Yeah it is definitely an American/centric take. Most of Europe also has strong contract laws. “At-will employment” cuts both ways.

Most of them have strong employee protection laws too which prevent such an abuse

That’s what the phrase “cuts both ways” means.

They're saying that it cuts one way.

Employee protection laws have nothing to do with what I was talking about. As an employee in the USA (contract or freelance), I can quit any time I like. My contract may be for two years, but I can cancel it tomorrow if I want, and only in extreme cases is there any penalty for doing so.

In the EU, if I sign a 1-year contract there is an expectation that I will actually work that year. If I break contract by deciding to get another job without negotiating early exit with my employer, I could be on the hook for damages. This doesn't come up very often because in the EU people just don't break contracts like this--if you want to hire someone you ask when their contract is up and work around that. But the reason why people behave this way is because the termination of a contract is a serious deal and hard to navigate.

The US is (mostly) at-will employment. One aspect of that everyone talks about is that the company can fire you at any time for almost any reason. That sucks. The flip side though is that you can fire your employer any time you like, and walk of the job to somewhere that pays you better or treats you better. This is at the root of a lot of American dynamism, and a good thing.

At-will employment is definitely something that cuts both ways.

This is wrong.

A 1-year employment contract in the EU will still have a notice period, probably 2-4 weeks. (Probably 1 month for a 2-year contract.)

What happens if you break it with zero days notice?

I wouldn’t call losing your source of income and maybe your health insurance no practical repercussions.

I don’t know in which countries you worked but I didn’t have any problems getting out of a contract.

Inexplicably linking employment with healthcare seems unrelated to at-will employment.

The reason is explicable - health insurance paid by the employer is tax-deductible, while insurance paid by the employee is not. Therefore, employers include it as a way to increase total compensation at a lower cost.

The origin of the practice was in WW2, when Roosevelt froze wages. To attract more and better employees, the companies threw in health insurance as a way around the restrictions.

Thanks for reminding us that state intervention is the source of the problem.

Stop linking medical insurance to employment via this tax bigotry. Buy it on the open market instead, or subsidize it if you're a leftist, but don't put that burden on jobs, you'll only get fewer jobs with greater hassle. People can agree to the arrangements they prefer, and it's not for us to second guess that. If there are people who end up coming up short, then you can help them yourself, or force the whole society to chip in (again, if you're a leftist), but don't force such considerations on the fragile links among private individuals and businesses.

>The reason is explicable - health insurance paid by the employer is tax-deductible, while insurance paid by the employee is not.

It would be very easy to reverse, if literally anyone was willing to.

Hillary was for single payer. Trump ran on repealing even the ACA. I don't think it's as simple as literally anyone.

I'm not talking about changing the healthcare system entirely, but the tax deduction status.

Right, but we're currently at a point politically where we're heavily considering regressions in healthcare and insurance, not progressions. We're talking about bringing back denying coverage for existing conditions and allowing insurance to deny medication on grounds of religious reasons.

Changing the tax deduction status would harm businesses, and therefore I can't see a conservative administration ever letting that fly.

Which goes again to my original point.

Sure, but the inexplicable bit is that there's no actual reason it has to be that way.

There's no reason why a law cannot be passed amending the tax code to make health insurance premiums paid by an individual tax deductible.

I'm not saying it would be easy to get such a law passed, but that doesn't change the fact that it's stupid to have health insurance tied to your employer.

(At any rate, health insurance premiums are tax deductible, but the rules are annoying and require that your healthcare spending be a certain percentage of your income.)

I can spell it out, if it helps. In a country with exorbitant healthcare costs, it means that leaving your job means that you (and often your family) don't get healthcare.

I'm thinking you misinterpreted the comment you responded to? I read it as saying that you don't necessarily have to have employment linked healthcare just because you have at-will employment.

The "inexplicably" being a commentary on the wisdom/sanity/compassion of linking healthcare to employment, rather than a claim that the parent comment had made an inexplicable leap of logic

But the discussion wasn't about "generic at-will" employment. It started as "American at-will" employment.

> > I have come to the conclusion that the American “at-will” employment model is actually a good thing and benefits workers

It may seem like you can just walk away from a job but realistically most people can't.

"Most people" are not dependent on health insurance for their average needs, except in the long-term or unexpectedly.

Then of course, being unemployed, you have the option of COBRA (you probably don't want that though), and if it does not make you immediately eligible for Medicaid in your state (40 of 50 have Medicaid expansion), it would make you eligible for the ACA subsidized plans. NB: more than one-third of employer-sponsored plans are HDHPs, meaning employees have deductibles in the thousands of dollars anyway.

