In the US, the real cost is the fear of litigation.

But it costs so much more to keep a cancerous waste around who poisons the environment.

I'm all for workers' rights (I once belonged to a union), but sometimes the axe has to fall.

The Economist has lost lots of credibility with this one.

I have lived and run companies in Shanghai for 8 years. The number for China is completely wrong. Firing someone in China is straightforward. There are rules to guard against improper firing, but they are fair and balanced.

The current maximum is 2 years salary and that is under rare conditions. Normally, you pay someone between 2 weeks to 2 months. The new labor laws generally stipulate 1 month pay for each year of service.

This is further negotiated, and generally reduced, by contract with the employee. And that assumes you did not fire them for a "reason" which can be put in contract as well.

You could have a contract saying employees must follow company policy. Company policy, in turn, may say employees must be clean and follow certain dress codes. You break company policy, you get fired, no excessive payout. Its very simple.

The Zimbabwe figure is kind of misleading, unless it's corrected for the insane inflation of the Z$. I just did a quick calculation, and assuming 10M% yearly inflation, that works out to about 20 weeks.

It's not just misleading, including Zimbabwe on the list right now is just silly. Their currency is essentially meaningless.

The figures for india are wrong too. You need to pay only 1 months basic pay to fire an full time employee or you can ask them to leave after one month without paying them any extra money other than the salary for that month.

This list is VERY inaccurate and completely misleading. I don't know who the dolts where that published it.

This is just a largely unfounded guess based on my feminine intuition -- and note that I'm a dude -- but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it was the Economist.

Has the cost of firing in France come down recently? I thought they had one of the highest costs of firing in all of Europe.

Allegedly, it was cheaper to keep people on indefinitely then to fire them. (That might have been government or union workers, not sure.)

Odd how rich countries that function well are interspersed with countries that don't work quite as well (at least in terms of ease of doing business). Italy is fairly low on the list, yet I'd take Canada or Britain's economy any day.

There might be no legal requirement to pay someone after firing them, but by convention you usually get one month of pay for each year on the job. That would make the US fifth on the list.

The chart could do without the stupid graphic. I've heard of workers being sacked by text message, but never by Post-it note. (If it is a Post-it note, why the drawing pin?)

I nominate taw's dead comment for "Most mysteriously dead comment of the week".

How common is it, really, for someone to stay with a company for 20 years? And why do I care about data that won't affect me on either end until, at the least, 2028? Presumably, all these numbers will be very different by then.