Dutch employee fired by U.S. firm for shutting off webcam awarded €75K in court
nltimes.nlFrom Glassdoor for related employer:
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Chetu-Reviews-E231082.htm
>> Review: “You'll discover during training week that the the company will watch over you all day, even long tenured employees are watched via their WebCam.”
>> “Glassdoor Alert: Attempt to Inflate Reviews — We have evidence that someone has taken steps to artificially inflate the rating for this employer with positive reviews posted in violation of our Community Guidelines. We have removed these reviews. Please exercise your best judgment when evaluating this employer. Learn more about Glassdoor Alerts:
https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/Glassdoor-Alerts-Badge-...
_________________
From related company’s homepage:
>> “We are proud to employ over 2,800 in-house developers with a variety of software development experience in an array of industries.”
Between this, and them shuttering any official EU accounts or presence after the award, I really foubt they will pay the award, and it seems unlikely they were contributing or collecting any taxes related to the employment.
IANAL, but the person terminated would probably have some pretty good arguments in a US based lawsuit. More money to be awarded by the court in case he wins too.
Way more expensive legal fees though, and a much slower "justice" system.
In the Netherlands court, the legal fees were sub 1k, and the decision happened less than 2 months from the filing.
How can the legal fees be less than a thousand dollars? It would take at least a few hours to research the law and write a brief, let alone prepare for court and make an appearance. Even if a lawyer was paid only $150/hr, it seems hard to come in under $1k.
Regardless, it would certainly be much more expensive in the US, where decent lawyers are hundreds or thousands an hour.
We have “juridisch loket” over here in .NL which is advices people on legal matters for free. Especially common for housing and/or employment issues, but they deal with anything.
It’s not unlikely the employee from the article used their services, even if just initially.
I would call any legal system making it practically impossible to sue without a lawyer a failure. But even if using professional help is recommended, it doesn’t have to be expensive - you can use legal insurance to cover majority of the costs.
How does legal insurance work? The only time I ever heard of it I was pitched what sounded like an MLM. Is there another kind out there?
In the UK legal insurance is often bundled with home insurance for a small fee (~£8 a month for me). This covers the cost of legal advice across a broad range of categories (employment, housing, consumer protection, personal injury are all usually included) and if a case is likely to succeed (more than 50% prospects of success as judged by the law firm) then they will cover all the costs up to a certain limit which is usually enough for most cases (say £50,000 or so).
It's not perfect but reasonably strong regulation of consumer insurance means that if you have problems with e.g the decision made, there is an independent organisation who can review the case for you.
You usually have to use a law firm which has an arrangement with the insurer, or one who will accept the lower rates the insurers have negotiated but again if you feel there is an issue with the quality on offer you can make a complaint.
I presume something similar is offered in NL.
Europe doesn't have case law, the law is written and codified so once you finish law school you have all the laws memorized. The judge can only apply specific paragraph of the law not create new ones. 1k is cheap yes, 5k would in such case be more reasonable to expect if you're in a similar situation if you go with a lawyer (depending on firm and location i.e. lawyer in big city vs provincial town)
> Europe doesn't have case law
Case law is a thing in civil law systems too, it is just not binding on the judges except special occasions.
I assume he did it without a lawyer. I know in Australia we have forums where you can represent yourself in these low level workers rights cases.
He spent time himself researching the law and going through the process, but he can't claim for that
In the article it says that the (compensation awarded for) legal fees were 585 euros
I can't imagine what they would sue for in a US court. Most states are at will and refusal to comply with company policy and procedures is a one-way ticket out
Instead of re-litigating the employment issues couldn't they just sue to enforce the fact that they didn't pay their bill in the other suite? Also unless they have zero assets in the EU wouldn't other member states potentially be an option to seize said assets?
I don't think that the trial decision in a foreign court is binding in US courts. The US court will not enforce them because they are completely different jurisdictions
I'm not 100% sure but I think one of our treaties with the Netherlands is that we enforce each other's laws/court judgements.
Looks like it comes down to a each state to determine how and if they will honor decisions for other Nations.
Here is some information I could find[1].
Obviously, there is a lot of variability here, and I don't there are blanket agreements to enforce judgements. It is hard to imagine the Netherlands forcing payment for an abortion damages judgement from a Texas court .
https://www.gibsondunn.com/wp-content/uploads/documents/publ...
Think the US famously never signs treaties like that. Our courts decide.
Most states are at will, but he wasn't employed in "most states", now was he?
Juppor is talking about suing in Florida courts. Florida is absolutely at will. He may be able to sue to collect a foreign court judgement instead, but it is notoriously difficult to collect judgments, even us Court judgments, if the other party stonewalls you
That's not how choice of law works. If you are operating a business in jurisdiction A and open a branch in jurisdiction B, you have a nexus to jurisdiction B and can't say your branch exists under the legal umbrella of jurisdiction A. Of course, you can assert that your customer and employment contracts are under the law of jurisdiction A, but such assertions don't magically trump statutory law. Contractual provisions can often be dismissed as unenforceable.
He already sued and won in jurisdiction B. The money is in jurisdiction A. No banks and police in jurisdiction A will honor a legal document from jurisdiction B. This leaves you to the situation described above.
The best option is to take the decision from jurisdiction B into a new court proceeding and jurisdiction A and ask them to honor it with a local court order in A.
They may or they may not.
Even within the United States you might have a court order in one state or payment, and another state that refuses to enforce it within their jurisdiction.
No banks and police in jurisdiction A will honor a legal document from jurisdiction B.
Except that that is often not the case, because of things like federalism, treaties and so on. Anyway, you're missing the point; you're now talking about a judgement from jurisdiction B, whereas earlier you were arguing that the rules from jurisdiction A could apply in jurisdiction B.
If a plaintiff goes to jurisdiction A with a judgement from jurisdiction B (eg pursuing the money as you suggested), you wouldn't retry the case under the rules of jurisdiction A. The reason is that the defendant (in this case the company headquartered in Florida qua jurisdiction A) agreed to the rules of the Netherlands (qua jurisdiction B) when it filed to get a business license there.
It would be different if a Dutch worker had sought employment with a company in Florida, and then complained when he didn't like the employment standards he found himself subjected to. It's the fact that the company committed itself to NL/EU law when opening a subsidiary there that subjects them to its judgments. The issue of the business license imposes conditions upon its beneficiary within the scope of its use.
Suppose something is legal your jurisdiction but not in mine. While you are in your jurisdiction, I can't sue or prosecute you for doing The Thing there. But if you come to my jurisdiction, do The Thing, and then return to your own, you can't shake off that liability because you don't get to bring your legal environment with you. The only exception I can think of offhand is with international diplomats, who get quasi-immunity because they are formally representing a different country, and whose embassies/consulates are allowed to operate under the law of their home rather than host countries.
You are repeating what I have already said.
>Juppor is talking about suing in Florida courts. Florida is absolutely at will. He may be able to sue to collect a foreign court judgement instead
To inject some expertise: "Enforcement of Judgments in the United States: Overview" https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/w-034-2858
Thank you! this largely agrees with the link I posted 7 hours ago.
Particularly relevant, is that if you want to collect in the US, you have to go to the courts in the US and show them the foreign judgment. There are many circumstances where these are not accepted.
>Juppor is talking about suing in Florida courts. Florida is absolutely at will. He may be able to sue to collect a foreign court judgement instead
I think it would be a fairly clear cut debt case. It might take a bit of lawyering to collect on the debt, but there are firms which would take it on a contingency basis.
If they are trying to avoid payment it will kink any activity in the EU, all over a relatively paltry sum.
The lesson though is that if you're dealing with potential shysters, like NFT promoters and other dodgy stuff this firm is doing (who else pays 70k Euro per year plus commissions to telemarketers??) then make sure they have assets in your jurisdiction that you can put a lien on, and ideally require cash up front.
I think you are probably right. It is worth noting that most of the money at stake isnt simple debt like back wages. It looks like the lion's share is essentially punitive damages. I am not a lawyer, so I don't know where this falls in relation to types of decisions that are applicable.
This is an employment action. There is a good chance it pierces the corporate veil. So yes, they can avoid paying, if their directors never want to enter the EU again.
Why would this pierce the veil? That’s a pretty high bar, and I don’t remember learning that employment actions are much more likely to satisfy the requirements.
payment of wages owed to employees frequently pierces the corporate veil.
Sure, if the employee being paid is an owner of the company.
But in this case, I can't imagine how it would be relevant. Perhaps you know more about Dutch law and piercing the corporate veil, but my training as a US lawyer has me scratching my head on this one.
I thought they closed up their Dutch branch after the firing, not after the court case:
"Less than a week after the plaintiff was fired, the Rijswijk branch of Chetu Inc. was deregistered from the Chamber of Commerce and shut down on 2 September, records show."
Seems fishy, but could an innocent explanation be that he was their only Dutch employee?
he was ordered to take part in a virtual training period called a "Corrective Action Program."
This is the sort of name given to processes uses when an employee is already performing below expectations. (Where I work it’s a more euphemistic Performance Improvement). If that’s the case here then his firing was a bit less sudden than it appears. Though the entire monitoring process seems draconian regardless.
Well, I worked on a company with a performance program (I can really remember the exact euphemism), in which all new employees were supposed to take part when joining, and then if marked as low performer go through it again, with a neat addition... random employees were also selected to go through it again just because.
That’s not that terrible idea - it removes some of the stigma and potentially helps ensure the program provides value rather than just being a checkbox on the way to termination.
>> it removes some of the stigma
Stigma around being on a corrective performance plan should be removed?
I guess it depends on whether your goal is to improve performance, or punish and humiliate people
BTW: If anyone finds themselves on any sort of "performance improvement plan", do the BARE MINIMUM to not get fired outright. Ideally go to a therapist, talk about how stressed out you are and how fucked your situation is, and get an official FMLA (legally protected leave of absence). That'll give you some time to relax and look for a new job. Don't let your boss or website trolls gaslight you into thinking you can't find a new job that will treat you better.
I don't see the benefit of this strategy TBH. At best this tactic just drags out how long you can claim an employment dates with an employer but delays any future unemployment claim you could make until once fired and drags down everyone's opinion of you for abusing a legal protection for medical issues because your job performance was lacking. From an ethical standpoint, why not just lie about the situation to your future prospective employers and cut out wasting a therapist's time?
The type of place that you are most likely to need one of those will try to keep their official FTE headcount just below the minimum of 15 and use offshore contractors for the rest, or other loopholes such as shell companies, because there are so many labor laws (including FMLA) that don’t kick in until 15 employees.
idk man seems plausible that the social pressure of not wanting to be the PIP bozo could be effective. also love how you assume that "anyone.. on any sort of performance improvement plan" is 100% not at fault, it must be the evil kkkapitalist boss "trolling" or "gaslighting". there are retards who don't do their jobs well and a PIP is sometimes trying to push them into doing better instead of firing.
punishment is for reinforcement. Our brains are just not sophisticated enough to regularly reevaluate forecasts and stop the chain of events, but do at most trigger on known initial condition, trace and recreate the precedents all the way through to the pain, then just exit with an exit code.
This post reminds me of the category of "not even wrong". Apart from anything else, reward is a _much_ more effective stimulus for learning than punishment.
Maybe, it could be implemented as such, but it was mostly just a drag; it’s not like your workload got reduced because of being in the program, so following all the bullshit without reducing your actual performance would mean at best reduce your time to breath and decompress during work, or at worse, having to do extra time.
It's still a checkbox used during termination.
I also don't see how going through it reduces the stigma. The stigma exists _because_ of the experience, not the unfamiliarity of it. For instance, does the experience of going through US airport security ever reduce the stigma of it?
When you go through TSA, nobody thinks “oh, that person must be a terrorist because the TSA is screening them”. Because the TSA screens everyone.
When someone is on a PIP, the expectation is “that person is about to get fired”
This is the stigma we’re talking about.
Assuming PIP programs exist for any purpose other than establishing justification for termination.
> does the experience of going through US airport security ever reduce the stigma of it?
Some people feel degraded when they go through airport security, but it doesn’t carry a stigma. Nobody’s judging you for going through security so you can fly.
> random employees were also selected to go through it again just because.
I can imagine being in the middle of a critical project, on a tight deadline, and getting the "You've been randomly selected to attend the performance program again." email.
PIPs are a tool for managing out employees that don’t perform well or don’t yield to often abusive company demands like e.g. overtime or pissed of somebody in management or connected to management.
Depends on the company but they are commonly used to ensure managers are not just firing someone that they are "pissed off" at, people are cynical about them but they are designed to ensure managers have to document the poor performance, and have notified the employee they are under performing...
I have seen companies that lack this process and witnessed employees getting very positive feedback from managers even in performance reviews, only to be shell shocked with a termination for poor performance.
Given the option to have a PiP process or not I would rather have one.
I have seen employees go on a PIP and then improve their way out of it. I have seen them be used as a tool to justify termination, and in one case the PIP ended up revealing fraud.
I think the point is, if a company is going to abuse employee, that will happen with or with out a PIP, but even with abusive management having that process IMO is better than not
I'm actually shocked that so many companies handle performance improvement and coaching so badly.
We implemented a coaching system for our support team about a year ago with the explicit purpose that individual coaching does not directly affect KPI, and that as much coaching can and should be done freely without worry of impacting the support team. The system tracks both the person being coached and their team lead who does the coaching. The coaching is directed to be as instructive as possible, that it's not about punishment, but better ways of handling specific technical situations or adherence to the support policy.
Long term reviews consider not just the person being coached, but also the leader as well, as a high number of coaching options across multiple persons on the same team would suggest an issue with the leadership as the root cause, and more qualitative reviews focus on that element as well. The entire point is to ensure that Performance Improvement Plans don't have to be a thing, and that there is constructive feedback flowing into the system.
Adoption was slow, but with strict adherence to what a coaching instruction must include, we've seen exceptionally high improvement and much calmer conversations when mistakes are made since the support persons realize "this isn't a KPI penalty or a PIP; it's just trying to prevent that." Having the system "open", i.e., the support persons can see every entry they have at any time with a few clicks of a button means no secrets.
It's a lot of documenting, but so far we're seeing a ton of success with it and positive feedback to having this process for constructive criticism, and the focus on also considering "this might be a leadership issue" also helps add some comfort.
I've seen this work well, especially with some flexibility. Had a very dramatic underperformer on a team that sat near me. His lead went down every paperwork rabbit hole to get him fired, and the improvement plan was the last step. He simply couldn't knock out a simple backlog item without a lot of help. I'm not sure how he graduated with a degree. But the improvement plan had him doing some ops work as well as development, and low and behold he was a natural born ops wizard... It all made sense to him. Had never heard of k8s or helm and was spitting out helm charts, docker files, conan files etc. in less than a month, burning down the whole teams ops backlog.
thats a really cool story, and i think that may be true of a lot of oeople who end up fired: they just didn't find (or weren't placed in) a position where they can shine with their talents... maybe some places are too quick to fire...
Interesting factoid from Europe: at least in Germany, you are effectively unhirable if you are in a PiP. You actually have to warrant that you are not, before any company of any size will consider hiring you, and of course lying about that would be a firing offense.
I get the logic, but as an American I was surprised… I was never PiPed but I too would have assumed it was better than the alternative. Not always!
Interesting, in most states in the US it would be illegal for an employer to reveal to another employer that the employee was on a PiP, I am surprised that is allowed in the EU with all the privacy laws.
The US has lots of anti-black listing laws in almost every state that would make something like that very very illegal
Its also not legal in Germany, in fact, its pretty impossible to legally give a bad reference.