It's certainly a disruption, and it's one more thing to consider, but the idea that "most Americans" are one job loss away from being killed by lack of health care is not remotely true - most people don't need health care that regularly, unemployed people have insurance options, and at a last resort, for the most part, you can accrue unlimited medical debt in most places with few real-world consequences.

My wife was once a day light on her birth control. Nine months later, she delivered a boy.

For most women of child bearing age, between birth control and annual visits, healthcare is pretty important.

Birth control is available over the counter in the US. If you have specific need, it’s very cheap and your doctor will almost always just call in refills without charging you. The meds themselves are not expensive.

Annual visits are also not actually that important. They’re perfunctory. They can certainly be put off for a few months in a ok except a few one in a million cases.

And at any rate, as I said, losing your job in the US means your insurance is disrupted, not that you are now uninsured. Pregnancy even in states without Medicaid expansion will get the mother and child on Medicaid.

Of course, at the risk of being silly, it’s also true that missing a day of birth control is not what got your wife pregnant. ;) it’s pretty surprising to me how many people (now with children) thought birth control meant they wouldn’t get pregnant. There definitely needs to be better education on this. Taking birth control, even regularly, even with an IUD, is more like a backstop and should not be relied on for your primary protection. The odds are low but when you play them a few times a week for ten years…

I very much read it as I responded, and re-reading, still interpret it as such.

Kirkules is correct.

My apologies, I stand corrected.

If you lose healthcare """insurance""" when you lose your job, you never had real insurance to start with.

(The system might work if some lag was introduced (a year of keeping that level of insurance??), but I'm not sure that this duration would not quickly get sapped by perverse incentives ?)

COBRA?

That’s super expensive. ACA is often better but that may change now with the republicans having control of congress.

> That’s super expensive

COBRA costs you exactly how much you + your employer were paying for that insurance.

It's expensive because your employer's share of insurance was a significant part of your compensation (And because US healthcare costs are pants-on-head insane.) I'll point out that it's generally quite expensive to, like, stop getting paid.

Practically, post-ACA, health insurance in the US is about as tied to employment as having a roof over your head and food on your table is. If you don't have employment, or money, you're going to be in trouble - but that's the case with everything you need to live, not just healthcare.

Our regulations (including the medical guild) and legal structure (including crazy malpractice payouts for unintentional mistakes) forces everything to be more expensive than necessary. We are very far from a free market, even if we stopped with the untaxed benefits.

US healthcare is a market but not for patients. Insurance, employers and hospitals negotiate a lot. But people who get employer based insurance just have to accept what they are given. Pretty crazy.

Don’t most large employers essentially self insure? They only outsource the administration to insurance companies, not the float.

Sure. The point is that the employer does all the selecting of options and the patient/employer has to take what the employer chose. No market for the patient.

Aren't healthcare costs in line with the very high US income levels (with people spending a high fraction of their income in it, because they can afford to), and the main issue is inequality (including lack of real insurance)?

We left the free market of healthcare behind because it was awful for consumers. People who were disabled or otherwise had chronic conditions were, more or less, completely screwed. Not to mention these regulations are very much necessary. We want educated and highly certified doctors cutting you up.

COBRA is an expensive joke

It is, though, because it kind of transfers most of the power in the relationship to the employer. Without it, I imagine they'd find some other way, or lobby the state away from at-will employment.

America has very low unemployment and median household incomes are among the highest in the world. You get to continue your existing health insurance 18 months after you quit if you wish, you just have to pay for it. Most people can and if you can’t then the government pays for it.

While getting terminated is disruptive, it isn’t the end of the world for the typical American. The relative ease with which most people can get another job is also nice. It is an economy that is structured under the assumption that people will move between jobs and minimizes the friction in doing so.

I have seen the “having a contract” thing abused many times in many countries in Europe. Thanks, but no thanks. I have had that contract multiple times and I don’t want that contract. That safety blanket comes with heavy chains. I’ve seen those contracts used to stifle far too many employees to condone it, employees deserve better.

The flipside is that you have no job security. In Europe, we've been moving towards more American style "flexible employment" for years, and it's highly controversial.

As an aging guy, I'm also staring down the barrel of cross-party consensus on replicating the predatory US healthcare model in my country. I see what things look like in the States, and no thanks.

> While getting terminated is disruptive, it isn’t the end of the world for the typical American.

Whenever conversations like this come up, I feel the need to remind folks that most folks don't work in tech for colossal salaries. Around a quarter of Americans have less than USD 1,000 saved, most under 5,000.[0] No runway is the norm, I'd put that well above "disruptive" for "most Americans".

