How would they reassign someone from the reporting chain of the company's CEO?

Asserting that they can’t be a direct subordinate should suffice in practice in most cases.

The CEOs of both BP and Nestle lost their jobs for having relationships with employees.

it's very common actually. One of my former managers was pressing an intern for sex, dangling a job. Too bad we weren't hiring at that time. Why are they doing this? Maybe the power is the point?

> In Europe, workplace relationships are considered a private matter as long as workplace peace doesn't suffer,

Well safe to say that European companies are generally irrelevant, but very irrelevant in this thread.

Ableton is cool though ;)

Isn’t it a conflict of interest to be sleeping with your direct reports? How does that play out in performance reviews? It’s definitely a massive HR problem

It's also really ethically dubious to sleep with someone you have that kind of authority over

Why? It’s how the mammal world works since the beginning of time. Females seek out the alpha male.

"Is-Ought Fallacy" is the right search term.

The "alpha male" is not even how wolf packs work in the wild: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-alpha-wolf...

The researchers who coined the phrase eventually realized it only applied to artificial packs in captivity, not the wild.

Mammal world has also worked by killing another mammal with food you want if slightly hungry. Yet, for some reason, people don't question why murder is illegal whenever someone gets convicted of homicide. Selective appeals to evolutionary history are an empty argument.

It's certainly an abuse of power and a lot of companies in the US forbid this explicitly, often in employee guidebook

That's where the "disclosure and reassignments" come into play - you can date a direct report, as long as you let the company know they should report to someone else from now on.

> ...and a ban would be considered legally impermissible.

This is factually incorrect. It is entirely legal for companies in Europe to restrict relationships where one party is a direct subordinate to the other. They can also legally require disclosure of such relationships.

This is common because these relationships can create significant conflicts of interest.

As someone else in this thread noted, the former CEO of Nestle (a Swiss company) was fired because he had a relationship with a direct report that he failed to disclose, and the former CEO of BP (a UK company) resigned because of a similar situation.

the person you're replying to wrote you have to disclose.

But as far as I know, it's not illegal, as this person implied, for a European company to forbid relationships between direct reports.

Disclosure allows for people to be reassigned so that they're not longer in a subordinate position.

But they didn't say you could be fired in the EU, which the comment you replied to pointed out has actually happened.

Are you guys thinking that Europe is a country and have the same labor law everywhere?

The US also does not allow banning relationships, but employers are not required to employ both persons in a couple. Europe restricts many aspects of people losing their jobs, is a more salient aspect of the legal comparison.

What US state law prevents this?