Various places in Europe already have what amounts to at-will employment. There are exemptions for companies under a certain number of employees (e.g. 25 in Italy). There's a wide use of fixed-term contracts (6/12 months). Many work through agencies, which means they can be "fired" with a few weeks' notice.
Depends a lot on what country, but I think you'll find that the ratio of full-time employee vs contractor/at-will employee in most European countries will look very different from how that ratio looks like in the US (or other similar countries).
Sure, but that's very different from saying that Europeans have would never accept it. It's already happening quite extensively, though not as much as in the US. Europe seems to be 20-40 years behind the US in various economic and social developments, but it's not immune from them.
I don't read "we'll never accept here" as "it's be impossible", more like "we won't base our entire economy on that, it's not what the average person wants", because obviously Europe has various staffing companies already, and if you add a tiny bit of nuance into what they said, I'd agree with it too.
> Europe seems to be 20-40 years behind the US in various economic and social developments
That's one perspective, another is that US is 20-40 years behind Europe because the average person can barely afford to stay alive in the US right now, which is much less of a problem in Europe. But it all depends on what you value, I'm not gonna say one is more "correct" than the other, we all have our preferences and so on.
> But it all depends on what you value, I'm not gonna say one is more "correct" than the other, we all have our preferences and so on.
I wasn't talking about values. Yours or mines are largely irrelevant.
40 years ago, much of the US economy was made of stable jobs. Contingent jobs used to be few, labour unions used to be much stronger. Europe is under the same economic pressures as the US, and it's slowly trending in the same direction, just with 20-40 years of delay.
> That's one perspective, another is that US is 20-40 years behind Europe [...]
The US's HDI (0.938) is comparable to New Zealand and Liechtenstein [0], and significantly above Austria's (0.930), France's (0.920), and Italy's (0.915) [0], and the EU's HDI is itself 0.915 [1] - this puts the EU roughly in the same position as the US almost 16-17 years ago [2] despite both having a similar population.
That said, once you break the 0.900 range, the differences are essentially cosmetic so Europeans or Americans saying either are significantly behind the other from a developmental metrics perspective is dumb and deflects from issues that exist in both the US and Europe.
Differences once you break the 0.9 range are more noticeable at the bottom end, particularly in the context of the OP's claim about people in the US "struggling to stay alive". There's also an "inequality weighted" HDI (accessible from your HDR link above by drilling down to the individual country data) which puts the US a fair way behind many of the EU countries the sheer weight of its per capita GDP puts it ahead of (on that index the US is even marginally worse than some of the wealthier Eastern Bloc countries, but interestingly on dead level pegging with France for the last decade)
Even then the US is comparable to France - the only European country that comes even remotely close to America's power projection capabilities - and significantly above Italy, a fellow G7 member and large EU member that also has power projections capabilities.
The only large European countries with a significantly better iHDI are Germany and the UK.
All this does is justify the fact that most EU member states have taken advantage of the peace dividend at the expense of countries that have heavily invested in defense capabilities like the US, France, and Italy which fuels anti-European sentiment that turned into the current diplomatic crisis.
Interesting segue from claiming Europe is 20-40 years behind the US to claiming if Europe's policy choices have resulted in any better outcomes than the US its because they're enriching themselves by taking advantage of the "peace dividend"! I guess I'd have to agree that in the current diplomatic crisis of America's making, there is literally nothing some Americans won't use to "justify" blaming it on Europe....
Back in reality, inequality doesn't have an obvious relationship with country size or power projection, countries with superior inequality-weighted HDI like Germany and Poland spend more of their GDP on defence than Italy and the strengths and weaknesses of America's business culture, labour laws, welfare state, privatised healthcare etc (higher incomes for many but lower baseline living standards) really don't have very much to do with its military spending. If Americans want their government to tackle inequality they should probably back candidates advocating European-style policy over candidates advocating anti-European sentiment.
> Interesting segue from claiming Europe is 20-40 years behind the US to claiming if Europe's policy choices have resulted in any better outcomes than the US its because they're enriching themselves by taking advantage of the "peace dividend"!
That's not what I claimed. Europe is 20-40 years behind in how the social fabric is being destroyed, making everything precarious and lives shitty, stressful and meaningless. Many good choices in Europe have slowed down that decay, but I'm afraid it's just slowed, not arrested.
And it's not so much as the "peace dividend" helping Europe, but the opposite: the US have made themselves poor because with the same economic framework as today, the US would be in a much better position if it had an efficient healthcare system, instead of one that spends 2-3x the European average for worse outcomes, and if it didn't drive up the cost of living by allowing boomers to print themselves money by restricting housing construction though zoning.
Not really. Fixed-term contracts can not be used indefinitely. A worker must be permanently hired after the first extension. Agencies can not be used indefinitely, and also, the agency is required to support the employee after the client lets them go. So the company just pays to shift that responsibility but the responsibility towards the employee is there. A company is also not allowed to make an employee 'self-employed' by making them start their own company. They must always have multiple clients, if they have just one the government will consider it permanent employment with all strings attached and will apply all relevant restrictions and taxation retroactively.
I'm just talking about holland here but all over europe the conditions are similar.
All the exceptions you mention were just sly ways the companies have tried to circumvent their responsibilities and the law has caught up with regulations to make those impossible or at least impractical.
And there are some exceptions yes. But those are mostly for in-between gig jobs. Not for stuff people make a career out of.
Of course there are also exceptions with easy firing for things like gross negligence. Though the employee always has the ability to countersue.