HR departments have a workaround though - instead of a bad reference, they will simply confirm that yes, you worked there. Nothing else.
Are reference letters no longer done in Germany?
When I was there that was how this was done. Basically you would always get a reference letter when ending employment. The reference letter's language always sounds good, as in not giving a bad reference. However, a reference letter that states things like "employee X delivered his tasks on time and to the satisfaction of work standards" basically means that he's a slacker that does mediocre work at best. It has to say something like "We are ultimately saddened for employee X leaving because he always delivered his work early and to the highest standard thinkable". These are bad made-up English language examples to show the difference in language but there's basically template language HR departments use for this.
Yes, this was a thing already thirty years ago. There's even a term for them: coded reference letters. I even got a reference letter explicitly declaring that it doesn't contain hidden codes.
https://www.arbeitszeugnis.de/presse/geheimcodeliste.pdf (German)
This shows that there's a conflict: law forbids to discriminate someone with a bad review of their capability, motivation or fitness. But people always seem to try to work around this prohibition. Like giving a friendly declaration that someone worked at a company if they weren't impressed and give an enthusiastic recommendation in the other case.
They are still a thing, though I don't know how common. My own experience on leaving a big company fairly recently was they were available if you wanted one, and you were expected to write your own and submit it for approval, in German and/or English at your discretion.
I didn't bother, but if my future plans had included being an employee at a big company in Germany I definitely would have done so.
I never got a reference letter when leaving at any of my German employers, but when references were checked that's how it worked - the language would either be explicitly good, or "neutral good" meaning bad.
> yes, you worked there. Nothing else.
That's the norm in most places, isn't it? He didn't steal anything, he wasn't sacked, he didn't punch-out the boss, and he didn't shit on the carpet.
Nobody wants to be sued for giving a decent reference.
My dad was a soldier; his retirement reference (age 45) said something like "He is an oustanding officer who will succeed at any enterprise he turns his hand to". That impressed me, until I learned that any officer retiring from the army will get a reference pretty-much the same.
Note that retiring from the army at age 45 is very common. If you get to 45 without getting promoted past colonel, you need a new career, because serious promotion happens when your CO gets killed in combat; and beyond about 45, they won't be sending you into combat.
Having worked in UK for over a decade with various employers I never got an actual reference letter other than a confirmation of employment. Nor I have ever been asked for one when being hired. In fact if I remember correctly it might have been stated in some company documents that "they don't give references" and that "they'll confirm the job start and end date, the employee's job title and number of sick days taken and nothing else(that's required by the law if I remember correctly)". Although I had managers privately tell me of their willingness "to talk to" anyone I might need to give a reference to in private.
I never knew in Germany one is expected to obtain actual proper reference letters from past employers. Good to know just in case.
Long time ago (15+ years ago) I had worked in Poland. Back then I did get a written reference from the company I worked for. I can't say if those letters are required these days in PL.
> HR departments have a workaround though - instead of a bad reference, they will simply confirm that yes, you worked there. Nothing else.
This works in the US as well.
So I guess anyone working at a German company will want to make really sure their HR department is in on this before leaving :p
I worked for small and large companies, both German and American, never has anyone asked me whether I had been in a PIP. Have never even encountered something like this in Germany.
That would seem weird in the US given that, if you're on a PIP and aren't looking for a new job you probably should be as a PIP rarely ends up well. Essentially, you'd be in a situation where you knew you were going to be fired sooner or later but couldn't look for a new job.
I never had this issue when working in Germany, and I was actually on a PIP at one company while successfully finding a new job to move to.
> they are designed to ensure managers have to document the poor performance
I have had very close interactions (details below) with managers who completely fabricated “poor performance” in order to PIP the target out of a job.
In both cases, I had the PIP target secretly work in tandem with a star employee to produce work that was considered top notch work up and down the management chain.
In both cases, the manager took a cursory look at the work and completely dressed down the PIP target verbally and in writing with little or no constructive feedback.
One manager was fired, and the other manager was out to pasture to work on meaningless solo projects (necessary due to organizational reasons).
I am not sure how common this is, but managers who are slightly more intelligent about it can fairly easily set up a PIP target to fail while technically providing constructive feedback.
One of the cultural problems in this org was that pretty much 100% of the managers were bad/inexperienced/untrained, so the unwritten rule was to not monitor the administrative actions of other managers. I was brought in basically to protect them from potential lawsuits that would have had merit — they were incapable of doing this internally.
> I think the point is, if a company is going to abuse employee, that will happen with or with out a PIP
Agreed.
> but even with abusive management having that process IMO is better than not
Sort of, imho. What I always tell people is that they should consider their PIP period as a type of severance and look for another job aggressively while they are on it.
In the handful of orgs that do PIPs well, the folks will usually know that the process is not punitive. I will add that I am fairly certain they every relatively large org I’ve known that does PIPs well also gives folks an opportunity to transfer if the job is not a good fit (assuming the target is not a bad apple, which is a selection problem).
Anyway, I agree that PIPs could and should be an effective tool for remediation. That said, I am not sure it’s any better than undocumented managerial capriciousness and malfeasance since usually all it really does in these situations is slow down the bad behavior slightly.
If anyone gets randomly fired by a bad manager in an org with no PIP, they are probably better off just being out of the org in general rather than suffering for a few months in a sham.
I’ve never ever ever seen a PIP used in a positive way. It’s almost always been a way for petty toxic management that resented an employee not tolerating an abusive environment.
I got asked if I'd be willing to take a guy on pip onto my team. The guy was senior to me when I started but he languished a bit so I was now senior. He was good technically but terrible with internal politics. It was a bit of an adjustment but we worked hard and managed a turn around. He was surprised and thankful for the genuine interest in his career and well being. He never became an A player, but he stayed on a few more years and stock splits and we remain in contact 15 years later.
Thanks for being a decent human. In my experience, such is more rare than you would think.
For management it is a win-win. If the employee fails they have a record that they can use to defend themselves in court against a discrimination lawsuit. If it actually helps, they retain a worker with perhaps improved productivity. Companies can use them for either or both
Yeah, I had a manager PIP me out once like that. I was required to work until midnight to hit a deadline, then get on a call until 3am with the contractors in India, and when my butt wasn't back in the office chair by 8:30am the next day, I was written up for being late. Another warning came from refusing to stay more than 3 hours late one night (unplanned overtime) because I had plans that night, which made me 'not a team player'. After those two warnings, it only took me being randomly 5 minutes late one day for the third and final.
Oddly enough, after we 'mutually agreed to terminate my employment' there, I got a call from the director of another department offering me a job in his department and, most surprisingly, a really glowing recommendation on LinkedIn from the very manager that fired me.
I don't claim to understand it. But I do understand why the company had such high turnover, and why the guy I had been hired to replace had gone on mental health leave and just never came back.
Of course PIP got a huge potential to be abused, it’s like a weapon in the hands of management. I’ve never been under a PIP but if I were I’d urgently look for work.
That's what I did - once I was put on a PIP, I knew it was time to jump before I was pushed.
Man, it's so frustrating. I just wanted to work hard, do a good job, and make a comfortable living.. but I got repeatedly screwed over by corporate politics several levels above me at my first couple of tech jobs after college. I was forced into learning how to play corporate politics just to stay employed, and now I make 6x as much money and work maybe 1/3rd as much as I used to.
If these companies weren't comprised of weasels and wannabe tyrants, I think everyone would be a lot better off. I guess being a manipulative, greedy asshole is just human nature though.
Last time I got put on a PIP was for refusing an entirely unreasonable request to be on call, and leaving my work phone at home during that period.
I started making plans to resign pretty soon after being put on the PIP.
I dunno, can't you just say "Dude, if you put me on the PIP, I'll have trouble leaving. Since what you're proposing amounts to disciplinary measures, I'll be quitting anyway; so why make it harder for me to get a new job?"
The dismissal process for underperformance here (UK) requires the employer to give warnings: one verbal, and two written, I think. The employer is also expected to help the employee meet the performance target. The PIP sounds like a checklist version of that help - it's not meant to help the employee, it's meant to hustle along the dismissal process. I'd take a job flipping burgers, rather than work for a boss that put me on a PIP.
Quitting and getting terminated have very different consequences. Quitting does not entitle you to EI and could jeopardize severance/termination pay. To lose those benefits due to termination the termination must be for cause, which comes with a very high standard that an employer is exclusively required to justify.
Also potentially just the unlucky selected person for a forced rank/yank exercise when everyone is doing their job, but some percentage is selected to oust.
I’ve always called them sacrificial lambs.
This completely depends on the company. Where I work, PIPs really are designed to give extra structure to the people on them as to what is expected of them and they're designed to be achievable by the average employee without working extra hours. Of course, they're also private, so you only know someone has been on one if they choose to share that information.
PIPs rarely work but it's the legal system that awards poor performers the equivalent of a year of salary when they're fired that makes them a requirement in the first place.
The article also states that he was "telemarketing worker" without much detail about his job duties. Was the company already recording his screen and voice (if applicable) interactions with customers?
from the article
> The telemarketing worker replied back two days later, “I don't feel comfortable being monitored for 9 hours a day by a camera. This is an invasion of my privacy and makes me feel really uncomfortable. that's the reason why my camera isn't on. You can already monitor all activities on my laptop and I am sharing my screen.”
That does not answer the question regarding interacting with customers.
>Was the company already recording his screen and voice (if applicable)
The answer is yes.
Was his job to interact with customers? Not answered. Did not address voice recording which is common for call center and support employees.
I suspect the article meant teleworking
Me too, but it makes a big difference. Recording sales or support interactions with customers is common.
The article also mentioned "commission" as part of his compensation which may be related to a sales function.
The article mentions he was a remote worker up front. I think his job was telemarketing.
I wonder if they were a remote sales or marketing rep.
I'm not sure why a software development Company would have an employee doing telemarketing, at least not the unsolicited direct to consumer type we use the term for in the US. Maybe this is a connotation issue.
Software companies still need to sell stuff much of which can be remote, it looks like this local branch was a sales operation to the Dutch market.
I don't know if you're from the US or not, but in the US the term telemarketer usually refers to someone that makes cold calls to private residences. It is usually low paid work and usually outsourced to countries with cheap labor.
Dude was getting paid 70k in the Netherlands. That’s a pretty big chunk of change. Not “low paid” work at all…
That's my exact point, it is unlikely that he was actually a telemarketer and the article is probably wrong.
Reread my posts
Ah, my mistake. I thought you were saying he must not have been paid well because he was a telemarketer. And I agree with you.
"Corrective action" is quality system jargon.
I love it when US companies meet Dutch labor laws.
European in general. My wife works for a biotech company in Austria which was recently aquired by an american company and it's so funny to hear about their efforts to adapt to EU law and culture. Most of their training material is still unchanged from their US branch so there are things they list as benefits for all employees like
- 3 Weeks paid vacation (we get 5 by law)
- Health insurance (you know the drill)
- 3 weeks parental leave (we get 1 year for 80% pay, first 6 months full pay, then 5 years protection against dismissal)
- 5 days paid care leave for when your kid is sick (we get 12)
So their benefits which makes them think make them attactive are all below basic EU law that even store clerks get
All true, but it might be worth mentioning that most of those benefits are still Austrian law, not European law. So while they generally better than the US, other EU states might lack some of those law.
Many countries go further, but the EU does require a minimum.
- 4 weeks paid holiday
- 4 months unpaid parental leave, 14 weeks paid for the mother
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_labour_law is the best overview I can find.
For what it's worth I'm pretty sure there are systems in place in these countries which actually make it possible. right?
Like, there are insurances and government assistance programs that businesses use to pay for things like parental leave.
US businesses get no such help. So what is often attributed to US business greed is actually political greed, while businesses are just casualties.
Your statement does not make much sense. As you correctly say, there are obligatory schemes to pay into in Europe. The companies could easily keep the same amounts at hand and pay them out at the same conditions - no difference whatsoever except corporate greed/lack of obligation.
Yes at least when I’m sick or on parental leave it’s not the company paying the parental leave money. The law makes it a requirement for my employer to let me take my parental leave, i.e they can’t refuse or not have my job there when I return. So while that’s a cost to them, of course they don’t pay me my 80% salary when I’m gone 6-12 months. Tax money does. My employer can use my salary money to pay for my replacement.
When I'm on sick leave in Poland, first two weeks are covered by the employer (80%) and only after that it's covered by tax money.
Italy is either two or three days, I can't remember which.
The reason, I believe, is that there are random checks by the health service to ensure people on sick leave are actually sick. But if you only take a day off due to a headache, by the time it gets registered and checked you could have already got better - so your claim is hard to verify.*
A dishonest employer could easily defraud the system by claiming a lot of individual, unverifiable "sick days" and getting the state to pay for a nice chunk of his payroll expenses.
By contrast, an employer gets alerted sooner of an absence and is in a much better position to guess whether an employee claiming fake sicknesses. In case of suspicion they're legally allowed (at a small fee) to have a physician check on their employee from day 1.
* now that I think about it, with everybody having a camera phone nowadays, this might eventually be solved - a video call might not be enough for a diagnosis, but it can probably tell "yep you're sick" with a reasonable degree of confidence?
>For what it's worth I'm pretty sure there are systems in place in these countries which actually make it possible. right?
>Like, there are insurances and government assistance programs that businesses use to pay for things like parental leave.
>US businesses get no such help. So what is often attributed to US business greed is actually political greed, while businesses are just casualties.
It really depends what are we talking about. In case of paid holiday leave (for example in Poland) everyone in normal employment gets at least 2 uninterrupted weeks by law. However even in my very first job many years ago I got 4 weeks total paid leave. All the pay gets paid by the employer.
However, there are things like maternity leave that can take a year. It is unreasonable to expect an employer (perhaps a small business) to pay an employee for a year of maternity leave. So during this time one is entitled to 80% of their pay, but it is paid not by the employer, but the national insurance. The actual amount taken by people varies. It can be split between parents, voluntary given up etc.
Then there is sick leave. If I remember correctly the usual thing was for the employer to pay for few initial days, the rest was paid for by the local equivalent of national insurance.
That would be a fair point if US businesses weren't donating to the GoP en masse.
Must suck being a father and not being able to take leave with your kids. We get 10 days when the baby is born. Plus lots of days until the child is X years, I think 11 years.
To be fair, it used to be two days (!) up until 5 years ago in the Netherlands. We're still the worst place for young parents and fathers in particular in western Europe.
I got indeed 20 by law and 14 on top of that for a total of 34, but the latter is the exception.
In IT 26-28 days are common.
I'm not sure how it's counted, but in Poland we initially get 20 days and 26 after you work several years. Maybe the 4 weeks include national holidays, which don't count into the limit I mentioned.
20 days are 4 weeks if you work 5 days per week.
Well there are certainly differences. How about 3 years parental leave in Slovakia.
that's funny considering how someone else here is arguing that labor protection in austria is worse than other european countries.
In contrast, the extra capital buffer required to maintain such benefits directly reduces the amount of risk a startup business can take. Starting a risky venture in the EU vs the US seems like starting with an immediate financial drag. Stability for workers is achieved in part by forcing companies to lower the risk they can take.
If that risk comes at the expense of the workers, then yes.
Tbh, it’s just a cost of doing business in the Netherlands.
Now do salary and taxes
>>(we get 1 year for 80% pay, first 6 months full pay, then 5 years protection against dismissal)
That is just crazy.... I would hate to be a chidless person in your country, I can not image the extra amount of work that get places on people that do not have children...
