As said, I have now clue about things in Japan, but in Germany, a court can definitely order the company to rehire you if the reason for firing was unlawful. In smaller companies coming back to that job usually isn't fun (as your boss usually was directly involved in the case), thus in these cases you usually get compensation of about a year's worth of wages.

Bigger companies are usually pretty professional about these things. (Completely different domain, but just look at Apple and Samsung being in court while Samsung still being a supplier for Apple.)

I mentioned in some other topics, but Japan has a pretty good protection systems like most European countries on paper. The difference lies in what a law can't easily catch. They can put an enormous amount of informal obstacles to a so-called "bad" employee, from subtle changes of seating to relegating to a humiliating position. Each of them is annoying by itself, but they're smart enough to make sure that none of them are significant enough for litigation. Then there can be a group bullying. Because every other employee is equally afraid of the company, they can collectively act like an orchestrated attack even when there's no explicit order. Japanese team work at its finest.

And that's exactly why there is power in a union, to quote Joe Hill; it has the potential to turn the situation around.

Again: union in the company you left of your own will (did you RTFA?) won't help you. Union in the company that won't hire you due to informal pressure won't help you either, because you aren't a member or working at the company.

This is specific to the US I think. In many other countries unions organize workers across a whole industrial sector, not just inside one company.

I don't know about Germany but in the US, we apparently have a do not hire list that goes across company lines for even positions like bank tellers? There was no visible public outrage against any company that refused to hire former Wells Fargo employees for example

America has some of the worst worker protection laws and regulations in the developed world: occupational health and safety; minimum wage; paid time off (vacation, illness, parental leave); lunch and other breaks; consecutive hours worked in a day; 'at-will' termination; and so on. It really is an extreme outlier.

On the other hand, at least when it comes to software developers, americans seem to be extremely well paid compared to the rest of us and they pay far less in tax.

I'd make that trade any day, but then again that's just one industry and I'm just one person.

>I'd make that trade any day

It's not a trade, it's just a temporary result of a market imbalance. When that stops to be case, programmers will get the same bad treatment like everybody else.

So I'd make rather live in a country with more sane and fair laws for all, and not extrapolate too much from what a specific field or two (even if it happens to be mine) might temporarily command.

> It's not a trade, it's just a temporary result of a market imbalance.

That temporary result has been going on for a few decades now. And it's only getting better for the engineers, because more and more tech companies need more and more employees and for the most part, CS degrees still remain difficult to get (relative to some other degrees).

So I agree it's temporary, however it will probably last until after my retirement short of another .com bubble.

It depends on how old you are but I'd be careful assuming that things will last that long unless you're in your 50s now. There's a huge IT community which was employed to do commodity tasks (helpdesk, networking, PC management, etc.) or working on enterprise software which is increasingly outsourced, competing with cloud offerings, etc. anywhere companies see it as a high cost, low strategic value area – which is not an uncommon attitude even where that's not true.

Software developers at the top end are better positioned than many for that but even if your job isn't directly exposed that's going to contribute to pressure against wage increases and respect, especially since senior management is going to keep seeing comparatively high labor costs.

I'm a frontend engineer for the one of the big 4 tech companies, so I'm not really concerned. I'm in my 30's now, and don't expect to be coding for the rest of my life, but is the field going to become so constricted that 30 years from now wages will stagnate? I doubt it, at least not in the grand scheme of things.

At the end of the day, I'm not going to plan my life around my job suddenly becoming less valuable.

> That temporary result has been going on for a few decades now.

That really was not the case before the Netscape IPO or for about 5-6 years after the dot-com bust.

People were still making great money, just not the ones that lost their jobs.

It's been some time since I ran the numbers but when you isolate federal taxes and compare them the difference is stark. But when you combine all of our income taxes and compare the percentage the difference is much, much less significant. Federal, social security, state, state disability, etc. It does depend on the state though. If you add in health insurance costs since those are covered by the government in other countries the difference shrinks even more.

When you combine it all and compare the amount of benefits and safety nets provided to other countries it kind of feels like you're being screwed. I guess getting paid more is nicer but raising children here and realizing that they may not make nearly as much money while having such small or irrelevant safety nets is a sobering experience.

Well they have to pay for all that military equipment somehow.

