Re:Why France Has So Many 49-Employee Companies
by briandon on Thursday May 10, 2012 @10:33PM
(#3957276)
You begin with a reductio ad ridiculum argument and segue into a spiel about employers' and employees' being aligned. I'm not sure whether your post earnestly reflects your position or was intended as a satire of the views of stereotypical Ayn-Rand-ites ("To the Gulch!").
Obviously, it's difficult to buy into the idea that employers' and employees' interests are aligned when business owners recoil in horror at the notion of having to meet once a week with the equivalent of shop stewards and bridle at having to explain why they need to lay off chunks of their workforce on short notice.
Now relax the assumption. At employee 50, you have to start complying with a bunch of onerous and expensive regulations. This limits your ability to make profits and to continue growing your business—which, among other things, means being able to hire fewer workers and having to pay them less. The magnitude of the effect is less than that of the forced-charity sale, but the sign is the same.
These kinds of laws are based on a fallacy: they assume that the interests of companies and employees are not well-aligned. What is worse, such laws guarantee misalignment—thus exacerbating the very problem they're (ostensibly) meant to ameliorate. In medicine, this is called iatrogenesis. Did the bloodletting not work? That must mean we need more bloodletting!
These laws also create a decoy, which has effectively distracted you from the real enemy. The object of your ire should be boneheaded labor laws, not the "greedy" corporations trying to evade their restrictions. It's a diabolically clever political strategy, and it ensnares many a well-intentioned voter. But it's never too late to escape the trap.