As someone that will never have a child I like the fact that the US does not force this kind of parental leave on employers, I know that will be very unpopular hot take
For you, there will be no impact beyond having to sign the "Congratulations!" card for your colleague!
A company (an employer) rents the time and skills of employees for a particular task. It's not a pool of work that employees must struggle to achieve regardless of circumstances - it's the employer's responsibility to hire enough staff.
For example, my paternity leave (20 days or 40 half days) would not impact my colleagues. Some of them can opt into overtime, but the same labor laws also define how overtime works - as an employer, you can't order someone to work extra hours unless described in their contract (and limited to the maximum specified by law, with mandatory regular breaks). Overtime is also paid at 150% or 200% of your regular pay, depending on the day of the week and hour of the day (e.g., weekends and nights obviously cost more than daytime rates). Very few jobs are even allowed to work on Sundays.
That's similar to how it works in my Canadian workplace. My employer has a pool of workers, and when a project is coming up, the manager phones around and fills his or her labour requirements. Lots of us work secondary jobs too, and this is both reasonable and understood, and a "no" or even a series of noes to an offer won't put you on the street, though it may lower you on a particular manager's call list.
Its like renting yourself out. You don't feel owned, and nobody feels they own you. Its great.
I will also not have a child and live in an EU country where parents get a lot of paid parental leave. I think it's great. Why wouldn't I want to work alongside happy, less stressed coworkers who aren't constantly _extra_ sleep and energy deprived from worrying about having to unsustainably juggle work and kids? Companies are well aware of the laws and know they need to staff appropriately. In addition, it is a good thing that parents get to prioritize their children because it makes for well adjusted children for us all to live with as they grow.
As a person without kids I do sometimes wish childfree people got benefits in ways that have more _immediate_ applications for us as well. But that doesn't mean parents shouldn't keep getting generous leave allowances to care for their children.
As a person without kids, I'm painfully aware that I'm not (yet) contributing to building the future in which I hope to still be living in, several decades from now.
There are countless things the State spends money on that I resent having to pay taxes for, but childhood and parenting benefits _definitely_ isn't among them. Go nuts.
> stressed coworkers who aren't constantly _extra_ sleep and energy deprived
maybe I should have added that the parental leave only applies to the mother. Fathers can just take a month off.
And since women can choose to go back to work after 1 year or even 2 years (at reduced pay until then) the kids can already go to the nursery although it's not free until they're 2.5 years old. Then kindergarten is free
> maybe I should have added that the parental leave only applies to the mother. Fathers can just take a month off.
That's unfortunate. Where I live parental leave is split between both parents (I think it is 480 days total), I think that works better.
There's a simple word for people with that attitude: freeloader. It's pretty easy to understand:
> I can not image the extra amount of work that get places on people that do not have children...
What you're forgetting is the amount of work required to raise children. That's an externality that is only covered through a social contract, where everyone contributes to a next generation. Why should parents put in the extra work to raise children that, god forbid, would ever do something you benefit from?
What you want is someone else doing the work so that you can just reap the benefits. You're a freeloader, plain and simple (other, less favorable words come to mind).
Unless, of course, you will never in your life use the services or inventions of anyone younger than you. But, somehow, I doubt that - am I right? You just expect those cohorts to just appear out od thin air to your benefit.
I think there's a lot of people that want things to be fair at the individual level ("that person gets time off for a child, but that other, childless person works the whole time")... but don't see the greater "benefit to society overall" part of it. It's not necessarily that they're being greedy; it may not even be something that would benefit them directly. They just never consider that they're paying a cost for the greater good, because it's not in their view of the world.
In some cases it’s probably legitimately “unfair”. Me for example am probably at the more unfair end. I
- have high income so pay a large % into taxes
- not a citizen so don’t enjoy some of the benefits of military protection
- wasn’t raised here so didn’t use any of the earlier year services
- likely won’t retire here so won’t use those either
Most of my tax dollars goes to fund others in the country. But as a society there is no good way to account for all that. To try to do so the tax calculation will be crazy. So I’ll grumble about the taxes I pay, but end of the day I also don’t really have a better solution.
But you still benefit even from the mere _existence_ of human beings younger than you are (e.g. service, manufacturing, research, medical, etc.). If you think you don't, think about the fraction of people you will interact with in 20 or 40 years that are younger than you will be, or about the innovations you will be using in 20 or 40 years that were developed by people younger than you. Those human beings have to come from somewhere - why do you insist it my obligation to make you that gift, at exorbitant expense of my time and money?
The European countries with these benefits don't have higher birth rates, so it doesn't seem like it's actually producing more younger people.
Instead, it's African countries and then ones with more practicing religious people who do.
I’m not arguing that I don’t derive value from my taxes. Like you said there are benefits from the next generation, social stability etc. Just that I don’t necessarily derive value proportional to the amount I pay.
Presumably you're not paying taxes to <whereever you will retire to>, but you reap the benefits of the people that did pay taxes there during this time. So it works out in the end. It's the same thing, just at a global level instead of a national level. Admittedly, the rules aren't the same everywhere.
Plus, as noted elsewhere, you are getting benefits from the taxes you're paying now, only just on some of it.
It’s the proportion of payment vs benefit. We intentionally have a set up where some people pay more into the system than they might get out of it. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. But then by the same token some people will be paying an “unfair” amount.
Eg if I make a million a year, I might pay 500k in taxes. Someone making 50k a year might pay 10k. I don’t get an extra 450k a year worth of benefit from my taxes. This is intended and is ok. But I think we should also acknowledge that this happens.
> likely won’t retire here so won’t use those either
I don't know which country you're living in, but surely the money you paid into a pension scheme - be it public or private - doesn't just disappear because you moved to another country?
Spain is famously full of UK pensioners receiving and spending their pounds there. Heck, my father worked for a few years in Belgium in his youth, without even being a citizen, and that still entitled him to a (minuscule) Belgian pension later on, in addition to his more substantial one from his subsequent decades of work in a different country.
> not a citizen so don’t enjoy some of the benefits of military protection
Can you explain what you mean by this part?
If I was stuck in a war torn country, I don’t get evacuated by the US military.
I think Afghanistan and Ukraine both show that this is not necessarily the case for citizens either.
It really is a tragedy of the commons with a changing demographic, where DINK are more prevalent that, say, 50 years ago, where most tried to contribute to raising the next generation. But the amount of entitlement still baffles me - where do these people think everyone younger than them comes from? How much time and money do they think it costs to train a human being to be a member of society, of benefit to them!, and why do they just assume it is someone else's duty to provide this to them, free of charge to them?
>why do they just assume it is someone else's duty to provide this to them, free of charge to them?
Why do you assume I would think it is someone else's duty to provide anything to me? This seems to be a bit of projection.
> DINK are more prevalent that, say, 50 years ago
A good standard of living was possible with a single income 50 years ago (just). It's barely possible today with two average incomes in much of the US.
A standard of living in 2022 wasn't achievable at any cost 50 years ago; the reason both people want to work in a modern family is that it gets you more money and they want to spend more.
You'd only want to not work if your job couldn't effectively contribute to the household (you're already rich or your spouse is a super high earner) or else you can't pay for the childcare work you're no longer doing (you're poor). Both of you working is a sign of being middle class.
Like paying schools from taxes and never have kids, or paying fire fighters and your house never burns.
It's called society.
> Like paying schools from taxes and never have kids
I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of people paying taxes for school have actually enjoyed the benefit of free schooling. It can be helpful to think of things that way... (another example: people complaining about kids being loud in planes, restaurants, etc - remember that you were that kid once too).
Well I would prefer they send me a bill directly for fire services monthly, like water instead of having it obfuscated in general taxation. I prefer user fees not taxation.
as for schools, to the extent I support their funding (which is more limited than I suspect you do) it is generally ethically justified because I too attended schools paid for by taxation, so in that manner I paying off a debt vs paying for others. Granted it is a debt I did not consent to, and had no option to opt out of but still there is that ethical foundation
None of that exist for what we are talking about here
and I absolutely reject the idea of a "social contract"
> I would prefer they send me a bill directly for fire services monthly
The problem is that then some people opt out. If enough people do that, it's no longer financially viable to have a fire service.
> I absolutely reject the idea of a "social contract"
Which is fine, but then don't live in the society. As a society, we have decided what is important for the benefit of the society; fire departments, law enforcement, schools, roads, etc. We then attempt to gather money from everyone in that society to pay for those things, because that's the only way it's realistic. Not everyone in the society agrees to all the details, but (in theory) the majority of people agree to them.
It's not all that different than living in an apartment with a few other people. If most of the people agree that everyone has to split the electricity bill, but one person says they don't want to... then it's reasonable to have that person leave, and replace them with someone that is ok with the rules set by the group.
>>The problem is that then some people opt out. If enough people do that, it's no longer financially viable to have a fire service.
Aside from the fact that since most homes are covered by a mortgage and mortgage companies would require that as a condition of a loan, no where did I really say to make it optional. I simply said I wanted an itmized bill for the service
I am required to have water service turned on as part of occupancy, I can not turn off the water service to home even if I wanted to live completely on bottled water, it would be against local ordinances. I am required to pay that bill monthly, if I turn it off I would get fined by the city, and at some point they would take my home
I am also required to mow my grass, and other such things, I fail to see why fire services would be any different.
>It's not all that different than living in an apartment with a few other people.
You are correct on that front, I despise apartment living and I also despise HOA which is why I took great care to avoid both in my life.
If star link or a competitor proves to be very successful and gets to be cost effective then Rural living may even be in the cards for me, one the only reasons I moved to where I did was because of the availability of high speed fiber optic service.
>Well I would prefer they send me a bill directly for fire services monthly, like water instead of having it obfuscated in general taxation. I prefer user fees not taxation.
As is quite common in the US, my fire services (as well as part of education costs--the state also contributes) are paid for out of my quarterly property taxes and my town budget is right up on the website to look at. So it's not really obfuscated. And I don't really want to get 20 different bills from my town rather than a quarterly property tax (and water) bill.
> for fire services monthly, like water instead of having it obfuscated in general taxation. I prefer user fees not taxation.
That would have to be mandatory service though (remember, firemen can perform inspections, fine people etc. - they're not there just for fighting fires), at which point it's just simpler to pay for that through taxes.
Firemen mostly don't fight fires. We've decided to send them out on every ambulance call just in case, so they do have a lot of work, but it's not clear if they're adding anything or if it's busywork.
(Which isn’t to say we should make them work less, but we should get them smaller trucks like other countries have.)
That's not the way it is everywhere. I'm a volunteer firefighter and I'd say at least 19 times out of 20 my calls are for a fire. The other occasions would be traffic control at an accident or assisting EMTs with lifting a person.
Obviously depends on location, but normally only state-funded firefighters are performing the prevention duties (and have authority to fine people and companies).
Well, my parents got parental leave for me and my brother. Which I think I benefited from.
> and I absolutely reject the idea of a "social contract"
The very definition of a sociopath.
> paying fire fighters
Which the vast majority of America doesn’t do either.
A lot of those that don't pay the firefighters still pay the fire department. Volunteer fire departments are usually tax funded.
On the other hand, it sounds like it might be viable to have a kid there. Two parents working full-time in the US struggle when they have a kid, due to the loss of income. Our system worked a lot better when both parents were not expected to work, it's kind of broken now.
which is exactly the point. birthrate is already bad enough as it is. for the moment this is compensated with immigration, but eventually support for parenting may have to increase even further if we want to keep the birthrate up.
Wouldn't it also work to just make everything cheaper for everyone?
Housing has increased so much in cost that I wouldn't be surprised that just having housing back to 1980s price levels would give most families enough breathing room with just unpaid leave.
Of course that would work, but that requires the economy to not adapt itself to the new prices, which requires politicians to step in and prevent the richer people from buying up things which makes would-be families feel too uneasy about starting a family.
It'd be far more desirable to return to situations where most of the budget is spent on luxury and only a little is spent on any kind of milestone, but that's a campaign most politicians aren't winning votes with.
>> which requires politicians to step in
Ironically politicians "stepping in" is the biggest reason cost of living is going up. Regulations preventing new housing, limiting new housing, etc. Monetary policies and massive debt fueled spending spree's causing massive inflation, draconian lock downs disrupting supply chains, irresponsible "climate" policies preventing farmers from growing food affordably, the 100's of other ways "politicians stepping in " to "solve" a problem in the process making everyone worse off
Bad regulations by a slow, bureaucratic government do that, yes. Meanwhile, the free market people always claim will solve everything? That same free market "solved" mobility by pushing car usage through the roof, resulting in extremely inefficient space usage now that population demands are changing.
Neither bad regulations nor the free market are going to solve a lack of foresight. Worse, those regulations are largely devised by politicians in power voted by a majority of homeowners and a few ultra rich lobbyists. You might as well make a "always has been" meme out of it.
Same goes for every other of your points. If free market capitalism would solve it, it already would have.
The problem here is what you identify as problems the market (thus people) do not agree are problems
For example you decry the " inefficient space usage " of modern housing, and suburbs, however many people clearly prefer to have single family structures on plots of land over living in densely populated area's
I am one of those people, I would never choose to voluntary live in a dense city like NYC or even LA
I can think of nothing more nightmarish then living in a multistory apartment building. I lived in a 3 story building once, and got out of there as fast as I possibly could. Today I live in a typical suburban neighborhood, with homes on 1/2 to 3/4 acre lots and about 40-100 foot separation between home even that is far too tightly packed for me, and would prefer even greater separation.
Governments attempt to control sprawl and force more density is in part what is driving the massive increase in cost for Single Family homes.
So it is not a correct statement to proclaim the free market is not solving problems, it is that people that guide the market reject your proposed problems and the solutions you desire for the problems, in that rejection the only way to do it is to impose government regulations by force.
I can think of nothing more nightmarish then living in a multistory apartment building
why is that? bad neighbors?
maybe the problem is our culture of selfishness and lack of tolerance and respect? (and by that i mean your neighbors that are causing you trouble, not asking you to tolerate that trouble)
i have lived in multi story buildings all my life in different countries. and never had issues with neighbors. i hardly ever see them. really, the only difference between an apartment and a single family house to me was access to a garden. and in a single family house i have to deal with neighbors too. so i really don't understand what your problem is there.
people have preferences. sure. my preference is to live close to shopping and culture, and my friends, and access to public transport without needing a car to go anywhere.
if i wanted to get away from neighbors i would move to the countryside where the next neighbor is a mile away. but that is no longer a city. suburban life to me is the worst of both worlds. (and i have lived that too, so i speak from experience on both)
the reason the free market does not solve problems is that the free market is not fair. in a free market the strong have an advantage at the expense of the weak.
slums are caused by a free market. to eliminate poverty, intervention is necessary. if an intervention fails then that's because maybe it is the wrong kind of intervention. and with that we are at the problem of figuring out how to make life better for everyone, which is a question of education, the will to make things better for others, and again respect and tolerance and giving everyone a voice, aka democracy.
What government is trying to force more density? Please let me know so I can move there.
The closest I can think of is Tokyo, where the zoning laws are basically set by the national government. In the USA, the local landed gentry can easily block any new development/increase in density, which is a big part of the reason we have so much sprawl*. In Japan, all you can do is shake your fist and write an angry letter to your congressman while developers throw up a 4 story apartment complex next door.
The result is that you can get a job as a janitor in the heart of downtown, and comfortably afford an apartment nearby. A tiny apartment within 10 minutes, or a larger and more spacious one 20-30 minutes away, or a house if you're willing to put up with a 90 minute commute.
