And yet there are people who prefer working on site and “being observed by management”.

So, people not wanting to bring their work inside their homes where they eat, sleep, watch movies, play games, meet friends, have sex and play with their kids is unnatural? Are you gonna tell me next that same sex couples are also unnatural?

I'll tell you what's unnatural: You trying to be the authority on what's unnatural.

Stop trying to enforce your world views on everyone.

It takes time and usually isn't worth for small amounts... But for 75k someone will take time.

[1] https://www.chetu.com/locations.php

Tbh, it’s just a cost of doing business in the Netherlands.

https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1466794872648650752

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_pr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD_Better_Life_Index#2020

I think a more interesting point is that people in the UK and Japan specifically are poorer than you'd think they are. And they don't have working clothes dryers either.

It operates similarly to the European Account Preservation Order, and under the right circumstances it is possible to apply for a freezing order on a _without notice_ basis meaning that the employer would not be aware of the order until it is issued.

Being in a union pays off in labor court: Unions usually offer sending their legal staff instead of a lawyer that you‘d need to personally retain. This substantially reduces the costs of a court case for the employee.

See https://www.klugo.de/ratgeber/arbeitsgericht-kosten

(1) or shared, on partial wins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...

If the court ruled in their favour it would have been insubordination.

In my contract, it says there is a few months' notice period, both when I want to stop working there as well as when they want me to stop working there. When reviewing the contract, it sounded reasonable and I just assumed that when I get the notice, that's how it is.

Later, I learned of these "there must be a valid reason" type of protections.

Does that make this whole clause void? Or even working in my favor, that is: even if there is a valid reason, our contract adds those months of notice period?

The dismissal process for underperformance here (UK) requires the employer to give warnings: one verbal, and two written, I think. The employer is also expected to help the employee meet the performance target. The PIP sounds like a checklist version of that help - it's not meant to help the employee, it's meant to hustle along the dismissal process. I'd take a job flipping burgers, rather than work for a boss that put me on a PIP.

- 4 weeks paid holiday

- 4 months unpaid parental leave, 14 weeks paid for the mother

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_labour_law is the best overview I can find.

In the Netherlands court, the legal fees were sub 1k, and the decision happened less than 2 months from the filing.

Personally I value my "work". That is not to say I value my efforts for my employer which makes this hard to explain.

I do not find value is laying around, vacationing, sports, or any other traditional "leisure" activity. I like to work

So even when I am not "working" for pay for my employer, I am still working. I am going a personal coding project, or working on my home, or working on my car, or working in some other way.

I work... weather it is for pay, for my own personal pleasure.

The article also mentioned "commission" as part of his compensation which may be related to a sales function.

Oddly enough, after we 'mutually agreed to terminate my employment' there, I got a call from the director of another department offering me a job in his department and, most surprisingly, a really glowing recommendation on LinkedIn from the very manager that fired me.

I don't claim to understand it. But I do understand why the company had such high turnover, and why the guy I had been hired to replace had gone on mental health leave and just never came back.

Case law is a thing in civil law systems too, it is just not binding on the judges except special occasions.

For a software engineer, I’m not sure if the Netherlands makes sense. For everyone else, I’m almost certain it does.

Swap the US and Russia and replace "Ukraine" with "North Vietnam" and you have a historical conflict which everyone agrees was a proxy war. How is this different?

Of course, that's an old picture of the country; ~10 years ago when everyone though of Tokyo as a place where kids hung out on the street in cool fashion all day, that's because those kids were unemployed because they weren't willing to become salarymen. And there has been real reform towards productivity since then.

Also, Japan’s Phillips Curve looks like Japan.

http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/japan.pdf

If I tell you to go buy 10 apples, refusing would be insubordination because it's legal to buy apples.

If I tell you to go steal 10 apples, refusing would not be insubordination because it's legal to buy apples.

Until the court ruled against them, the view of the firm would have been it was legal to require someone to have their camera on. Hence they viewed it as insubordination to refuse.

