If someone is really bad you have issues firing them. I mean if someone watches pr0n all day in NL you just collect proof and that's; in PT we had to pay for the guy even then. That is a perverse incentive for employees; just get through the trial and then jerk off. I am a left wing voter and I am for employee protection but you need to be able to punish abuse and as far as we found we could not in PT nor in ES.

Edit: and to make sure; if an employee is good we will do anything we can afford to keep her/him; we are not the employer frauders like Oracle is in Malaga you also encounter...

I agree. I haven't met such extreme cases, but I've seen situations where the employee simply did not have the competence nor the will to acquire it. Lack of a given competence is tolerable, but not trying to address that limitation, for me, is a big issue. In such cases, employee protection will certainly result in rather perverse effects - not only for the employer, but for all the other employees (which will have to deal with less than acceptable output from the problematic one). Even socially, it grinds my gears to know that someone like that is employed when there are some many people which truly want to work.

That being said, the employer still has some protection. You can hire someone for 3 or 6 months and then decide not to renew his contract. You can also use the experimental period clause to void the contract in the first two weeks up to three months, according to the contract duration. The latter is sometimes abused here: hire someone with a long-duration contract and then, just before the experimental period ends, send him away.

These were extreme cases we had in NL and PT. But also incompetence; that was an hiring snafu ofcourse but yes we had our fair share of people working hard during trial and then sitting back and basically drop the ball. No one was asking them to work like animals; 5-6 hrs a day. But we had many good experiences as well esp in Portugal. It is just the bad ones that make you scared...

I'm sorry you had to handle such situations. I always had the feeling that we (Portugal) are very good at producing engineers, but not so good at producing citizens.

I work for a rather big german company and they dislocated some stuff (software development, mostly) here. They're very happy with the overall result, but you can easily tell that there are guys which work around 1-2hrs per day. For the company it's OK-ish, they're still paying way below what they paid elsewhere. But for the other employees, it's somewhat shitty.