So my total tax rate in the US is just shy of 50%. Software developers are actually in the "sweet spot" for paying a ton in taxes: they make enough money to qualify for the high tax rates, but not enough money to make it worth exploiting the loopholes that rich folks use to avoid paying taxes.

What's your effective income tax rate (both state and federal)? Assuming your an average paid software engineer in SV, you have a marginal income tax rate of 28% (33% over $198k). Which means your effective tax rate is actually a lot lower than that. Assuming you are in California your marginal income tax rate is between 37% and 43%.

So I call bullshit. Marginal income tax rates are always higher than effective income tax rates. The only way you are paying a 50% tax rate is if you pretend ALL of your income is taxed at the 43% I mentioned AND you count FICA as a tax.

There are certain deductions that go away as your income goes up which is effectively an increase in tax rate as well. Student loan deductions for instance are 2500 I believe, but start going down after you break 80k. Then there's things like the social security payments which stop at 127,200 in 2017 so every dollar after that has a lower tax rate. It's very complicated but the last time I did taxes I paid north of 40% effective

> It's very complicated but the last time I did taxes I paid north of 40% effective

It's not that complicated. In order for you to have a 40% effective tax rate (including Federal, State, Local and FICA), assuming you ONLY took the standard deduction and you file single, you'd need an income of just over $450,000/year.

https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#VL01ZILZtI

That assumes you have 1 exception, no deductions for retirement (which would actually reduce your effective rate) and only taking the standard deduction (you can't get lower!)

In fact, if you want to tax EVERY POSSIBLE tax into account (sales, property, fuel, etc), you'd need to make $300,000/year to achieve a 40% effective tax rate across all taxes.

So either you make a mountain of money, you have a terrible accountant, or you are lying.

Unpopular opinion, I know but I think we should try to get rid of as many credits and deductions as possible.

Every time someone take about simplifying the tax code, I bring it up. It will hurt me as well (I'm poor) but it is ok.

If you're in the tax bracket to pay 40%, I'd say I want to raise your taxes you pay but I also want to raise the taxes your overlords pay.

I want higher taxes so we can offer the same services to the wealthy that we offer to the poor. It is the right thing to do. We don't have too many wealthy people in this country. We should be able to include everyone. Can't afford to include people who make too much money? Too bad. The program can't exist.

I would want to create a consensus towards "no income checks". The government should not have any program that qualifies people based on income or assets. Be it Medicare, social security, or Medicaid, food stamps, college tuition, rent subsidies, school lunch or whatever. You should not be able to exclude anyone because they make too much money or have too much money.

Of course, economists will say this is stupid and inefficient and irrational but I say economists are not even people. Nobody is rational in the real world.

I'm not sure how unpopular that is unless you are one of the vested interests behind some of these deductions. The cost of enforcing these regulations seems to grow exponentially as the number of regulations grow. Many proponents of UBI, such as myself, want there to be zero means testing as it would save a significant amount of cost vs all of the current regulation behind things like welfare, unemployment, Medicare, etc.

If you're in a marriage with two high earners (lets say > $500k household gross) then most of your income is being taxed at the highest (or close to highest) marginal rate. You also don't qualify for a bunch of deductions (student loan tax breaks are only for people under a certain income, you can only deduct medical expenses over 10% of household gross, etc). You also don't always get to claim the full amount of your deduction from local/state taxes thanks to the way AMT is calculated.

If you earn much more than that, generally companies find other ways to pay you (equity, deferred compensation, etc.) that have more administrative overhead, but less of a tax hit.

And yes, FICA is definitely a tax. A regressive one since the rate goes down the higher your income is, but it's still a tax.

> If you're in a marriage with two high earners (lets say > $500k household gross

Well yes, if you are in the top 1% of wage earners in the US your effective tax rate is going to be pretty high. In fact, you'll pay around $200,000 in taxes on that, give or take (if you live in a high-tax state like California). But that's literally affecting 1% of the population, and they're probably doing ok.

> If you earn much more than that, generally companies find other ways to pay you

Most companies give equity in the form of RSU's rather than options, so income taxes hit immediately upon vesting.

> And yes, FICA is definitely a tax.