* Yes, I know that a lot of the sprawl comes from people wanting houses, but a lot of people just want a place to live close to their job, where they can change out their sink or repaint their walls without asking some rich prick for permission
china's cities are growing and creating more density. i don't know if that is forced though, or simply demand from people who prefer to live in the cities because there are more opportunities there.
but look at any city with a growing population.
vienna for example is growing rapidly in the last two decades, after a slow decline of its population for almost a century, and it's interesting how the city addresses that growth with sufficiently dense housing. a whole new suburb is being built on a green field (literally) for 25,000 people and 20,000 jobs (not a bedroom community where everyone is commuting into the city), and that addresses only a fraction of the growth so elsewhere the city must be growing in density too.
You're being intruded on by your neighbors more than you would be in a city. Suburbs are full of cars and noise pollution; the inability to safely play in the road and having to listen to other peoples' cars and gas powered leafblowers is much worse than sharing a wall with someone.
Of course, the kinds of apartment buildings allowed in the US aren't that good either, since few cities allow single-stair buildings like Europe does.
Sprawl is a government invention, as is suburbia. Residential zoning isn't a natural concept and didn't exist before post-WW2.
The high car usage isn't "the free market"; nothing in the US has anything to do with a free market, and land use even less. It's all zoning regulations and federal highway funds all the time, and in general it's all a mixed economy. Free markets are a made up concept so people can have internet arguments about them and do not exist in real life.
You’re presenting an incredibly contentious opinion as fact..
Better yet, shouldn't we just make everything free for everyone? Housing costs are outrageous. It would be great if houses were free. And food too. And cars and clothing. I guess the only problem is then everyone's wage would have to be $0 as well.
i don't see why zero wages would be a problem in that case. it would be a money-less society like in star trek. whether that's realistic is another discussion.
but how about universal basic income instead?
I've been thinking about this, and I don't know if a UBI like people envision will ever really be viable.
BUT as society gets more and more wealthy, I'll bet that living on the fringes of it will be more and more viable
We're already at a point where you can work minimum wage for an hour (take home ~$7) and buy a few days' worth of subsistence-quality food if you have access to a kitchen. You can pare down your other living expenses too, and suddenly you have a reasonably comfortable lifestyle that only costs a few hundred bucks a month.
Right now we stigmatize "van dwellers" and couch surfers, but maybe that'll change in the future
The automation is going to bring that relatively soon.
Automation doesn't change anything fundamental in the economy, and could only make things free if it was a perpetual motion machine.
Yup Automation is going to push humans out of Capitalism to the point it where Capitalism ends it self.
I am not the best in keeping up with the Socialist movement.
But this video explains it well, people would still work, just not for a living.
Taxation is pooling resources and in this case some people will put in more or less than their “fair” share. If we account for every penny (some how) of how much everyone puts in and everyone gets out of their tax dollars it’s not going to be 1:1 for everyone. This is ok and by design to some degree (wealth redistribution). For better or worse, we as a society has taken the stance that people with more wealth should contribute more. Unfortunately this won’t work if it’s an opt out system.
sorry what extra work? you know the company is able to hire more people right?
You know companies have budgets right? you can not just "hire more people" and remain profitable, no profit no company.
Companies are not charities created to employ people.
So sure if only 1 person is off on leave most likely another person could be hired
But 5 years of protected leave..... What percentage of the work force is going to be out on that? Also since it is very hard to terminate someone in the EU, what happens to the employees that are "filling" the positions of those people out on 5 years of leave? can they be terminate or do you have to keep them employed even after the original employee returns?
If you can be terminated would you take a job knowing the second the parent returns you will be terminated
Parental leave should be measured in weeks, not years. If you want to be a stay at home parent for years, leave the work force and then return...,.
You are misunderstanding what the 5 years is: it’s a protection against being fired. You know as retaliation against actually having priorities that trump your employers emergency-through-incompetence-while-planning.
The actual leave time is typically around a year. Which is roughly where you can give children over without them crying. But yeah the workload of that parent will have to be picked up by additional staff
For one thing, most companies have hard time keeping employees working for them so this 'we have hired too many good workers and now we have to get rid of them' does not happen nearly as often. As others have pointed out, it's not a 5 year leave. Assuming it one to two years and assuming you simply cannot afford to have more people on payroll it's completely OK to hire somebody specifically for a year or two. Not all work contracts are indefinite.
I have no kids, don't plan on having any but it's kind of crazy how 'hail corporate' some cultures are. We're humans after all. Let people spend some time with their newborns instead of forcing them to make more money for somebody 3 weeks after giving birth.
Not five years of leave. Five years of protection that one wont be fired due to having taken leave is the way I read it.
Also in the system I work under, all employees pay a government tax that is used to pay for the parental leave. That is, the money isn't coming out of the companies pocket, but coming out of a national bucket designated for the purpose. The company pays nothing when the employee is taking this time.
Well, not "nothing", just not money directly. They still have to pay the loss in productivity during ramp up times. It's less of a big deal, but it's not nothing.
What you suggest is not a good government policy in my opinion. A government wants educated people to not be scared to have kids. Leaving a job to be at home a few months and look a for a new job after is extremely stressful and risky, and it can destroy a career.
And long parental leaves are just normal and common in some countries. A medium to large company has no issues dealing with them. It’s part of the management work to deal with that.
Moreover it’s better for a company that their employees don’t leave.
> Companies are not charities created to employ people.
And employees are not charities for their employers! If you can't afford the staff needed for a given task, perhaps you should pivot to something else.
Right you are paid X currency for X labor.
How is paying employees to sit at home not working anything other than charity/
> How is paying employees to sit at home not working anything other than charity
They are not sitting at home doing nothing, they are raising children. Helping them to do that is companies' share of investment into the workforce of tomorrow. Your utilitarian "fair" worldview doesn't account for the fact that having kids is insanely profitable to the economy. In modern economies, every kid is worth at least a million bucks over lifetime.
If you choose not to have kids and not contribute in this way, then who's going to foot the $1M or $2M bill for you?
Where do new employees came from? Do they materialize adult and fully educated out of thin air? Society-wise new workers are born and raised from preexisting workers. If corporations don't bear some of this burden in minting new employees, they are free-riding.
Those are operational costs. They are part of the costs the company has to support in order to have access to that country's labour market. If the company is unable to compete in that market they are, of course, most welcome to leave this market and go operate in some other lawless country.
It’s because when you hire employees they come with the aspect of being “people”. People work to live, they don’t live to work.
This has the very very close connotation to "from each according to ability to each according to need"
I live a very frugle life, my expenses are low, I have no kids, I dont take expensive vacations, drive a fancy car, etc...
So should that mean I do not get time off, or high raises, etc simply because my "needs" are not the same as a co-worker?
Why should a co-workers personal life choices (i.e the choice to have 1 or more children) be a factor in the terms of their employment?
I think employment policies should be agnostic to the personal life choices and situations of employee's infact the employer should not even know if you have kids or not, let alone provide you with "extra" because you do
Sounds like you would support a policy of income based on your personal expenses. Should the programmer with 5 kids make more than the programmer with no kids simply because the programmer with kids has more expenses?
Considering having children is beneficial to society and the economy (e.g. it's advantageous for employers since they still want to be able to hire people in n years and surely they'd like there to still be customers) one could argue that the programmer with five kids should get some "compensation" for this service, and as we know some countries do either directly or via employers.
> Should the programmer with 5 kids make more than the programmer with no kids simply because the programmer with kids has more expenses?
The programmer with 5 kids does make more than the one with no kids because he pays fewer income taxes. So the answer to your question is yes: it's how it already works.
No my question was should they. I also disagree with the Child tax credit.
> Sounds like you would support a policy of income based on your personal expenses. Should the programmer with 5 kids make more than the programmer with no kids simply because the programmer with kids has more expenses?
First time in Europe? That's pretty much a given here, more kids = bigger tax break = more netto pay.
Maybe you should talk to your boss and ask for more, instead complaining about others.
I am in the US and I do pick my employers based on these kinds of policies because their is no government mandate.
Well you're actually paid a fraction of every X dollars of value you produce
if the companies are unhappy with those terms then they're free to go elsewhere. under those terms companies hire people, so your assessment that such terms must break companies is clearly wrong.
>Companies are not charities created to employ people.
And employees aren't charities required to do things unpaid because there isn't the budget.
It works both ways
> What percentage of the work force is going to be out on that?
Its the workforce who votes for those laws. The workforce in Europe are not propagandized fools to the extent that they vote against their interests.
> Parental leave should be measured in weeks, not years. If you want to be a stay at home parent for years, leave the work force and then return...,.
And is for things like this that libertarians shouldn't make laws
> Parental leave should be measured in weeks, not years.
slavery ended thousands years ago
Uh... Weren't you a kid at some point? And weren't all your coworkers children at some point? Seems like you would benefit from the policy no matter how badly you don't want to participate in the task of childrearing.
That is not a hot take my friend? Do you pay your taxes? Sales taxes? Does the company you work for pay their taxes? Do you intend on retiring with a pension at some point?
Rising tides and boats comes to mind.
Well now we are going to get into more unpopular hot takes, because IMO income based taxation is theft....
I do not plain on retiring, and if I did I do not expect government social security (I am in the US) will be there to fund it so I do have a private retirement account that currently the US Monetary policy and government regulations/spending is doing its level best to destroy
> IMO income based taxation is theft....
How could income based taxation be theft unless we're considering all profit theft? Either it's immoral for someone with power over you to demand part of the value you produce or it isn't.
Profit in a market economy is derived from a voluntary exchange of goods/services for currency. I buy a Ribeye because I obtian more value from the Ribeye than I do the $18 in my bank account, However if that ribeye goes to $25 I now value the $25 more than the Ribeye so I dont buy it instead I buy a Chicken Breast.
These are choices I make in a free(ish) market. Companies offer their goods, I choose to buy or not
Similar with labor, I go to the market offer my knowledge and labor for a Wage, if I set my price to high companies will refuse to hire me, if I set my price to low I am missing out on profit.
Income Taxation is in no way voluntary exchange like that, the government with the full authority to initiate violence injects itself with a demand that for every hour of labor I sell I must provide the government with a 10-40% cut of not only my profit from the sell but the gross transaction price. They do so under the threat of violence (aka imprisonment) if I refuse their order.
The fact is that the government, like a common thief, says to a person: Your money, or your life...The government does not, indeed, waylay a person in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
> Income Taxation is in no way voluntary exchange like that
Take a weekend off and calculate how much 'fees' you would have to pay for 'private defense services', infrastructure, judiciary, police and all the other things if they were made private.
> The fact is that the government, like a common thief, says to a person: Your money, or your life
What religious delirium.
> But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
The dastarty act of providing military, police, firefighting, law, justice, social services - all the things that make you live in a modern society instead of living in the former late feudal society where you wouldn't even have the social rank in order to be able to talk against your feudal lord in public like this.
There is no magical, divine, extraterrestrial or supernatural force that provides this modern society that you live in, and all the rights and freedoms that you have in that society. We, the people, have managed to make that happen through the mechanisms we invented. And one of those mechanisms is the state that is owned by its people.
> The dastarty act of providing military, police, firefighting, law, justice, social services - all the things that make you live in a modern society instead of living in the former late feudal society where you wouldn't even have the social rank in order to be able to talk against your feudal lord in public like this.
If I don't support these things, or wish to take away their funding due to my displeasure with the service received I could do that if they were private. I cannot do that when every year the government puts a gun to my head and tells me to pay them 30% of my gross.
You've fallen into the classic socialist false dichotomy. Either you support taxes or you will be a serf.
The truth is taxes are the payment you're giving your lord (the government). You don't even own your own property. Try not paying your property tax (maybe it's too expensive?) and they take it away. Try not paying your taxes and they will start to take everything you own. This is the definition of theft. Coercing someone to part with their property through threats of violence.
All taxes are evil. A good compromise is the ability to take 5 extra minutes on my 1040 to put percentages where I want my money to go. I dont care if this overcomplicates the situation. We take in trillions in taxes a year and yet the only people who seem to benefit are the Nancy Pelosis. Somehow despite being a public servant is worth more than many top-tier entertainers. If I could put most of my money into school, hospitals, firefighters, and EMTs I would. Why would I fund police who drive around in veritable APCs treating every honest hard working American as a potential "insurgent" in their own land? Why are my tax dollars being shipped overseas to Ukraine when there's uncountable suffering here? Because we don't control it, our money is stolen, and the ill gotten gains are used to do whatever the kings and queens in congress decide. We are serfs, they've just managed to hide it.
Ask yourself do you feel good about where your taxes go?
>What religious delirium.
Like all socialists, you are the delirious one. It's just socialist indoctrination has better tasting koolaid with less assumption of responsibility.
> If I don't support these things, or wish to take away their funding due to my displeasure with the service received I could do that if they were private
Yeah, you could just 'take away its funding' and just do away with the military in a private environment. Which brings us to...
> Like all socialists, you are the delirious one
...the delirium of thinking that you would be able to keep your freedom and agency at the moment which you lose that socially-funded, democratically controlled military after you take its funding away in a private market environment. Which will make you immediately a subject of the richest man who did not take away the funding of the military outfit he supports.
> All taxes are evil.
The people from the country that kills its people when they cant pay for healthcare is telling us that all taxes are evil, even as their very infrastructure collapses.
THAT is delirium. Nothing else.
>Take a weekend off and calculate how much 'fees' you would have to pay for 'private defense services', infrastructure, judiciary, police and all the other things if they were made private.
This assumes alot of things, like that I reject all forms of taxation which I dont just income based. You know this because you already replied to a comment where I layout my preferred public finance model which you also ignored in that comment in favor of a semantic logical fallacy debate. so i question if you actually want to have an honest conversation
Also it assumes that the cost to private those services would be the exact same under a more private / direct model then our current system (for which my point of view would the the US model). I find that highly suspect and the few times were we have direct attempts at it has proven the current US model has inherent fraud, corruption, and waste that often raises the cost of providing these services by 2x or more.
>What religious delirium.
That is a bit of projection there. Like an adherent to a theocratic religion proclaiming Atheism is a religion. If anything Statism is more akin to a religion than being anti-state or libertarian.
Individualism is about the rejection of a "higher power", in your case this higher power is "the state" having replaced a god or gods
>ll the things that make you live in a modern society instead of living in the former late feudal society
False dilemma fallacy, as if the only option is a extreme over bearing high taxation state or feudalism...
> force that provides this modern society that you live in
Modern society was build by voluntary exchange of free individuals, not government.
> all the rights and freedoms that you have
neither rights nor freedom is provided by government, the entire US model of government is build on the fact that freedoms and rights need to be protected FROM government, the US Constitution is document to ensure government does not infringe upon the people as our founder knew that a government is like fire, a handy servant, but a dangerous master.
Government is to be subservient to the people, not a master of them. At all times the people need to be suspect of government power, and keep very tight control upon it.
> This assumes alot of things, like that I reject all forms of taxation which I dont just income based. You know this because you already replied to a comment where I layout my preferred public finance model which you also ignored in that comment in favor of a semantic logical fallacy debate. so i question if you actually want to have an honest conversation
If non-income based taxation worked, societies would be using it. Every single form of taxation was tried throughout history. This is the one that works.
> That is a bit of projection there.
No. The ones who BELIEVE that things will 'just' be 'okay' if they just leave things to 'the market' are repeating the Christianity's format of faith. That there is a 'good god' that will just make everything 'okay'. That's why it is faith.
