Well the point is - what's wrong with firing them ? If it's easy to fire someone it's also easy to hire and if they want to and hire her back afterwards or arrange some acceptable maternity leave and things like being available on-phone or one two days a week two months after birth, etc. that would not be possible under the "protection laws". Is she any less skilled after delivery. You could also accept a different pay, etc. But the point is there is a cost to the employer and regulation just reduces market flexibility and creates situations where it's tougher for a women to get the job in the first place. And as far as I know you get benefits for child, especially in the first year, from government, I'm not sure what's the situation with that in Italy.

Benefits per child are very very low here, and many couples don't have children because if the woman loses her job, with the added expenses too, it will become very difficult to make ends meet. Also for this reason Italy has one of the lowest birth rate in the world (second only to Spain, if I recollect correctly).

With generous (eg like in France) benefits per child, or generous unemployment benefits for young mothers, I could agree with more flexibility. The problem is, benefits cost immediate money from the State while putting the burden on families and businesses only costs in the long run. Given our current debt, the choice is very limited...

I think fiscal burden as opposed to regulatory burden is much less costly to the economy and the inflexible job market creates structural problems and prevents innovation, but at this point - with the interest rates countries such as Italy have to pay - I don't see that happening.

I think the best thing countries in Europe could do is implement something like a negative income tax and kill all that regulation and special programs/taxes/bureaucracy but I haven't even heard anyone in Europe propose such a move.

I can assure you that there is a lot of talking about that. Right now, there is serious discussion here in Italy about taking away some job protection from those who have too much (usually older people) and give some more to those who have none at all, through some kinds of contracts (usually younger people).

I don't think that deregulation is always right, but it is when you have too much - and we do have too much regulation, too much discretionarily applied.

But that's just talking about labor restrictions, and it's standard political bickering, nothing revolutionary will come out of that, Europe is too populist for any real change to happen. What I'm talking about is restructuring the tax/welfare system with something like this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

Eliminate paper currency and only have digital transactions, force the banks to disclose accounts and transaction information to remove gray economy and use NIT scheme instead of all the special programs. That way everyone get's the same safety net when they are unemployed or poorly paid and you can have unregulated at-will employment because employees aren't forced to negotiate for bare minimum.

It's wrong if they fired her because she is pregnant (and about to take the maternity leave I presume). Its almost the equivalent of firing a male employee who accrued a lot of leaves (by not using any) and about to use them.