Yes they are a payroll tax, but just "adding" them into your income taxes is extremely misleading. Income tax is just that. FICA is a payroll tax.

> If you're in a marriage with two high earners (lets say > $500k household gross) then most of your income is being taxed at the highest (or close to highest) marginal rate.

Incorrect.

The highest marginal rate kicks in, for married-filing-jointly, at just over $470K; the next highest at over $416K. You have to making close to $1M in taxable income for a married couple to be paying the top marginal rate on most of their income, and over $800K to paying at least the second-highest marginal rate on most of your income.

At $500K, you're just barely paying at least the third highest marginal rate on half your income.

> Software developers are actually in the "sweet spot" for paying a ton in taxes

That is as it should be. Is there something wrong? The only problem is that people above you are able to weasel out of their taxes, but the fact that you're in the top bracket means you're rich, you made it. Congratulations! Enjoy the high quality meats! Consider lobbying your Senator to close the loopholes.

Someone earning £80k ($100k) per year in the UK will pay about 30%[0] tax this is inclusive of income tax, local property tax and National Insurance ( mandatory insurance which covers healthcare, basic sickness and retirement benefits ).

If you are paying 50% tax, then you are being ripped off by your country because you are not gaining anything in exchange for paying all that money AND giving up all those protections.

We have those protections in the UK and they are similar across all of the EU. The highest rate of tax in the UK is 45% and you only pay that on anything you earn over something like £150k ($200k) per year. You have to pay ~2% to national insurance as well, but this is much much cheaper than private healthcare in the US. Local tax is pegged to the value of the house you live in and is typically between £0.8 and £1.5k ($1k-$2k) per year.

[0] http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/tax-calculator/

Don't forget to include VAT at around 20% on everything you buy. That's the genius of VAT compared to US sales tax: even smart people don't see it.

Close-to-50% total taxation is unfortunately pretty common in the West welfare states and yes, you're not getting your taxes worth.

You're right, but keep in mind that VAT is really only paid on things you buy for private consumtion, e.g. not on rent, medical insurance, pension plans, mortgages, not on your office etc. In the income brackets we talk about, at most 20% of income is taxed with VAT making the effective VAT tax rate 20%x20% or about 4%.

> and yes, you're not getting your taxes worth.

Thats debatable :) The US has a live expentancy as low as Cuba, very high crime rates, very high violent crime rates, low trust in society, massive homelessness, bad schools (but good top universities), bad care for the mentally ill, horrendous working conditions, ...

As far as quality of live per GDP per capita goes, the US is among the least efficient of all industrialized countries. Just think about the fact that Cuba manages to archieve the same live expectancy as the US with 1/6 of the GDP per capita of the US!

Total tax rate of 50%? This sounds extremely high. Are you sure you are not confusing between marginal and total tax rate? If you prepare you taxes with any software package, it usually tells your effective tax rate, does it really say 50% or near that? I checked back and they year I paid the most taxes I had effective rate of 24%, usually it's even less. I know software devs who make way more than me, but I don't see how even that would take them to 50%.

Well obviously the best position to be in is to be making your money primarily through capital gains.

Which country are you in? (The taxes vary depending on the U.S. state.)

Occupational health and safety? Have any examples? OSHA seems to shut stuff down in a hurry in the US.

And I've worked in both the US and Canada and I'd say there isn't much difference beyond the paid time off for parental leave.

There is an overview on https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/c....

> ...we apparently have a do not hire list that goes across company lines for even positions like bank tellers? There was no visible public outrage against any company that refused to hire former Wells Fargo employees for example

For bank tellers, I believe this is tracked via the federal agency FINRA, through AWC submittals. For the Wells Fargo employees, you likely are thinking of the brokers who were ordered by Wells Fargo management to fraudulently open accounts. Allegedly, many of these brokers then found out later after they were terminated from Wells Fargo that the bank marked their termination on a U5 form in a manner that all but ejects them from the financial services industry, forever [1]. In both of these cases, they are via mandatory regulatory notifications, and not like the Japanese cases discussed here where it sounds more informal.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/business/dealbook/wells-f...

Planet Money did a podcast on this very thing

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/28/499805238/episo...