> Individualism is about the rejection of a "higher power", in your case this higher power is "the state" having replaced a god or gods
Organized, well equipped and trained authoritarian forces do not give zit about the rejection of their authority by the individual people. The moment you lose the guarantor of your freedom and rights - the democratically owned and controlled society - is the moment you are a subject of the strongest armed bunch nearby.
> Modern society was build by voluntary exchange of free individuals, not government.
The modern society was built by literally the organized French Revolutionaries deposing the aristocracy, making everyone equal and creating a social and legal system that ensured that. There hasn't been any 'voluntary exchange' of power on the side of armed, organized minority tyrants.
Neither the society was formed in American Wild West, where if you were upset with your local environment, you could just kill some more Indians and steal their land and prop yourself up on the stolen land in the most libertarian fashion.
Such philosophy is great while there is free land to take. The moment the free land runs out, things change. Just like how it happened at the end of 19th century in the US.
> the entire US model of government is build on the fact that freedoms and rights need to be protected FROM government
Yes. And that's why the US is in knee-deep sh*t. Becaue large slaveowners who had gigantic amount of land, wanted to protect their land from redistribution like how it was done to the deposed English nobility. Hence you got 'checks and balances' to prevent the democratic majority from asserting their will, with an openly declared intention by the architect of your constitution, John Adams, that the 'opulent' (rich) must be protected from the 'tyranny of the majority' (the people).
And as a result, you are killing your people when they cant pay for healthcare, 42 million working families are suffering hunger, you are still paying the $4 trillion Iraqi war debt that you accrued for the privilege of murdering 1 million Iraqis, and your infrastructure is failing.
But hey - the rich are far richer. So that is 'okay'.
>If non-income based taxation worked, societies would be using it.
They do, very successfully and most of the government services you and others have aurgued with me about income tax providing are not infact provided for by income taxes in the US. Roads, Schools, Police, Fire, etc almost none of that is funded by Income Taxes, it is funded by Property Taxes, Sales Taxes,and excise taxes.
In the US income Taxation is used for 4 main things. Social programs, National Defense, Science (Nasa, etc) and Administration / regulation
>the democratically owned and controlled society
Ahh the religion of democracy. also known as 2 wolves and a lamb voting for what they will have for dinner. This idea that democracy "provides" rights is laughable for anyone that understands anything about history which clearly you do not
>you are still paying the $4 trillion Iraqi war debt that you accrued for the privilege of murdering 1 million Iraqis, and your infrastructure is failing.
It si very ironic that you defend income based taxation, most likely because your socialist mind believes that is the way to "eat the rich" never realizing that income based taxation is the fuel for the engine of the war machine, and absent income based taxation the government would not have the ability to use the war machine in that manner. You are defending the very tool they use to murder people but you are soo blinded by your jealousy of the rich you believe would get ahead under a non-income based system you fail to understand that the rich WANT an income based system of taxation, that income based taxation is regressive (not progressive like proponents of the so called progressive income tax claim), and that a single tax system could be used to create universal income, and would actually help reduce income inequality
Smash the State, Eat the Rich[1]. The freed market, without all the distortions and giveaways by the state such as price and wage controls, licensing and safety requirements, limited liability, costly regulation, capitalization requirements, quantitative easing, financial regulation, zoning requirements, protectionist trade policy, intellectual property laws, and various other barriers to entry all promote centralization and cartelization, is truly an equalizing force
> They do, very successfully and most of the government services you and others have aurgued with me about income tax providing are not infact provided for by income taxes in the US. Roads, Schools, Police, Fire, etc almost none of that is funded by Income Taxes, it is funded by Property Taxes, Sales Taxes,and excise taxes.
US police is not an example of anything. They are literally fining people to fill their quotas to support the budget, leave aside their murderous practices. American schools neither are - the quality of American education has gone downhill since state-subsidized education was done for. Your roads are literally disintegrating, brigdges are falling down as people drive on it.
No. Those schemes just do not work. They never worked in history for any society, and they don't seem like working in the US.
> Ahh the religion of democracy. also known as 2 wolves and a lamb voting for what they will have for dinner.
That's your endemic American problem thanks to your two party system due to FPTP and your anti-government indoctrination. Government and democracy pretty much work well anywhere else in the world.
> the rich WANT an income based system of taxation
The rich don't want any taxation. The rich want the late 19th century environment in which they could just buy and own anything. The only way that they were reined in was after T. Roosevelt brought all those pesky antitrust regulations and FDR piled up the taxes and social programs. Otherwise it was a Dickensian world.
> is truly an equalizing force
The free market handed over ENTIRE US to ~12 robber barons to own when it was as free as possible in the late 1800s.
Randian 'free cities' and environments ended up in hellholes.
https://www.gawker.com/ayn-rands-capitalist-paradise-is-now-...
The decline of central state allowed local feudal lords to rise and own everything and everyone toward the end of Roman empire.
Chinese history is full of examples repeating the same, the 'free' market giving way to warlords who stomped down people like you when they had the chance.
We have been there, done that. And yet here you are, still PREACHING the same thing from a country that KILLS its people if they cant pay for healthcare.
That's why it is called a belief, a religion. For there isn't anything other than your faith backing it.
> because IMO income based taxation is theft
Only in the ultra far right US. Where everything works so perfectly because of that belief.
https://www.businessinsider.com/asce-gives-us-infrastructure...
Taxes are the membership fee of society
There are many public finance options to fund society in more equal way than taking a persons labor. If there is anything akin to "wage slavery" in modern times it is more because of income tax than anything else
Personal I am supporter of the Henry George Single Tax model to fund society instead of income based taxation
> If there is anything akin to "wage slavery" in modern times it is more because of income tax than anything else
Don't invent stuff to make an argument. Wage slavery is what happens in the 'free market'. The very invention of wage slavery was to make conditions of slavery happen after slavery was abolished so that former slaveowners wouldnt go bankrupt. It was implemented in post civil war US, then it was copied by Brazilian slaveowners when slavery was abolished in Brazil.
Personally I think the only problem with current taxes is the primitive nature of the bands in most cases and that non-labour income is often taxed far less heavily.
Progressive taxation is our most effective tool for ensuring that a few people don't end up owning everything. For those of us who end up wealthier than the rest it's the price you pay for society providing you with a healthy, educated workforce, currency, roads etc.
Well that leads to another problem, because I do not equate government with "society" nor do I believe government is the only, or best way for society to provide " a healthy, educated workforce, currency, roads etc. "
In fact history shows that government is generally pretty poor at providing any of those things
> nor do I believe government is the only, or best way for society to provide " a healthy, educated workforce, currency, roads etc. "
To me the obvious flaw in this type of society has always been that it provides no guard against the concentration of wealth and by proxy power. It works with a theoretical amorphous blob of people who have no ties to location and an infinite supply of land and resources. In reality the populace would quickly become slaves, with the only interest of the organisations in control of their food, shelter, and transport being the extraction of ever larger sums of money.
I'm honestly not sure how someone could look at the state of the corporate world and say "I wish these guys controlled more of my life". We've already seen this type of rent seeking become prominent in digital media and it hasn't improved anything for the populace.
The profit motive is functional enough for things that aren't necessities but we know exactly what happens when a profit driven entity has a near or local monopoly on something necessary for life. Look to the early railroads and company towns as an example.
> In fact history shows that government is generally pretty poor at providing any of those things
That's a bold claim without any proof. I'd argue the opposite. The vast majority of the population is now both numerate and literate and most countries have a usable road and rail network that's accessible to everyone. Beyond that government programs have been responsible for the eradication of multiple diseases.
> In fact history shows that government is generally pretty poor at providing any of those things
And who does history shows as being better at it?
More of a hostage situation given one can’t opt out of said society nor has a choice in joining it.
> Well now we are going to get into more unpopular hot takes, because IMO income based taxation is theft....
Most of the other replies to this point are not really that helpful. The actual economic point is that since income taxes apply to /everyone/, they do not make you in particular less rich, because your relative amount of money is maintained. In fact, they're one of the main things making the currency valuable by providing demand for it, so you could say they're what make you rich.
VATs are more effective taxes at collecting revenue though, which is why most European countries use them, but only land value taxes avoid deadweight loss. Thanks Henry George.
you'll get older and things will happen to you. at some point, before you die unless you die in a catastrophic situation, you won't be capable of working anymore. it's just facts of life.
Dont worry my eating habits and lack of exercise will likely ensure I will die in that catastrophic situation you speak of
When I take your property by force, do you plan to hire a security team to get it back, and then hope that I don’t have more money, and a bigger security team? Or are you one of these libertarians that suddenly sees the value in a government that enshrines in law the concept of “property rights” and implements enforcement?
Grey mass is a huge problem in most of Europe and we do realize most people want children and not break their back trying to fund them.
There are better solutions (teaching individuals to be more financially responsible and kicking overly rich capitalists to the curb, for one) but that's preaching to the choir.
Plus cue in the shock of US Employees, when they realize his court costs to sue his employer were less than 500 dollars.
This isn't harmonized across the EU though, e.g. in German labor courts each side pays their own fees and lawyers regardless of outcome. So even a completely illegal action by your employer can/will still cost you hundreds to thousands of euros when you go and fight it. (The flip side is you don't have to pay for a team of expensive corpo-lawyers in case you loose)
The rules depend on what court you go to. In the first instance, both sides pay their own lawyers, but the court fees are paid by the loosing party (1). The fees are usually not very high, so that‘s not much of a barrier. On an appeal, the loosing party pays all fees, including the opponents lawyers (1).
Being in a union pays off in labor court: Unions usually offer sending their legal staff instead of a lawyer that you‘d need to personally retain. This substantially reduces the costs of a court case for the employee.
See https://www.klugo.de/ratgeber/arbeitsgericht-kosten
(1) or shared, on partial wins.
You're applying the American Rule backwards. There is no default presumption in the US legal system that you pay the winner's legal fees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...
Most people in germany (at least the ones with common sense) have a "Arbeitsrechtsschutz", a insurance which covers legal fees, a lawyer and so on. As this insurance is very cheap (i pay around 30 Euros a month) i can only recommend this for anyone working in germany.
In Norwegian civil court, the loser pays the legal bills for both. It may seem a bit harsh, but it does prevent frivolous law suits.
For work related cases, if you are in a union, they will foot the bill in most cases.
The loser doesn't always pay for both. In some cases (well, many actually), or at least in cases where party A sues party B and loses, the court decides that it wasn't all clear-cut and party A was right to get a resolution through the court system. In that case both may end up paying their respective legal bills.
I wonder if this makes court cases a pretty high stakes game for even the smallest of issues? Interesting concept all the same.
At least in Finland it still makes things quite ugly from cost perspective. It is not uncommon to read about cases where costs are in tens of thousand for real-estate. Probably one of the more common things to take in court.
> I wonder if this makes court cases a pretty high stakes game
Stay away from courts! If your case goes before a judge, you're in casino country. Unless you're on the hook for some criminal offence, tell your lawyer to negotiate a settlement. Once a civil case comes before a judge, that usually means that there's a legal issue to be decided that nobody agrees on, which means that you can't predict how the cookie might crumble.
Honestly I'd just have asked my union to deal with it... but that a little more in membership fee, compared to the €585, but it would have gotten me a lawyer who understands labour laws.
Filing fees. There's still a legal fee threshold.
Or basically any labour laws. "You mean you can't just be on call with a 5 minute SLA for 14 days straight non-stop?
“Hey so the way we do on-call is violating labour laws for all EU employees”. I’ve had very fun conversations with HR and Legal about this.
There’s so many fun things. Mandatory rest periods, on-call on weekends in some countries requiring additional work, having to actually pay people, needing to provide them with the equipment to be on-call (phone and subscription) and on it goes.
> I love it when US companies meet Dutch labor laws.
This is the first time I've heard of any US company requiring an employee to keep a camera on themselves 9 hours per day. Obviously, that's not some standard US company practice.
I wouldn't be surprised if these same practices would fail in a US court.
This. I have worked at a number of US employers, and if a US employee sued over similar circumstances, they would almost certainly win (IANAL). There's a whole long process that you need to go through to fire someone, especially if the organization is medium to large, and far more serious sounding infractions have been found to be insufficient cause for firing. Given that he said he was already sharing his screen, it's hard to see why a webcam would be a legally defensible requirement, even in the U.S.
One big difference is the variability of the outcome in the U.S. You might get a result where such a firing is upheld, or you might get several million $ in punitive damages. Most companies don't care to roll the dice.
Some in-office workers in US, usually unknowingly, have their desktop web cam and other monitoring tools recording them at all times. It's sad and disgusting to say the least.
Last employer did this without the status led turned on. They also recorded, keystrokes, push notifications attached to volume changes and media players, used sslstrip/mitm on web traffic, among other things.
Sadly, wouldn't be surprised if the same has carried over to remote.
I recently did an interview with a German company, and they had the same requirement. They mentioned it early on, and it was probably the shortest interview I ever did.
It's been coming up a lot, especially since the pandemic started. Sadly this isn't an extreme example.
While quality of life in Europe is still great, EU GDP share of the world going down is starting to effect European people more (especially now with the proxy war between US and Russia).
I wish Europeans were a bit more business savy and corporate, and not see businesses as just bad things that are part of life, but of course when I’m in US I see the other extreme where businesses want to extract all value from me all the time, and it gets tiring.
Quite honestly, if anything, I think we (and I truly mean nearly everyone here) in the EU have far more than necessary to have a decent life and doing anything more "business savy" would not have any positive effect on our lives at all. Yes, maybe we could make a little bit more money by being more business crazy, but what's the point if you get nothing you actually desire in return?
This is one of the culture differences between the US and EU for alot of people (though this is changing in the US)
Personally I value my "work". That is not to say I value my efforts for my employer which makes this hard to explain.
I do not find value is laying around, vacationing, sports, or any other traditional "leisure" activity. I like to work
So even when I am not "working" for pay for my employer, I am still working. I am going a personal coding project, or working on my home, or working on my car, or working in some other way.
I work... weather it is for pay, for my own personal pleasure.
> I am going a personal coding project, or working on my home, or working on my car, or working in some other way
That's not working, that's having hobbies (and it's a good thing)
>>Most of their regrets revolved around their family and how they wish relationships, usually either with their children or between their children
I am willing to bet, that if you met many of these people in the 40's and 50;'s (where I am today) they would have the same statements.
I too sometimes regret I am not closer with family, or have more "friends" but at the same time I do not have the desire to change that reality at all...
It is complex psychological problem for me I have always since my teens been a "loner", I do not have the mental stamina to be around people for long periods of time. Once of the reasons I would attracted to computer programming, even when working in a "team" you work alone for large periods of time.
To be clear I am not really a introvert or rather I am both an introvert and an extrovert when the situation requires it, I can carry a conversion, I can be "the life the room" but I find it mentally draining and exhausting to the point where if I am at a conference for example, I need a few days completely alone after to decompress.
So sure I sometimes regret that was not born with the mental gift of being able form these close continual bonds with people... but at the same time I dont have the desire to change that element of myself... if that makes any sense at all.
Oh please. EU countries have more stakes in that conflict considering some of them would be next to be attacked if Russia won in Ukraine.
The Russia is an actual threat for EU countries. Which is why the biggest hawks in that conflict are EU countries.
The biggest hawks are former soviet counties - the big EU countries to the West have not done their part. Germany has supported Russia for years.
No they aren't. Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal are staying away from it as much as possible. Many central European countries, the same. This is an Anglosaxon + Germanic project, with the addition of Poland. Its their war.
...
There can be no bigger enemy than the country that blew up European pipelines to sink European industry.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-09/european-...