[^0] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/savings/average-ameri...

They don't save because they don't need to since there's always a job available as hiring is so easy. In Europe we need to save in case we want to quit, since then we lose all rights and protections and need to wait months before finding a new job.

A major reason poor people don't save is the inflationary currency and government control of interest rates (plus other central bank policy) encourages debt over saving. We slowly put a noose around our necks because our laws put lights on that runway. We need major reform to get back to a saving mindset. It'll be a world where the government will borrow and print far less money.

I'm looking at the data and there is zero relationship between inflation, interest rates and personal savings in the USA. People save in time of crisis (2008, covid, etc.), and don't when the economy is good (1990 -> 2007)

Poor people don't save because they are poor and there's nothing to save.

It costs loads more to be poor than to have some money. You won't save money by buying up-front, if your credit is low you'll pay more than a person with more money, you miss payments and the late fees rack up, you overdraft and your fees add up, you can't go on autopay to save money because you risk going into overdraft, etc.

Maybe if the 1% didn't own 50% off all the resources (money) than poor people could find some money to save.

While your comment may shed some light on the nuances, gp’s point shouldn’t be disregarded. Losing income and health insurance is in fact amongst the most practical of repercussions one can experience upon losing a job.

That this needs to be spelled out just shows that HN operates in an extremely privileged bubble. Some people are aware of it, but most don’t seem to be.

In what way is losing income from quitting different in at-will vs the article? Losing the income is a consequence, but it's the same consequence in both cases and so is not part of the conversation and silly to mention.

If you read through gp’s comments, you’ll see that they very much made it part of the conversation when they claimed that losing income and health insurance are not “practical repercussions” of losing employment.

Having no income is the same as having no income. It matters greatly. But the manner in which it was lost does not matter.

The other part is that companies are much more willing to hire people if they know they can get rid of them if either that person ends up sucking or business starts to fall off.

I believe it’s the case that in some places, bureaucrats can basically just say “no” if you decide to lay people off. Why would you want to hire people in the first place if there were a risk of that happening, especially if you have the option to hire people in a different country?

In most of them there is an initial probationary trial period during which you can easily fire someone without providing any justification, and with a minimal mandatory notice.

It goes both ways: during that time, the employee too can quit with a reduced mandatory notice.

That only covers the "if that person ends up sucking" part though.

For the other "business falling apart", maybe they consider it’s part of the business owner’s responsibility to make sound business decisions when involving someone else’s livelihood. Just like when leasing a shop or taking on a loan.

> For the other "business falling apart", maybe they consider it’s part of the business owner’s responsibility to make sound business decisions when involving someone else’s livelihood. Just like when leasing a shop or taking on a loan.

What about running a tech startup with high chance of failure? Ever considered why they seem to be few and far between in EU?

No, I really haven’t. Please enlighten me.

(and remember to figure out a difference that applies to San Francisco and Boston and NYC and Austin but not Kansas City or New Orleans.)

Yes, naturally such a system is biased towards high accountability and high trust industries. Industries which thrive on minimal accountability and trust won't function very well. Personally, I think that's a good thing overall. The problem comes in when other countries don't operate this way, so those businesses can just go there (and take your talent with you, i.e. brain drain).

France is especially like that, with consequent mass unemployment. That's the model the progressive side of our politics wants to emulate.

> The other part is that companies are much more willing to hire people if they know they can get rid of them if either that person ends up sucking or business starts to fall off.

That and other reasons (few vacantion days, request to overtime, etc) is why one should avoid American companies in Europe, if possible.

Trust goes both ways.

> Most people can and if you can’t then the government pays for it.

For now.

> The relative ease with which most people can get another job is also nice.

This seems unemphathetic. Even just for the tech industry, thousands of engineers have found it difficult to find new work after the layoffs of the previous years. Please do not extrapolate your experience of the ease of finding new work towards every other American.

> It is an economy that is structured under the assumption that people will move between jobs and minimizes the friction in doing so.

No. Even if you look at it from a process perspective, true minimized friction is when other countries goverments automatically deduct and manage your taxes when you move jobs, manage retirement funds and have socialized healthcare to reduce the stress and uncertainty during unemployment. You claim that "at-will" minimizes friction is a joke compared to those.

At-will coupled with layoff disclosure laws seems pretty solid. The result seems to be that severance pay is a lot more common.

>No one should discount the value of having the power to tell your employer to fuck off at a moment’s notice with no practical repercussions.