They are wrong, it's not insubordination, but it's not unfair of them to think it was.

"Yeah, if you disregard all the poor people that struggle to stay alive, us rich people are generally much richer".

I think your exact statement is probably true. Because most European countries tries to distribute wealth in such a way that everyone gets to live, with food, healthcare, education and housing. And naturally that means that the 50% wealthiest in Europe are less wealthy than the 50% wealthiest in the US.

But the 50% poorest in Europe are much wealthier than the 50% poorest in the US.

I know that you Americans use the word 'middle class' in place of 'working class'. No, a professor would not be 'working class'. Its lower upper class at the least. Both in Europe and the US.

Even for the public university case, the Europeans have benefits that you likely don't calculate. From getting state-subsidies per child to rent control to many different things. You shouldnt calculate the difference just over pension, medical and housing.

Up until recently, it was a given. In the case of Japan, there is some kind of feudal behavior of 'loyalty' that comes from the Zaibatsu culture. Which in itself descended from postwar Yakuza.

> We can't even stop Saudi Arabia from raising gas prices whenever they want to annoy us.

You used to. Until Russia & China built up enough defense industry and also started helping any country against US coups and color revolutions by providing intelligence.

1. The act of subordinating, subjecting, or placing in a lower order, rank, or position, or in proper degrees of rank; also, the state of being subordinate or inferior; inferiority of rank or dignity.

2. Degree of lesser rank.

3. The state of being under control of government; subjection to rule; habit of obedience to orders.

4. The act of subordinating, placing in a lower order, or subjecting.

5. The quality or state of being subordinate or inferior to an other; inferiority of rank or dignity; subjection.

6. Place of inferior rank.

7. The process of making something subordinate.

8. The property of being subordinate.

9. The quality of being properly obedient to a superior (as a superior officer).

As you see when you expect your dog to be obedient your are placing yourself on a higher rank, so your dog is your subordinate.

When you expect your employee to be subordinate your are expecting him to obey when something is asked or tasked from ranks higher than their's in your organization. Your are also expecting him to obey to what is written in the subordination contract signed by both.

Wikipedia: obedience, in human behavior, is a form of "social influence in which a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure".

What I think to be the main issue is the word "order". IMHO an order is not something that might exist in a workplace, with few exceptions. Your boss gives you tasks and expect you to execute them remaining inside a more or less explicit set of rules, your boss cannot give you orders.

We are talking about a Danish person hired by an European company. I fail to see the point of your comment.

...

There can be no bigger enemy than the country that blew up European pipelines to sink European industry.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-09/european-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law

All the states are At Will, but a number of them have exceptions that provide certain protections (ex. Not being fired for following the law):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Wtf?

No, "right to work" is not the opposite of "at will," they have almost nothing to do with each other. Furthermore, Texas IS a "right to work" state.

"Right-to-work" laws are laws that make joining a union not a requirement for employment.

All states in the US are "at will" employment.

Sounds like a good way to burn bridges. If I'd show up to work one day and tell them to suck it up for the next few months of planned projects, I do know what kind of reference my boss would provide to future employers.

It's not about loyalty or something, but so long as there isn't anything egregious, it does seem reasonable to me that both sides can expect a notice periods.

We implemented a coaching system for our support team about a year ago with the explicit purpose that individual coaching does not directly affect KPI, and that as much coaching can and should be done freely without worry of impacting the support team. The system tracks both the person being coached and their team lead who does the coaching. The coaching is directed to be as instructive as possible, that it's not about punishment, but better ways of handling specific technical situations or adherence to the support policy.

Long term reviews consider not just the person being coached, but also the leader as well, as a high number of coaching options across multiple persons on the same team would suggest an issue with the leadership as the root cause, and more qualitative reviews focus on that element as well. The entire point is to ensure that Performance Improvement Plans don't have to be a thing, and that there is constructive feedback flowing into the system.