I'm not sure how much of a Germany's war is this. From what I gather, if we had any kind of deal to stop the war tomorrow, they would be more than happy and eager to start discussing (energy) business again.
Also, Greece is not staying as away as you may think. First EU country to send military supplies to Ukraine. Supplies were complete junk btw, so you can even call it a lose-lose gesture. Worse, the only external country who has a PM stupid enough to say in an interview "we are at war with Russia" [1].
[1] https://www.tovima.gr/2022/09/22/international/mitsotakis-de...
> I'm not sure how much of a Germany's war is this
It definitely is not Germany's war. Various openly-published American think tank papers openly call for German industry's destruction and outline plans for it. One example went viral recently.
> if we had any kind of deal to stop the war tomorrow, they would be more than happy and eager to start discussing (energy) business again.
Yep, after the US literally went ahead and blew up the pipes when things looked like settling down, many German establishment figures seem to have changed their minds. But it may be too late. Even if repairs start tomorrow and both pipelines open, its unlikely that they will complete before the winter is over. And that will likely castrate German industry.
> Also, Greece is not staying as away as you may think. First EU country to send military supplies to Ukraine. Supplies were complete junk
Lol, Spain did the same - first it sent a few thousand rifles that were practically remnant of the Spanish Civil War or early WW2. Then it offered to send Leopard tanks IF Germany gave permission - therefore throwing the ball on Germany's court. Of course Germany couldn't allow it, so the tanks were not sent. Then in the 3rd run, when pressured to send artillery shells, they just sent some 150mm shells which may or may not be usable in the equipment that the US gave Ukraine.
Greece is FAR ahead of Spain: Currently Europe is STILL buying Russian oil. But it is now 'Greek' oil. As long as you have at most 49% Russian-sourced oil, your oil is not Russian oil. So you can sell as much as you want. Greece had been doing crazy business. It may end up as the country that comes ahead of all others in the crisis.
As a very ironic note, Latvia is also selling Russian oil. Shiploads of it. But its 'Latvian oil' since its only 49% Russian.
It looks like business does not follow rhetoric.
you really should stop spreading misinformation
You will be shocked to find out that Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia are all EU countries. All are full members actually - no less then Italy or France.
And yes, Italy is rather pro-Russia.
And you are wrong in other way too - Germany does everything possible to not deliver arms to Ukraine. They are tempted by that Russian money and did not get off the imperial against east thinking entirely.
Traditional Russian enemies, coupled with a few central European states. Much smaller economies of the Eu, leave aside not founding members, less, members of the G7.
> And yes, Italy is rather pro-Russia.
Its not "rather". Entire south Europe wants to avoid this US proxy war.
> They are tempted by that Russian money and did not get off the imperial against east thinking entirely.
Yeah, instead they should drop whatever thinking they have, become an Angloamerican colony, and get into an actual war with Russia on their behalf. Sure makes sense.
> especially now with the proxy war between US and Russia
This is not a proxy war between the US and Russia. Ukraine nor Russia started this conflict at the behest or instigation of the US. The US (and NATO, the entire western world really) are supportive of Ukraine but it's important to note that Ukraine is not a puppet of the US and that Putin started this conflict.
The war is "between" Russia and Ukraine but the US is funding and arming Ukraine because the US wants to hurt Russia. How is that not the dictionary definition of a "proxy war"?
Swap the US and Russia and replace "Ukraine" with "North Vietnam" and you have a historical conflict which everyone agrees was a proxy war. How is this different?
> because the US wants to hurt Russia
You seem to forget Ukraine in this equation entirely, you know, the country that is the victim of Russian aggression including murder of civilians, rape, and theft.
They are constantly begging for help to fight the invaders. Is it remotely possible that's why the US is helping for this reason and to stop Russian aggression?
Any "hurt" Russia receives is entirely self inflicted. This is a war of their choice.
Is it just the US that’s doing this only to hurt Russia? What about the countries that are facing very real consequences to join them? And the countries that have abandoned their long-standing neutrality in order to do so? Could it actually be that all of these countries including the US just actually find it deeply offensive that Russia has decided it’s ok to invade a country and commit atrocities all so that they can tell a free people that, no, you are not allowed to be a free people.
Basically all of Europe is arming Ukraine because Europe knows that if Russia takes Ukraine, Russia will eventually want to annex all other ex-USSR states as well. If not more.
> Russia will eventually want to annex all other ex-USSR states as well
I don't know how people buy such uninformed BS. First, a lot of ex-USSR states are already NATO members. So, no game.
Further, USSR was a political construct. Their whole expansionism was based on that. Russia on the other hand is a nation state. They are not capable of annexing any region where there is no Russian-speaking + Russia-aligned population. Putin knows that very well.
As put by people who probably know better [1]:
[1] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russia-not-soviet-union...One obvious difference between the Soviet Union and Russia is that the Soviet governing elite embraced Marxism-Leninism and its objective of world revolution. Today's Russia is not a messianic power.Have you looked at a map? You are forgetting about Moldova, which already has Russian military bases "protecting" Russians in a small strip at the border to Ukraine, effectively occupying land.
Then you are forgetting about Georgia where Russia fought a war in 2008 resulting in Russia creating South Ossetia on Georgian land. Exactly the thing they now tried to do with Luhansk and Donetsk.
Then there is Kazakhstan where Russia did a military intervention to support the government in 2022, this year! Although, Kazakhstan seems to want to sever the ties to Russia now.
I have a feeling that you don't know anything about this topic and just read a single article and now feel informed while in reality you were hit by Russian propaganda. The author of the article you posted thinks that NATO made Russia invade Ukraine by expanding to far East, explicitly following Russian talking points.
EU countries are funding and arming Ukraine too. Baltic states and Poland are the ones pushing the most for support for Ukraine.
And obviously, all actual fighting and dying is done by Ukrainians. They are the ones being tortured and oppressed on occupied territories too. If Russia won, all Ukrainians would be oppressed by Russia.
It could be argued it’s a proxy war between NATO and some… unknown world power, with Russia as a proxy. Although I don’t think Chinese would be able to pull it off.
> I wish Europeans were a bit more business savy and corporate
Seeing how well that worked for the US, no thanks.
The only reason European GDP is going down is because of 10-year-long trade war that was started circa 2005 by the US. It started with tariffs back then, moved onto trying to push NAFTA-like 'trade deals' via TTIP etc, and when all failed, they just blew the pipeline.
Judging from what was done to Japan with 'Plaza Accords', there is no guilt or responsibility of the targeted country and their people in this. Japanese were and still are the most sacrificing, hardworking workers. And yet, after accepting the terms that the US forced on them with those accords, Japanese economy is still in ruins.
The Japanese economy is healthy relative to the rest of the world but it's true that Japanese people are too poor and are not getting better fast enough. But this is mostly because "sacrificing and hardworking" was a dumb thing to set up the country to be. They were worried about people having too much free time so set up a super unproductive structure where every man was in the office 12 hours a day, gets micromanaged, and barely does any real work.
Of course, that's an old picture of the country; ~10 years ago when everyone though of Tokyo as a place where kids hung out on the street in cool fashion all day, that's because those kids were unemployed because they weren't willing to become salarymen. And there has been real reform towards productivity since then.
Also, Japan’s Phillips Curve looks like Japan.
> The Japanese economy is healthy relative to the rest of the world
It is frozen at the exact size and breadth that US wanted to freeze it. Its a literal economic colony.
> But this is mostly because "sacrificing and hardworking" was a dumb thing to set up the country to be
It worked until 1991.
I very much recommedn reading about the Plaza Accords.
Impressive you think the US can influence other countries that long. We can't even stop Saudi Arabia from raising gas prices whenever they want to annoy us.
> Impressive you think the US can influence other countries that long
Up until recently, it was a given. In the case of Japan, there is some kind of feudal behavior of 'loyalty' that comes from the Zaibatsu culture. Which in itself descended from postwar Yakuza.
> We can't even stop Saudi Arabia from raising gas prices whenever they want to annoy us.
You used to. Until Russia & China built up enough defense industry and also started helping any country against US coups and color revolutions by providing intelligence.
You say that, but stories like this will just mean US companies hire fewer Dutch remotes.
I’ve already seen it happen, after legal claims using “lines of code” to assert ownership of the code base.
My impression is that the Dutch labour laws are mostly designed for working-class employees, and they actually work fairly well for that, but once you move up in the pay range it starts breaking down. I've worked at several businesses that had expensive "unfirable" employees, and if people decide to be difficult they can draw out the firing process for years.
I've been let go earlier this year in spite of good performance reviews because they thought I'd probably do fine, but weren't 100% sure and they didn't want to take the financial risk of being "stuck" with me.
American companies are not as innovative as they think- they just want to turn back the clock to the 19th century.
You're telling me it's not innovative to run psychological experiments on children without any approval from an ethics board? Sounds pretty innovative to me
I do not, since they invariably flee back to the US before ponying up anything they deem unreasonable.
Coming from the ‘land of the free’ that’s basically anything.
Which is why you make 50% less by the way. Not dumping on the laws, which I think are great, and are probably worth it overall, but there is a cost.
> Which is why you make 50% less by the way
They make 50% less. And they don't have to pay $1000 per head for private insurance, more for other insurance, $3000/month for being able to be a roommate in a 30 m2 apartment. Also they have disability, reasonable retirement, paid vacations and everything that are pretty much nonexistent for American employees.
If you use some extreme examples then sure living in the US can be very expensive. But for most of us the things are not this bad. I am a professor and even with the academic pay I save about 30% of my salary even after paying all the expenses. The key is to live in a lower cost US state where the salaries are still quite high compared to most of the world.
> But for most of us the things are not this bad. I am a professor
If you are a professor, you are not one of the 'most of us'. For most, things are really that bad.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/americas-dirty-little-secret...
There are millions of working families where both parents and even children work and yet they still suffer hunger.
My comment unintentionally sounded like I was talking about all the other Americans. I meant to say most of us in the middle class. I am acutely aware that poverty in the US is real. When I talk to my academic friends in Europe and we compare salaries (it's quite common to do that because in the US our salaries are public if we work in state universities), we usually come out with the conclusion that in the US we have a lot more liquidity after accounting for pension, medical, housing, and other expenses.
But isn't that a completely unfair comparison?
"Yeah, if you disregard all the poor people that struggle to stay alive, us rich people are generally much richer".
I think your exact statement is probably true. Because most European countries tries to distribute wealth in such a way that everyone gets to live, with food, healthcare, education and housing. And naturally that means that the 50% wealthiest in Europe are less wealthy than the 50% wealthiest in the US.
But the 50% poorest in Europe are much wealthier than the 50% poorest in the US.
> I meant to say most of us in the middle class
I know that you Americans use the word 'middle class' in place of 'working class'. No, a professor would not be 'working class'. Its lower upper class at the least. Both in Europe and the US.
Even for the public university case, the Europeans have benefits that you likely don't calculate. From getting state-subsidies per child to rent control to many different things. You shouldnt calculate the difference just over pension, medical and housing.
Same, being DINKs we literally save 85% of our monthly cash flow while maxing out two IRAs, two employer matched 401ks, and two HSAs, and carry no debt.
We don’t even make that much by US coastal standards.
My retired grandparents have total monthly expenses of $3k but make $12k/mo from their pensions plus around a million in retirement accounts. Their entire careers they barely made more than the median household income and had kids.
The advantage of making a lot of money in expensive cities is you get an amazing deal when you pay “world rates” for things. But living in cheap medium size cities gives you an absolutely fucktonne of purchasing power. Our total monthly expenses including rent, utilities, internet, food, insurances, gas is less than $2.5k and we live in a nice well appointed flat.
Yeah, so we still come out about $1000/month behind after the salaries.
For a software engineer, I’m not sure if the Netherlands makes sense. For everyone else, I’m almost certain it does.
The median Dutch person makes more per working hour than the median American. They just work around 400hrs per year less.
Depends, America is a good place for the upper middle class and a paradise for millionaires. The rest of society-the majority lest we forget- is not so well off.
It's about the bottom 10th percentile in the US that's worse off. The American middle class (median household) is better off than almost any other country, and that's including healthcare costs. We're so rich it makes up for all our other problems!
https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1466794872648650752
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD_Better_Life_Index#2020
I think a more interesting point is that people in the UK and Japan specifically are poorer than you'd think they are. And they don't have working clothes dryers either.
A first glance, this may sound like a case of a bad US company meeting reasonable labor laws, but Euro laws of often unreasonably restrictive. Companies choose to leave entirely, as happened here. How many people lost their jobs so this one person could have their payout? This company definitely sucks, but still unfortunate for others caught in the crossfire.
I think we will be okay without this kind of company, given employment rate is one of the highest in the world and a main problem at the moment is labor shortages... But thanks for your "concern"
> Less than a week after the plaintiff was fired, the Rijswijk branch of Chetu Inc. was deregistered from the Chamber of Commerce and shut down on 2 September, records show.
So, it's a fair assumption that no organisation in the Netherlands is going to pay out as a result of this.
What are the chances of the employee being able to enforce this judgment in a Florida court?
There may be another way for the employee to get his money: Provided that the company still has a bank account somewhere in the EU (except Denmark), a creditor can apply that the funds are to be freezed. The debtor does not have to be informed of this in advance. Then a court order can be obtained to be paid out of the freezed funds.
See: https://e-justice.europa.eu/379/EN/european_account_preserva...
If they’ve deregistered the company, presumably they drained the accounts too.
Cross border collections are a thing between western nations. After all, US courts want to collect damages from EU countries as well.
It takes time and usually isn't worth for small amounts... But for 75k someone will take time.
I believe most European countries require some kind of employee liability insurance that will end up paying this.
Looking at their website [1] they still have a location (branch?) in the UK. I don't know how Brexit changed the legal frameworks between the UK and EU, but I would assume that could be a avenue to get some enforcement.
The UK (together with Denmark) was never part of the European Account Preservation Order, established in 2017. So the comparatively easy EU process to freez funds in another EU country was never possible there. What is possible according to UK law, I do not know.
It is possible to get a freezing order through the courts to freeze assets like land, property, bank accounts, etc.
It operates similarly to the European Account Preservation Order, and under the right circumstances it is possible to apply for a freezing order on a _without notice_ basis meaning that the employer would not be aware of the order until it is issued.
They'll collect eventually, and Chetu will have to pay interest on the late payments on top of it all. The longer the process takes, the more they pay.
I was of the understanding that you cannot open a business in the Netherlands if you are not resident or have no local office - or does it simply require you have employees and pay the relevant taxes? It seems too easy for the owner to have gotten out of this without recourse.
There is a mechanism to get civil lawsuits results registered accross borders for collection, I don't know how difficult it is to use.
Home is not owned by employer. So for this type of surveillance employer should get consent from all inhabitants.
It's very easy to see that such a consent cannot be given freely, only coerced.
It's very easy to see that most of capital-labor relations fall into this category.
"insubordination"
wtf, was this a job or a prison camp?
As others said, the dutch term is probably different.
Their (bad) legal argument was. He refused to follow work instructions, hence he did not perform his work as required, hence we can fire him "op staande voet" which is an on the spot firing that does not require a long process of attempting to improve employee performance. They needed a 'op staande voet' firing because the long process takes months. The justifications for this are limited to things like "theft or fraud", "Threatening or causing Grievous insult", "repeated innebriation" (called out specifically in law), or "refusing a task".
