The 2008 financial crisis had left the company in a position where it needed to downsize anyways, and the board of directors gave the CEO the choice between covering that liability by making the US layoff bigger, or avoiding the extra liability by getting rid of basically the whole Argentinian operation. The CEO chose to preserve US jobs.
The Argentinian operation would have seen a layoff either way. But nowhere near as dramatic as the one that actually happened.
At-will is a huge risk for the individual, since they're going from roughly 100 % employment to 0 % employment.
On the other hand, in a decently sized organisation (where employee protection is typically enforced), being stuck with a bad employee and asking them for meaningless work that bothers nobody else means paying for 100 % capacity and only getting, say, 94 % of it. Over a large number of employees, the organisation can be fairly confident of what this percentage will be. Much smaller risk.
In other words, the utility cost for the employer of employee protection is smaller than the utility cost of at-will for the individual.
(Homeowner's insurance is a similar type of situation. Makes no sense to the individual if you look at the dollar costs, but in terms of utiles it does actually work out for both parties in most cases. Another case is hedging major business expenses -- costs more, but you and the counterparty both lose fewer utiles from it.)
Maybe not, but the world isn't zero-sum. Some things really do raise or lower the overall average.
> I have even personally witnessed a situation where a company evaluated a legal change to increase employee protections, and decided to layoff almost everyone in a particular country before the new law took effect. (The company was Pictage, the country was Argentina, and this was a bit over a dozen years ago.)
What was the law change? And how long would it have been before those employees were laid off otherwise? That's an interesting datapoint to hear about, but "employee protections" can mean many different things.
> So I'll take the up front downsides of at will over the hidden downsides of employee protections.
Unfortunately you don't get to skip out on the hidden downsides of at will either.