any day, based on what I’ve read just in this thread.

57

It kind of feels like the European model is “The government will make sure someone is going to pay you to do your job, regardless of whether or not it actually needs doing.”

In contrast, the American model is “We can’t really think of any real work for you do, but some organization owned by a billionaire or private equity firm so we will pay you to participate in a ‘theater of productivity’ if you follow a constantly changing set of rules.”

58

It really depends on the company. Japanese culture is difficult to nail down. There are a lot of stereotypes and a lot of people think that they understand Japanese culture, but there’s such a wide range of companies and people.

There are some companies where you can’t go home until the boss does,and others that it it doesn’t matter. Some of the companies that I worked for or knew about then, the bosses were fairly quick to leave.

Japanese actually get more holidays than what’s typical in America. When I set up the Japan branch office for an American company, the VP of HR asked me which of the Japanese holidays we needed to give the employees off and which we didn’t, and I told them all of them. There were more than 20 paid holidays and annual leave was similar to the US.

There’s some people who never take annual leave, but there are others who take all of their days off.

The lifetime employment thing is pretty much only for brand name companies. Small and medium size companies don’t necessarily have that. It is true that people don’t change jobs as much, but unemployment is fairly low.

Pretty much all of Japan shuts down for a week at New Year’s, and a lot of of Japanese gets 3 to 5 days off in summer at Obon. The disadvantage of having these as paid holidays is that airplane tickets and such become insanely expensive. Lightly, more companies are just giving employees three days for summer vacation that you can use when you would like to.

It is kind of rare for foreigners to become really integrated in Japanese companies. I was kind of an exception, in the three Japanese companies that I worked for.

When I was working for corporate Japan, in my industry, it still was the case that mostly it was males in the manager level.

For the most part, women are underemployed. Raising kids takes a lot more parental time and often the husband will have the better pain job so women will tend to work part-time jobs.

Japanese work culture can also be more cohesive, and people can have strong connections with their coworkers.

I got out of corporate Japan and now I’m teaching, so I’m not sure how much things have changed in the last 14 years.

59

based on your last sentence, you don’t have non-compete clauses in your contracts? In the US, Jimmy Johns used that to sue worker from going to another sandwich place (really, trade secrets at a deli?)

60

The rules are different from country to country, but non compete clauses as they’re generally understood in the US don’t really exist the same way in the EU. Here in Luxembourg, they’re almost entirely unenforceable.