That final cause "Refusing a task" ,or in dutch, quoting from the law: "wanneer de werknemer hardnekkig weigert te voldoen aan redelijke bevelen of opdrachten, hem door of namens de werkgever verstrekt", can be translated to insubordination. A full translation of the dutch phrasing would be: "when the employee persistently refuses to comply with reasonable orders or instructions issued to him by or on behalf of the employer". Hence the company argued that "turn on your webcam all working day" was a "reasonable order or instruction issued by the employer".
Note that the story mentions this was during a "Corrective Action Program". That sounds like they were already in the firing process. Which starts with a process of notifying an employee their performance is not good enough, and requires they are offered a chance to improve. This 'offering a chance to improve' is usually done by putting employees on a 'performance improvement plan'. I believe many US states have similar procedures.
> I believe many US states have similar procedures.
Most US companies follow similar procedures because they are a sensible thing to do. But 49 out of 50 US states have "at will" employment which means that employers can fire any employee at any time for no reason at all.
"At will" employment, especially for larger organizations, does not mean this. There are lots and lots of cases of employees, in nearly every state, suing for wrongful termination and winning.
US companies follow those procedures because lawyers tell them they'll lose in court if they don't. Sensibility has nothing to do with it.
They have at will firing. When employees choose to leave, not so much: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/us/thedacare-lawsuit-wisc...
(deleted, replied to wrong comment)
I think it’s a bad translation, the actual Dutch word being used is “ongehoorzaamheid”, which means something like “not following the rules”.
I will say that it’s typically used in the context of raising children for example, but it’s definitely acceptable to use this word in Dutch in this context.
"ongehoorzaamheid" means disobedience. Even in the context of raising children it seems pretty unfashionable nowadays. It has the air of authoritarianism that in my experience modern Dutch parents try to avoid. I wouldn't consider it acceptable in the context of employment relationships (except perhaps in military positions).
Then it is a correct translation, as that is what insubordination means.
Yes, a friend raised concerns about his health versus company mandates / peer pressure in an emotional and kind of irritating way and the company Terminated him for that. Still finding out if he’s eligible for unemployment in the US state he lives. Specifically, he wrote that the company’s only option was “not up to his standards” and the Executive who fired him cited that as a reason, because how could an individual possibly have higher standards than him and the company? Hint: it’s not hard because they are malicious hillbillies.
Insubordination is simply refusing a proper direct instruction; for example, refusing to turn on your webcam. I'd argue that instruction wasn't "proper". But one of the legitimate grounds for dismissal is refusing to do what you're told. After all, if you hire someone, and they won't do what you pay them to do, then natural justice would seem to say that you can stop paying them, and hire a replacement.
From what I've read, this employee was indeed insubordinate; but they were entitled to be insubordinate, because the instruction they were given wasn't proper. It would be wrong to court-martial a soldier, for example, if they refused an order to murder PoWs, even though prima facie that would be insubordination.
The term seems fine to me. Actions of the company absurd, but I don’t associate that word with just a prison camp type situation.
Judging by their webpage they seem like a classic body shop making a living on selling cheaper EU devs to US firms.
Its hilarious that on the 3rd line they say "quality software is important to us..."; and immediately following is jquery soup.
same thing in the states
Seems an appropriate word...
"Insubordination is the act of willfully disobeying a lawful order of one's superior."
Your boss is your superior, so disobeying what he asks of you is insubordination.
> ... lawful order ...
That's why it is not insubordination, the order must be lawful. Your boss is your superior but there are plenty of possible scenarios where disobeying their orders is not insubordination. Besides that, your boss is not in a position to give you orders. It is a work place not a prison or a platoon.
In modern times insubordination is almost always related to military contexts.
Nah, insubordination is a very common term in employment law.
It depends on where you live, at least in Europe most people would find the word inappropriate. For us here "disobedience" or something alike would be a better term.
I disagree (and am European, and a union rep for many years). Subordination is what I expect from an employee and obedience from a dog.
Subordination is a role you opt into. Obedience is something you can't get away from.
You take a job as mailman and then you are a subordinate to the postmaster. Refusing to carry out sensible and appropriate orders (without a valid reason) is insubordination and grounds for being fired (more or less) on the spot, even in Scandinavia.
What counts as an appropriate order and a valid ground for refusal is probably very different in different regions/countries/states, but the basic dynamic is not.
Subordination:
1. The act of subordinating, subjecting, or placing in a lower order, rank, or position, or in proper degrees of rank; also, the state of being subordinate or inferior; inferiority of rank or dignity.
2. Degree of lesser rank.
3. The state of being under control of government; subjection to rule; habit of obedience to orders.
4. The act of subordinating, placing in a lower order, or subjecting.
5. The quality or state of being subordinate or inferior to an other; inferiority of rank or dignity; subjection.
6. Place of inferior rank.
7. The process of making something subordinate.
8. The property of being subordinate.
9. The quality of being properly obedient to a superior (as a superior officer).
As you see when you expect your dog to be obedient your are placing yourself on a higher rank, so your dog is your subordinate.
When you expect your employee to be subordinate your are expecting him to obey when something is asked or tasked from ranks higher than their's in your organization. Your are also expecting him to obey to what is written in the subordination contract signed by both.
Wikipedia: obedience, in human behavior, is a form of "social influence in which a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure".
What I think to be the main issue is the word "order". IMHO an order is not something that might exist in a workplace, with few exceptions. Your boss gives you tasks and expect you to execute them remaining inside a more or less explicit set of rules, your boss cannot give you orders.
Insubordination is an english word, and it is written into employment law as grounds for immediate dismissal. "Disobedience" isn't. Basically, if you take a paid job, you subordinate yourself to your boss.
> The resident of Diessen, Noord-Brabant, was hired by the the Rijswijk branch of Chetu Inc.
We are talking about a Danish person hired by an European company. I fail to see the point of your comment.
Whether the order was lawful is exactly what the suit was about
If you pick it apart, it really means failure to put yourself below.
Outside of acknowledged overt heirarchy like the military where the strict heirarchy has a defensible purpose (there is always some sort of heirarchy, but only in something like a military is a pathological form of it justified) you are theoretically always equal to anyone else, and your order-taking is merely a very limited commercial transaction. You are not actually subordinate to your boss or anyone else.
There is just this very narrow scope where you have voluntarily agreed to accept some specific kinds of directions in a specific context in return for pay.
Swap subordinate for subservient and I would not consider "insubservience" or "failure to be a servant" a very damning charge and I would look more at anyone who thought it was.
Since the lawsuit was successful, the order given was proven to not be lawful. Thus, not insubordination.
True, but it's still the case that he was fired by his company with the claimed reason of insubordination. I think it's a valid translation given the context (i.e. talking about what they said he did, not about what he actually did.)
Sure, but that wasn't the expectation of the company at the time they called it that.
If the court ruled in their favour it would have been insubordination.
Your boss is just some other person. If he thinks he's superior to anyone else, he can fuck right off. He'll end up as worm food just like the rest of us.
Most certainly but that’s not the point. The point is that companies are structured so that division of labour flows from a core group deciding the strategical priorities towards more specialised groups and ultimately line workers through levels of organisation making tasks more and more specific along the way. As a salaried worker, provided it was in your contract, you can’t entirely refuse to do what’s asked of you by the strata defining your work and expect to keep your position.
Thankfully, in Europe, unions have harshly fought for somewhat fair employment laws and this relationship only applies to actual work and not the whimsies of your boss.
I think you're right about things like chain of command; most companies are hierarchical in this way. But I think there's a fallacy that's widely believed that people "at the top" see things more clearly than those... not at the "top". I think we see very little no matter where we are, and we have to rely on each other to get the whole picture. To me, this indicates that a more flat structure makes sense: I'm good at the tech thing, you're good at the budgeting thing, if suddenly you stop being good at the budgeting thing I want someone else to do it, and vice versa.
The amount of people that advocate in favour of master-servant mentality is appallingly high. No wonder there are so many that prefer working in human farms.
Indeed.
Not to mention that the company was already monitoring keystrokes and requiring screen sharing. This indeed is some slavery mindset.
> Definition of superior (Entry 1 of 2) 1 : situated higher up : UPPER 2 : of higher rank, quality, or importance
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/superior
Boss is by definition superior to your position, not in a sense better, but higher.
not higher. the graph is topologically unchanged if you draw it with the CEO at the bottom, and so on.
don’t be hoodwinked by bad analogies, or the arbitrary demands of insecure narcissists
Well, I mean your boss can fire you from the company but you can not fire your boss from the company. So in that sense they are "superior".
Sorry, but no. That is a falsifiable statement in just about every respect and possible interpretation. The implied assumptions about everything from employment law to the notion that in all work environments everyone has a “boss”, let alone the meaning of that term, are far from universal.
The world just isn’t that limited, thankfully.
Tip: think about why you had to put “superior” in quotes.
You seem to have missed the word "lawful".
lawful just means the order itself wasn't illegal. It doesn't mean that it's "enforcing the law"
If I tell you to go buy 10 apples, refusing would be insubordination because it's legal to buy apples.
If I tell you to go steal 10 apples, refusing would not be insubordination because it's legal to buy apples.
Until the court ruled against them, the view of the firm would have been it was legal to require someone to have their camera on. Hence they viewed it as insubordination to refuse.
They are wrong, it's not insubordination, but it's not unfair of them to think it was.
There is also the word "reasonable". In civil law countries like Netherlands, that actually means something. One can argue that even if being ordered to turn on the webcam all day is not illegal, it is still an unreasonable request e.g. because it infringes on privacy too much.
The employer disagreed and so called it insubordination.
The employer was also found wrong by a court.
No. It would only be lawful if you were legally entitled to require him to buy apples.
as it's only insubordination if they were entitled to require him to buy apples. if i tell my friend or my brother to buy apples, and he says no, then that's not insubordination
It's always something toxic when it comes to US companies. I had to do multiple background checks. In Romania they are unheard of.
Were the background checks for a remote job? That would makes sense. Employing someone several thousands miles away in a foreign country requires a certain amount of due diligence, especially to keep the (tax) authorities happy.
Customer was from US, my company was from Romania. They were forced to do what the customer wanted.
It's hardly a US company. Most people working there are from India.
I’ve never had a background check for any US job I’ve had, other than a government contractor, so this is not universal. I don’t even think it’s normal. Maybe my sample size of 15 or so is just non-representative, though. I don’t tend to apply to the sorts of firms that specialize in bureaucracy.
I would be surprised if you worked at a financial or healthcare company and did not have a basic background check done. It could just be the type of jobs you gravitate towards. It's not really bureaucracy, but a financial company doesn't want to hire someone who already has a financial crime conviction.
>I’ve never had a background check for any US job I’ve had
How would you know? That said, I suspect I have not as the first one was out of school and the few other jobs I've had were all from people I knew.
I signed a release when the employer did a background check on me. And was provided a copy of it. The latter I think is state law here, the former I think is also law but I’m not 100% sure.
Same here. Discovery channel made me sign a release. It’s like whatever, free way for me to check myself as they’re required to give you a copy.
I can believe it's a state law--or even a company just doing it as a matter of CYA policy. I assume it's pretty easy to run a background check without someone knowing though. And of course it's quite common to provide reference although I don't know how commonly companies contact them--I suspect not often.
Doubly so for Florida.
This reminds me when I was contracted by a certain huge US company to write a driver for their new hardware. They… wanted me to take a drug test. It took them three months of me silently ignoring their emails (they had a deadline to meet) to figure it out.
Funny. Most US companies behave much better than companies outside the US. That's why Romanians looking to be hired by US companies and not vice versa (no attempt to offend you or any other Romanian, just stating a fact). This company sounds like a shitty one, the US of course has those like any other country, but it's usually the US ones that get more publicity when things like this happen.(also when good things happen, it goes both ways)
If by "behave better" you mean "pay more"... it's probably be correct.
But when comparing overall US & EU working conditions, it's a very lopsided contest. US employees seem to be abused by European standards: at-will employment, no maternity leave, workplace surveillance, unpaid overtime for salaried employees are illegal pretty much everywhere - even Romania.
> Most US companies behave much better than companies outside the US. That's why Romanians looking to be hired by US companies
No. The reason is compensation.
I personally would take better comp over benefits any day.
Higher comp beats "nice to have" benefits, but it doesn't beat a non-shitty work day every day.
I don't know how much you'd have to pay me to accept to be treated like a child or a slave for eight hours a day, but it's going to be a _multiple_ of what a reasonable boss can get me to work for.
I would never work for a company that required me to have my webcam on for the full work day.
Unfortunately this is well within corporate “go away” money. They’ll gladly dish over 75k to get a threat off their books. It’s the corporate equivalent to stuffing 20 bucks in your pocket in case you’re held up while out on a run and don’t carry your wallet. Add a zero to make it 750k if you want corporations to think about it deeper.
Keep in mind that this is not about punishment but about damages. 75k goes a long way for an individual and afaik we don't have this system of punitive damages. The state might collect punitive money in a criminal case (not a civil case).
Sometimes I feel like it might be good to meet in the middle (i.e. some amount of punishment awarded to the plaintiff, also as compensation for having had to take a corporation to court and presumably spending months in stress), but then I'm not sure where the line should be. Or perhaps a criminal case should be joined onto this, where the same judge (already familiar with all the details) also decides on a punitive amount going to the state.
I doubt 75k is the 20x monthly income financial professionals suggest to carry in case of unexpected unemployment for this position. Works out to less than 15.50/hr.
>Less than a week after the plaintiff was fired, the Rijswijk branch of Chetu Inc. was deregistered from the Chamber of Commerce and shut down on 2 September, records show. The branch was first registered in the Netherlands on 1 June 2013 with the capital declared at 10 million euros.
That doesn’t mean they won’t pay him. Only that they don’t plan to hire in the Netherland anymore. It would be pretty stupid to not pay to be honest. It’s not that much money, would mean keeping an open case in the UE and it’s highly likely they would end up paying anyway though one of the collection mechanisms in place for this kind of case.
Or they’re telling an entire country to “go away” and that’s a big enough indictment against their practices itself. And market power.
I'm sure they will still accept contracts from the Netherlands, they just won't hire anyone locally.
It happens all the time.
Hmmm. The advantage to Chetu of not paying is that other staff get the message that Chetu doesn't pay out, even if you win.
I think for devs the information that the employer watches your every move is pretty important. Portals like glassdoor should introduce a new metric about bossware.
most people i know don't keep cash even in their wallet. Do people even want credit cards or IDs? Even phones track themselves and turn off. What do muggers take these days?
Debit cards and cash, for one. They also will just take the entire wallet and figure out what's valuable later.
Also historically there have been ways to unlock stolen phones so they can be resold "cleanly" later. I don't know what current iPhones are like, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible with Android phones.
It's ironic. My company hired Chetu some years ago. Their devs were doing 20 mins of work, but charging for 8.
We couldn't trust them to do anything.
And Chetu doesn't trust its employees. Heh
I wonder how work culture will devolve from this kind of idea..
If I had a company, I'd much rather that my employees generate value, rather than "looking busy" and "working hard"
Those playing that game are usually managers using employees for the "perception" game and office politics/justifying their own position. It's nonsense.
My last manager was this type and was a big advocate for everyone returning to office, likely for playing this game.
indeed, but if companies start to require the actually-productive employees to participate in this game, and incentivize them based on that participation, things will look bleak.. might even be difficult squeezing any work in between those long sessions of looking busy.
Chetu argued instead that the webcam was no different than if the worker had been present in the office being observed by management.
Is this a company where a manager is literally watching over employees for the whole day? I don't think that's normal outside of things like production lines and other blue-collar type environments.