Finance is different get caught doing naughty things and you can be banned for life in the same way a Dr can be struck off

The most famous financial criminal of the 1980s United States, Michael Milkin, is now a wealthy philanthropist living large in Los Angeles. The disincentive for large-scale financial crime in the United States is just not there.

I think he was before the finance industry put this in place

... Unless you're C-level, in which case you merely lose your bonus at worst.

FINRA is an industry group

Thanks for the correction, it is a self-regulatory measure by the US financial services industry.

this article is not about employees who got fired but (mostly) those who left.

For real? What would be the point of that? Seems so foolish of the germans...

I'd guess the point of it is to actually give the laws requiring that you not fire employees for illegal reasons teeth.

No one wants to work for an employer who wants them gone, and vice versa.

> Union can't force a company to rehire you when you're "untouchable"

Maybe not, but there most certainly are penalties for such behaviour, see: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/09/blacklisted...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/21/building-in...

Important to note that this "blacklist" was "clandestine " and "a closely guarded secret", i.e. the people doing it knew that it was entirely illegal.

In countries where unions can cover your legal costs in work-related conflicts with employers/ex-employers this at least counteracts the power assymetry. Which might mean that you can still put your experience on your resumé without worrying about Konami going after you.

It is obviously not a flawless protection, especially not in terms of backroom business and that sort of quiet slander. But it does have the potential to counter some of these aggressive methods.

Strong unions could put an end to the untouchable concept completely.

Strong unions comes with their own issues. Many unions turn into unlabelled mafia.

Not so sure. The relations between mafia and unions seems to me unique to the US, or at least not so widespread.

Unions can indeed have issues (on one end corrupt leadership that just pads their bank accounts or screws those that they're supposed to represent, on the other end over-privileging of a certain field), but turning into "unlabelled mafia" is not a core trait.

Certainly it's possible, and yet I don't think there is much other way for employees to achieve any sort of political power over their employers. It's also probably worth mentioning, since we're talking about Japan, the extent to which the worlds of Japanese business and Japanese organized crime are intertwined.

...or into a labelled one (Sicilian Mafia).

Many countries have laws mandating that a company has to provide a positive or neutral letter of reference for all leaving employees. Apparently not the case in Japan though.

Which is really stupid by the way...

This happens in Germany but it just means that if someone has a simple neutral letter of reference, the person herself is a terrible worker.

You are making the scale from 0 to 10 into another scale of 5 to ten. Employers are not stupid and in fact they have developed their own codes to express whatever they want to express to other employers they have good relationships with.

The same happens in China where it is offensive to say: NO! So , instead of telling it, they wait and tell you Yes(!!)

There is an indirect code to translate the time and emphasis employed by the a yes into a no everybody agrees with.

Really? Then what's the point? If a reference isn't honest then why trust them at all.

What if you didn't do anything bad, but your boss just disliked you? A bad reference would make sure you never get another job in that industry

> Union can't force a company to rehire you when you're "untouchable".

In Italy we had the popular article 18 of the workers' statute that stated that if someone got fired without a dismissal for cause the company was obliged to rehire the worker.

> Union can't force a company to rehire you when you're "untouchable".

Unions forced the typical work week down to 40 hours from 60-90. Certainly they could make a company stop harassing a few ex-employees.

I think the reduction from 60-90 to 40 happened over the span of many rehirings.

I think you're giving unions too much credit for microscale protections.

What interest group besides unions had any interest in establishing a forty-hour work week?

I don't know an accurate answer to your question, but lets presume unions did it all.

I the GPs point is that having the power to change culture over the course of decades does not guarantee the ability to fix a single problem for a single individual.

Well, if the unions managed to secure reforms such that that person's problem would not occur then they'd solve it. It certainly seems more likely to help more people than doing everything piecemeal and on an individual basis.

A strong enough union can force all kinds of things, for better or worse. Whatever a company may gain by harassing a few ex-employees is nothing compared to the damage done by your entire workforce walking off the job.

If you have been bullied out of, or illegally fired from, a workplace, I don't imagine you'd actually want your old job back. What you would want is enough money to cover your living expenses for long enough to get a job you do want.

If you slander your previous employer, then you deserve it if your career comes to an end.

A successful lawsuit against a previous employer wouldn't be likely to make you untouchable. However, I could see how an unsuccessful one would.