I think you are confusing "it is possible" with "it is common". Never heard of people in Japan get sued for quitting, even with shady English teaching centers. But definitely seen companies do them for scare tactics though.

FWIW, I don’t have any experience in Japan, I have no idea what the nuances are like there. I have a lot of experience in Europe, which echoed some of the themes raised.

Do you have examples ? I have never heard European people being sued for quitting either. The opposite of at-will employment is not that you can't quit. Just that employers can't suddenly fire you without repercussions.

In the UK, an employee can't legally walk off the job without notice but it does happen albeit rarely. Nobody ever sues them. The only reason people don't do it more often is so they have a reference for their next employment.

The more common way to do this these days is to feign an illness like stress and get signed off work, paid, by the doctor, then quit later.

In Finland I believe you need very vindictive company. And even then any amount of money you can get out of it likely is not worth the work hours spend.

The notice period is kinda odd. I've known people who want to leave immediately and haven't had a lot of trouble doing so because the relationship with their employer has soured that much.

Paid by the doctor? I think sick pay comes from the employer initially and later statutory sick pay(state).

You're right, the doctor thing is just bad grammar or sentence structure on my part

The termination period in a Swedish employment contract certainly applies in both directions.

If you have three months notice period in your contract, your employer could sue for loss of income if you don't honour that notice period.

It usually doesn't happen that way, because it is a waste of everyone's time and money. But, if some employer feels the need to set an example the option is there.

That is certainly supprising to me. I assume most people just deal with it by showing up but silent quitting ?

If there is bad blood leading up to the termination, then I guess so. I haven't witnessed that more than once or twice in my career.

Most people make an extra effort to end on a positive note, both with colleagues and managers. Of course, effectively off-boarding yourself means having progressively less and less to do as time goes by... So in that sense you sort of quiet quit.

It is possible to be sued for damages in Germany if you quit and don't come back to work during your notice period.

Its not very likely and hard to prove damages by the employer, but possible.

Nothing really stopping you from simply half-assing your job during your notice period, though.

It is my understanding that you haven’t quit until your notice period is over, you just have given notice. As such it is not surprising to me that you still have to do the job or face some consequences; you signed a contract after all. You would sue your employer too if they fired you and then immediately stopped paying you.

Depends, in Eastern Europe "suing" does not happen often, in fact, it is quite rare, for both employers and employees. I see how people in the US are threatening to sue all the time, but that is not the case around here. It would take too much time and money and usually is not worth it.

I don’t know statistics but here in Germany many people have insurance that pays for attorneys in case of conflicts related to employment and would make use of it.

I think your opinion is influenced by probability being a well off professional in a field where you can easily find another job, maybe phisical location is not even that important.

Just an hypothesis.

I prefer the "chains on both sides" approach for the society.

Some of my dearest friends are on the lower end of working class and don’t make a lot of money. They worry about many things but finding another job is not among them. We talk about it. I am financially well off now but I’ve also lived decades of abject poverty, I am not unfamiliar with what that entails.

At every point in time, finding a job wasn’t an issue. It might have not been a great job, but it was a job that paid the bills until a better job came along. Being able to bootstrap to a better job is something the US does really well.

That's a general feature of minimum-wage jobs, not just in the US. The reason is twofold:

-Huge staff rotation (a lot of it people getting fired).

-There being little consequences if a role isn't filled.

Regarding that second point: what happens if there's one cashier, delivery driver or store stocker fewer? Not much, except for delays, unless they're the very last one.

It can be a totally different experience if you have a chronic illness that affects your schedule, or if you don't have a car. In my case it's been both. Currently, lack of reliable transportation and a driver's license is the main issue.

I've been struggling to even get an interview in junior software dev for over a year now. Tried some help desk as well and never heard back. I've had my resume looked at quite a few times now, so I doubt that that's the problem.

If you go to r/jobs and related subreddits, there are plenty of people who are losing their minds after applying to thousands of jobs for the last 2 years without even getting a prescreen. Some are even being rejected by temp agencies. I assume that this is an anomaly and 2023-24 had a uniquely terrible job market.

I'm going to a job fair soon. Wish me luck.

> if you don't have a car.

I had a long gap between employers where I lived off of saved money and explored new tech with a hope that I'd be able to improve my standing in the market. It made it nearly impossible to get anyone interested in my application because the gap was years.

Once I'd finally changed that by working a temp gig (having now achieved recent employment), I started getting calls. The job I took required visiting clients on-site from time to time. They didn't think to ask me if I had a car or license. When they found out (as I took a company-paid Uber 25m in my second month), I sensed that they realized they'd left a huge gap in their interview process. I was reassigned to only visit clients that I could get to via a combination of train and ride-share or short ride-share.