>there was no urgent reason given to justify the immediate dismissal given.” He alleged that the termination was disproportionate
Damn sweet. I wish we had such great employee protection laws in Austria, where the company/employer can terminate your employment relationship without any reason at all.
>Less than a week after the plaintiff was fired, the Rijswijk branch of Chetu Inc. was deregistered from the Chamber of Commerce and shut down on 2 September, records show
So the company knew they were in the wrong for firing him and immediately shut down their Dutch operations to avoid the lawsuit.
Not true that in Austria you can be terminated for any reason at all. There are protections in place. For example, in the regular case, i.e. 'no urgent reason' there is no such thing as an immediate dismissal, and this can be fought. Of course as always with the law ymmv - but there are many different ways in which your rights as a worker are protected.
See this: https://www.usp.gv.at/mitarbeiter/beendigung-arbeitsverhaelt...
Very similar in Texas - it is called At Will employment. Other states are Right to Work. Each has pros and cons. I’ve only lived and worked in Texas so At Will is very close to “for any reason” as long as it’s not against the law. Don’t like your haircut? They can shut can you on the spot.
On the flip side, if one day you go in and you’ve just had enough of the hourly retail job and think you can get a better one, you can up and walk out then and there. Usually we flash the double V for Victory sign and say “Peace out!” when that’s the case. It’s fun.
I remember working as a waiter once and the Manager started assigning employees cleaning duties like getting on ladders for ceiling vents. Waiters get paid by tips, salary was $2.13 an hour at the time. When he asked me I told him I wouldn’t do it and would call the Workforce Commission if he wanted to push the issue. Needless to say I was the only front of house person not cleaning shit like a chump that day.
"Right to work" is a different concept related to unions, and includes Texas:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
All the states are At Will, but a number of them have exceptions that provide certain protections (ex. Not being fired for following the law):
I love how only some are providing the protection of not being fired for following the law. Can they order you to organize a coup, some terrorist acts, or a murder in the others?
>it is called At Will employment. Other states are Right to Work.
Wtf?
No, "right to work" is not the opposite of "at will," they have almost nothing to do with each other. Furthermore, Texas IS a "right to work" state.
"Right-to-work" laws are laws that make joining a union not a requirement for employment.
All states in the US are "at will" employment.
> Usually we flash the double V for Victory sign and say “Peace out!” when that’s the case. It’s fun.
Sounds like a good way to burn bridges. If I'd show up to work one day and tell them to suck it up for the next few months of planned projects, I do know what kind of reference my boss would provide to future employers.
It's not about loyalty or something, but so long as there isn't anything egregious, it does seem reasonable to me that both sides can expect a notice periods.
>it does seem reasonable to me that both sides can expect a notice periods
Two weeks is pretty customary and normal in the US. A few months of planned projects being a reason you "can't" leave really is not. I generally have projects in some stage of planning going out a while. That wouldn't mean I'm effectively tied to an employer for te duration.
Being booked out 2-5 months ahead is typical for us. Two weeks is effectively zero notice period because you'll almost always have more remaining days of paid time off than that. If we had to account for N people being able to leave effectively on the spot, we'd not be able to sell more than 8-N persons concurrently (we're a small team), at least not more than a few days ahead. At N=1 person, that's already 13% lower turnover for the whole company.
After the trial/probation period where this notice period is not in effect, when I know what the employment is like, I'd much rather get a 13% higher salary and, should I choose to quit, wrap things up properly and do the job for 2-3 more months. (The notice period is not as long as we schedule ahead for: with 2 months' notice, we can find a good freelancer and get the paperwork done without time pressure, or the client can still find another firm in the worst case.)
Since I was fine with doing this job for years now, those months seem insignificant for the benefits that go both ways.
Laws permitting--and I assume any extended notice period would be/should be mutual--companies can put any appropriate terms in their employment contracts. But it's certainly not the norm in the US. I'd expect most common would be two weeks notice and you get paid out for any unused paid time off.
For most people, multiple months notice wouldn't work well. Either you quit without an offer in hand and spend half your remaining time job hunting or you have an offer but your potential new employer won't wait more than a month. I'd certainly think very hard before entering into such an arrangement as it would make getting a new job riskier.
>Not true that in Austria you can be terminated for any reason at all. There are protections in place.
Not true at all what you claim about Austria. There are zero protections in place for workers here unless you're over 50 or work at a place with a union (worker's council) that will fight for you. If you work for a small tech company you have no protections against unfair dismissal. Basically your boss can tell you at any time "in 30 days you won't work here anymore, goodbye" without any reason. Unlike other EU countries where you need to provide a specific legal reason why you're letting an employee go or you can get sued for unfair dismissal like the man in the article did to his former employer.
I spoke to Arbeite Kammer after being dismissed for no reason by a douchebag boss and they told me "your employer doesn't need a reason to dismiss you according to Austrian labor law".
My jaw dropped when I realized that Austria is basically, similar to US in this regard, where you get no protection against unfair dismissal except that here you get about 30-60 day notice period to find another job while you continue to work for your current employer. Austrian employers are even allowed to dismiss you while you're on sick leave. Crazy stuff.
Very backwards employment laws for an EU county.
you seem to mix up something. termination with advance notice is a normal process and pretty much always possible. i doubt there is any country in the world where you can't terminate employees with sufficient advance notice. the periods for advance notice differ but the process is otherwise the same in austria or in germany for example. and i am pretty sure most EU countries are similar. i only heard about france having much stricter rules for termination. so how is austria worse in that regard?
in this particular example, the legal date for termination in austria would have been december 31st (because by default it is 6 weeks notice after august 26, to the nearest quarter) in germany it would have been september 30th.
and for termination without notice
https://www.arbeitnehmer.at/kuendigung/entlassung/
pretty clearly spells out the reasons when someone can be fired, which contradicts your claim that people can be fired for no reason.
>termination with advance notice is a normal process and pretty much always possible. i doubt there is any country in the world where you can't terminate employees with sufficient advance notice
I think you are misunderstanding. Unlike Austria, in most others EU countries you can't terminate employees, even with notice, without providing a reason.
ok, it looks like i was wrong. i thought i read that in germany too employees can be terminated without reason. further search found that to be false.
it seems that austria really is the bad exception here.
I disagree. Austria’s labor protections are fine. If you make rules around dismissals stricter then you greatly harm the ability for a company to hire in the first place. The current rules give you plenty of protection as an employee that you can find a new place of work and not suffer financially.
>Austria’s labor protections are fine
When they're objectively worse than every other EU country, bordering on competing with the US, I can hardly call them "fine".
>If you make rules around dismissals stricter then you greatly harm the ability for a company to hire in the first place.
Please stop parroting the propaganda of the conservative party (ÖVP) who are bought and paid for by the business elite and would gladly tell us working 60h/week is in our best interest. The stricter employee protections in other EU countries haven't harmed the economy or innovations there. Do you see Netherlands or Sweden doing poorly economically because of their better employee protection laws? In fact their innovation and tech sectors are far above Austria's.
Nor did the lack of employee protection laws boost Austria's economic sector. Have you looked at Austrian skilled wages? They earn the lowest wages of all the German speaking countries causing an exodus of doctors and other skilled specialists to Germany and Switzerland, while Austrian devs make Eastern European wages. So how did the lack of worker protections help with this?
Maybe fixing the needlessly complex and conservative bureaucracy and high tax burdens on employers and employees would help improve the Austrian economic sector and make it more competitive and attractive for business, instead of taking away employee rights in a race to the bottom hoping that going the sweatshop route will make it more competitive.
There is a lot I want to fix in Austria from bureaucracy to taxation of stock options and more. The employment law is very fine by me.
If you think that you will get better wages if it’s harder to dismiss employees I have doubts. The main reason devs don’t earn enough in Austria is that it’s hard and expensive to have a business there and that the country is not appealing for employees. That means that the few good IT companies have a small labor pool and need to relocate developers for whom the country is not appealing.
if austria is not appealing for employees, wouldn't that mean that salaries should be higher, to make it more appealing?
Not really, because there are other options around. For a gross salary of 100.000 Euro (which is already high, but not necessarily for software engineers) the employer pays 125.000 Euro, after taxes the employee retains 61.000 Euro. Stock options are generally taxed as income as well.
So the general taxation situation and the complexities in doing business (lots of notaries needed, slow processes) make it unappealing.
>For a gross salary of 100.000 Euro (which is already high, but not necessarily for software engineers
Which companies in Austria pay 100.000 Euro salaries?
The US is the opposite of a third world country.
At one time I was told that it was very easy to fire someone in Denmark. I have no idea how true it is, but it was at a time when the Danish economy was doing much better than the German one, and the anecdote was trying to explain why.
It was a constrast of Denmark, Germany and the US. In Germany it was hard to fire somebody, so employers were reluctant to hire. Denmark & the US had no such troubles, but the difference between Denmark and the US was that a fired employee in the US loses health care, et cetera. OTOH the fired Danish employee falls into the generous Danish social security. The anecdote was that the Danish rules were the best of both worlds.
It's hearsay, but I found it convincing. Austrian social security isn't as good as Denmark's, IIRC, but it's much better than the US's, so perhaps Austria is close to the optimum of the guy telling me that anecdote?
>>So the company knew they were in the wrong for firing him and immediately shut down their Dutch operations to avoid the lawsuit.
Or he was their only Dutch employee so there was no point in keeping their Dutch entity open.
In the UK most people don't know that for the first 2 years of employment you can be let go for any reason(as long as it's legal) or no reason at all. Only after 2 years various employee protections kick in.
However there about 60 reasons that a dismissed employee can claim that it was automatically unfair to fire them, regardless of length of tenure.
Note that it’s only the notice period that this considers. The Netherlands and Austria are the same in that you can terminate an employee without reason.
//edit: apparently that’s incorrect for the Netherlands. Must have mixed that up.
That's incorrect. Employers in the Netherlands must have a valid reason to fire staff - see https://business.gov.nl/running-your-business/staff/dismissi...
I just saw. For some reason I thought that the Netherlands have no restrictions there but apparently I was wrong.
This is not true at all. It's notoriously hard to fire someone in the Netherlands.
I've always wondered about this.
In my contract, it says there is a few months' notice period, both when I want to stop working there as well as when they want me to stop working there. When reviewing the contract, it sounded reasonable and I just assumed that when I get the notice, that's how it is.
Later, I learned of these "there must be a valid reason" type of protections.
Does that make this whole clause void? Or even working in my favor, that is: even if there is a valid reason, our contract adds those months of notice period?
I assume the company is not in good financial condition, either -- 75,000 euros should not be terribly burdensome, otherwise.
Plus you can always fire anyone for any reason in the EU, just give them enough money to stomach it.
Worst thing that can happen is being taken to court and ordered to pay some money.
and give them at least one month notice as well as pay out their unused holidays.
Not really, mutual agreements are a thing. If you pay someone with one month notice 3 months worth of pay to leave on the same day, they would be stupid not to take it.
3 months I feel bit questionable still. As depending on location there might be loss of unemployment benefits.
yeah, you have to go higher than what they would get in court.
ok, yeah, as long as you pay more than the remaining working time. but an employee has to watch out how that affects unemployment benefits.
FWIW, while they are a U.S. incorporated firm, it looks like it's actually an Indian company in terms of staff / leadership.
Kind of weird that the website hosting a story about intrusive spying has a cookie policy that essentially says "we're going to set a cookie to track you around the intarwebs and you can't opt out of it."
One more site to add to the memory hole.
I’m a little surprised they had a Dutch employee and did know the laws.
Every company I worked for with foreign employees, hired (or more often acquired) knew the lay of the land.
This company's website, offer, and videos gives me such creepy vibes... American-business-software kind. Everyone are so proud, fulfilled, trained, and friendly. Have one shameful few months long episode at a similar one in Czechia... CREEPY.
Can this actually be enforced. It sounds like it’s a Dutch court v US entity where they were a contractor. If the company had a Dutch entity they wouldn’t make such obvious errors in judgement as they’d know the local laws
If you'd read the second sentence of the article, you would have learned that the company has a branch in the Netherlands.
And if you kept reading you'd know they don't anymore and the guy hasn't been paid.
I read that and I don't think it contradicts my comment, as the firm had the Dutch entity and thus the knowledge of Dutch labour laws at the time of the firing. This is contrary to what the parent supposes.
Yeah, but it sounds like the NL subsidiary doesn't employ a NL lawyer; or maybe they do, but just don't listen to him.
That's what I like about europe: legal protections. I have the feeling there's no way that would ever happen in East Asia (excepting maaaybe Japan). Tho it would probably happen in parts of SE Asia, Indonesia etc, informed by a cultural and political impetus to slough off the perceived historical yoke of Western colonial exploitation. But other places (like Ph, and Thailand, I guess) this would never happen, I think as they need their Western manufacturing contracts too dearly... I think.
Unpopular opinion: decisions like this hurt European workers. As an employer with 270 full time employees and many more contractors, I simply will not hire people in the EU and especially not in Netherlands because of the legal risks from a government with too many regulations.
An employer should be free to use webcam monitoring (no different than if the employee was in person with a supervisor nearby).
> shut down on 2 September
That seems unfortunate; the employee's best chance for collecting is if the employer continues to have business operations in the Netherlands.
It sounds like the company is really paranoid about their remote workers being actually subcontracted to a cheaper locale or something.
If the boss wants to monitor me working they should better not tell me. My entire intelligence melts down in anxiety and performance drops to near-zero if I know I am being watched. Why the heck do they want to watch people? What are they trying to discover? Isn't monitoring the results of the job enough?
Sounds like this company is a software farm for cheap contract work.
Some employers want to be able to take random photos to ensure remote workers are working at their computer during business hours.
The employee argued they had access to their computer screen at all time and could fully monitor their laptop which should be enough. The court agreed.
That should be MORE than enough. IMO an employers access to the screen and keystrokes should be zero.
“worker had been present in the office being observed by management”
And yet there are people who prefer working on site and “being observed by management”.
You might be surprised to know that there are workplaces where you don't get "observed by management" which is why people love going there on site.
Or that there are jobs where you don't have the choice of WFH so you have to show up to the office whether you like it or not if you want to afford food and rent.
Or lack of silence, space, amenities at home, or the multiple other reasons why some people to go to the office.
Why be judgemental about it? Let people do what they want and you do what you want.
You are right in the sense that mechanics, construction workers, medics, cant really work from home.
But to say that in tech, which thrives due to remote customers, people must work on site is misguided. People cant afford the “luxuries” you mentioned because they need to be in the proximity of their office. Some are so traumatised by the experience that they cant fathom the notion that it is possible to own a place of your own, moreover, a place that can provide quietness and space. Such people need reminding that yes it is possible. If a company demand remote customers then employees can demand remote work.
Those that despite having the space and the option of working form home yet chose onsite are welcome to do so. But i will remind folks that that is unnatural for human beings. Farming cattle is bad enough let alone people.
>Those that despite having the space and the option of working form home yet chose onsite are welcome to do so. But i will remind folks that that is unnatural for human beings
So, people not wanting to bring their work inside their homes where they eat, sleep, watch movies, play games, meet friends, have sex and play with their kids is unnatural? Are you gonna tell me next that same sex couples are also unnatural?
I'll tell you what's unnatural: You trying to be the authority on what's unnatural.
Stop trying to enforce your world views on everyone.
The CEO of this company seems very deep into 'hype capitalism' - all his recent writing is about the metaverse, NFTs etc. The fact that the Dutch subsidiary of this company tried to de-register itself within days of firing the employee suggests to me that its business models are extractive rather than productive.
what a pleasant piece of news