Adoption was slow, but with strict adherence to what a coaching instruction must include, we've seen exceptionally high improvement and much calmer conversations when mistakes are made since the support persons realize "this isn't a KPI penalty or a PIP; it's just trying to prevent that." Having the system "open", i.e., the support persons can see every entry they have at any time with a few clicks of a button means no secrets.

It's a lot of documenting, but so far we're seeing a ton of success with it and positive feedback to having this process for constructive criticism, and the focus on also considering "this might be a leadership issue" also helps add some comfort.

I get the logic, but as an American I was surprised… I was never PiPed but I too would have assumed it was better than the alternative. Not always!

I have had very close interactions (details below) with managers who completely fabricated “poor performance” in order to PIP the target out of a job.

In both cases, I had the PIP target secretly work in tandem with a star employee to produce work that was considered top notch work up and down the management chain.

In both cases, the manager took a cursory look at the work and completely dressed down the PIP target verbally and in writing with little or no constructive feedback.

One manager was fired, and the other manager was out to pasture to work on meaningless solo projects (necessary due to organizational reasons).

I am not sure how common this is, but managers who are slightly more intelligent about it can fairly easily set up a PIP target to fail while technically providing constructive feedback.

One of the cultural problems in this org was that pretty much 100% of the managers were bad/inexperienced/untrained, so the unwritten rule was to not monitor the administrative actions of other managers. I was brought in basically to protect them from potential lawsuits that would have had merit — they were incapable of doing this internally.

> I think the point is, if a company is going to abuse employee, that will happen with or with out a PIP

Agreed.

> but even with abusive management having that process IMO is better than not

Sort of, imho. What I always tell people is that they should consider their PIP period as a type of severance and look for another job aggressively while they are on it.

In the handful of orgs that do PIPs well, the folks will usually know that the process is not punitive. I will add that I am fairly certain they every relatively large org I’ve known that does PIPs well also gives folks an opportunity to transfer if the job is not a good fit (assuming the target is not a bad apple, which is a selection problem).

Anyway, I agree that PIPs could and should be an effective tool for remediation. That said, I am not sure it’s any better than undocumented managerial capriciousness and malfeasance since usually all it really does in these situations is slow down the bad behavior slightly.

If anyone gets randomly fired by a bad manager in an org with no PIP, they are probably better off just being out of the org in general rather than suffering for a few months in a sham.

Thankfully, in Europe, unions have harshly fought for somewhat fair employment laws and this relationship only applies to actual work and not the whimsies of your boss.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/superior

Boss is by definition superior to your position, not in a sense better, but higher.

Then you are forgetting about Georgia where Russia fought a war in 2008 resulting in Russia creating South Ossetia on Georgian land. Exactly the thing they now tried to do with Luhansk and Donetsk.

Then there is Kazakhstan where Russia did a military intervention to support the government in 2022, this year! Although, Kazakhstan seems to want to sever the ties to Russia now.

I have a feeling that you don't know anything about this topic and just read a single article and now feel informed while in reality you were hit by Russian propaganda. The author of the article you posted thinks that NATO made Russia invade Ukraine by expanding to far East, explicitly following Russian talking points.

in this particular example, the legal date for termination in austria would have been december 31st (because by default it is 6 weeks notice after august 26, to the nearest quarter) in germany it would have been september 30th.

and for termination without notice

https://www.arbeitnehmer.at/kuendigung/entlassung/

pretty clearly spells out the reasons when someone can be fired, which contradicts your claim that people can be fired for no reason.

Stigma around being on a corrective performance plan should be removed?

For most people, multiple months notice wouldn't work well. Either you quit without an offer in hand and spend half your remaining time job hunting or you have an offer but your potential new employer won't wait more than a month. I'd certainly think very hard before entering into such an arrangement as it would make getting a new job riskier.

The world just isn’t that limited, thankfully.

Tip: think about why you had to put “superior” in quotes.