Had they asked about long-distance on-sites and my ability to get there myself, I'm confident I wouldn't have been hired.

It's a false dichotomy anyway. There's no law of nature that says an employee being able to quit at a moment's notice means the company should be allowed to, for example, fire someone with no cause on the spot.

The asymmetry is an artificial distortion of the market, and like all such distortions, reduces overall productivity.

Asymmetrical relationships are baked into employment. Indeed, that’s the very basis of the idea. Labour laws, unions etc came into existence to change that balance of power. Without them, no paid holiday, no proper weekend, no pension. All of these things reduce productivity.

The purpose of our lives is not productivity. (I have no idea what it might be, but that’s a different thread)

Look, I lead very comfortable life compared to most. Many of the people here are like me, and I dare say, you. But we’re a blip in history. And most of that history hasn’t been particularly kind to people who weren’t born to wealth. I wish more folks internalised that lesson.

> Asymmetrical relationships are baked into employment.

If you have ever employed people (I have), it'd be clear that isn't true. You have no actual power over them. You cannot make them come to work. You cannot make them do anything at all. They can get up and leave at any moment, and you can do nothing.

You know who can do that? The military. If you don't follow orders, into the brig you go. They can even execute you.

> The purpose of our lives is not productivity.

Productivity gives us the amazing high standard of living we enjoy today.

> most of that history hasn’t been particularly kind to people who weren’t born to wealth

Freedom produced prosperity which changed all that for the better. Freedom is the greatest human invention ever.

An employer is not the parent of the employees. It's a transaction - trading labor for money. Just like you buying donuts at the store. If you buy donuts from them daily, should you be forced to continue buying donuts from them? Of course not.

Have you ever hired a service to mow your lawn? When you're unhappy with them, do you cease the relationship? Or do you now owe them your continuing business?

I’d say in the US there is a unique situation because health care is tied to employment, or it’s insanely expensive. When the job market is not great, you see increased costs and more exploitation of those employed.

Deregulate medicine and include benefits as income (and lower income tax rates to prevent revenue windfall).

The US compensates for their lassiez-faire employment model with their gym memberships and other subscriptions, which are harder to get out of than Japanese companies.

Drake meme:

No way ..... $200,000 more a year comp.

Hell yeah ..... gym membership

Sounds like a perfect deal for both employers and gyms - when talking about compensation, it feels like good extra value; when it comes to actually go to the gym, it feels like someone else's money, so no big deal if you skip this time, right?

At will employment coupled with a universal healthcare system would have been the best system for America, but as we know, that's an impossibility now.

I was stunned when I realised my Irish work contracts had a forced notice period, not just a courtesy. Accenture uses this as a tool to stop people quitting - forced three month notice even for super low level employees. Makes it hard to interview for new jobs!

Not at all, the labour market takes that into account, to the extent that if you're available to start working tomorrow, everyone is jostled off balance and chances are you will be asked to begin in three months, anyway.

It does not. New jobs know about notice periods and plan ahead.

I don’t think I’ve ever talked with a recruiter who didn’t ask what my notice period was in the opening conversation. IT services sector has a standard notice period too, so I think most employers expect 2-4 weeks anyways for most people they’d hire.

My wife’s experience was that having a three month notice period to change jobs was a dealbreaker. She’s not a software engineer.

Long ones can be a deal breaker though. It was for me when I was looking for a new job before. It's similar to being willing to relocate imo.

Three months is definitely very much on the high side.

I knew about such periods from reading the handbook when I was working for a global company where US was 3-4 weeks depending on title and other locations were ~3 months.

From a practical perspective, how does that work? I understand if you’re making widgets on the assembly line, you’re gonna keep coming in. But if you’re doing creative work or close work with customers, isn’t there a concern that you’re effort will definitely flag and you’re gonna do crappy work?

Many countries let the worker be at will effectively, the employer can only fire them for cause or redundancy or a proper PIP. However the worker can't sue for much if they are unfairly dismissed, so no company is too on tbe hook. Which is good because it would reduce jobs. Add universal healthcare and social security and it's an OK system. Althouth the SS may not actually be enough to live off.

> Having seen the perverse incentives this creates and the various ways in which it can be abused

Could you list any examples? Because I honestly don't see any way where potentially getting fired for no reason on the spot would be the beneficial option that you claim.

I've btw never heard of anyone where I live getting sued or unable to quit a job.

Not even close. Being from the US, I've worked both in Japan and Europe. Nothing holds a candle to how bad Japan is. It's unbelievable.