>Juppor is talking about suing in Florida courts. Florida is absolutely at will. He may be able to sue to collect a foreign court judgement instead

When I was there that was how this was done. Basically you would always get a reference letter when ending employment. The reference letter's language always sounds good, as in not giving a bad reference. However, a reference letter that states things like "employee X delivered his tasks on time and to the satisfaction of work standards" basically means that he's a slacker that does mediocre work at best. It has to say something like "We are ultimately saddened for employee X leaving because he always delivered his work early and to the highest standard thinkable". These are bad made-up English language examples to show the difference in language but there's basically template language HR departments use for this.

That's the norm in most places, isn't it? He didn't steal anything, he wasn't sacked, he didn't punch-out the boss, and he didn't shit on the carpet.

Nobody wants to be sued for giving a decent reference.

My dad was a soldier; his retirement reference (age 45) said something like "He is an oustanding officer who will succeed at any enterprise he turns his hand to". That impressed me, until I learned that any officer retiring from the army will get a reference pretty-much the same.

Note that retiring from the army at age 45 is very common. If you get to 45 without getting promoted past colonel, you need a new career, because serious promotion happens when your CO gets killed in combat; and beyond about 45, they won't be sending you into combat.

I never knew in Germany one is expected to obtain actual proper reference letters from past employers. Good to know just in case.

Long time ago (15+ years ago) I had worked in Poland. Back then I did get a written reference from the company I worked for. I can't say if those letters are required these days in PL.

This works in the US as well.

Particularly relevant, is that if you want to collect in the US, you have to go to the courts in the US and show them the foreign judgment. There are many circumstances where these are not accepted.

>Juppor is talking about suing in Florida courts. Florida is absolutely at will. He may be able to sue to collect a foreign court judgement instead

A company (an employer) rents the time and skills of employees for a particular task. It's not a pool of work that employees must struggle to achieve regardless of circumstances - it's the employer's responsibility to hire enough staff.

For example, my paternity leave (20 days or 40 half days) would not impact my colleagues. Some of them can opt into overtime, but the same labor laws also define how overtime works - as an employer, you can't order someone to work extra hours unless described in their contract (and limited to the maximum specified by law, with mandatory regular breaks). Overtime is also paid at 150% or 200% of your regular pay, depending on the day of the week and hour of the day (e.g., weekends and nights obviously cost more than daytime rates). Very few jobs are even allowed to work on Sundays.

As a person without kids I do sometimes wish childfree people got benefits in ways that have more _immediate_ applications for us as well. But that doesn't mean parents shouldn't keep getting generous leave allowances to care for their children.

> I can not image the extra amount of work that get places on people that do not have children...

What you're forgetting is the amount of work required to raise children. That's an externality that is only covered through a social contract, where everyone contributes to a next generation. Why should parents put in the extra work to raise children that, god forbid, would ever do something you benefit from?

What you want is someone else doing the work so that you can just reap the benefits. You're a freeloader, plain and simple (other, less favorable words come to mind).

Unless, of course, you will never in your life use the services or inventions of anyone younger than you. But, somehow, I doubt that - am I right? You just expect those cohorts to just appear out od thin air to your benefit.

It's called society.

Rising tides and boats comes to mind.

There are better solutions (teaching individuals to be more financially responsible and kicking overly rich capitalists to the curb, for one) but that's preaching to the choir.

Aside from the fact that since most homes are covered by a mortgage and mortgage companies would require that as a condition of a loan, no where did I really say to make it optional. I simply said I wanted an itmized bill for the service

I am required to have water service turned on as part of occupancy, I can not turn off the water service to home even if I wanted to live completely on bottled water, it would be against local ordinances. I am required to pay that bill monthly, if I turn it off I would get fined by the city, and at some point they would take my home

I am also required to mow my grass, and other such things, I fail to see why fire services would be any different.

>It's not all that different than living in an apartment with a few other people.

You are correct on that front, I despise apartment living and I also despise HOA which is why I took great care to avoid both in my life.

If star link or a competitor proves to be very successful and gets to be cost effective then Rural living may even be in the cards for me, one the only reasons I moved to where I did was because of the availability of high speed fiber optic service.

Why do you assume I would think it is someone else's duty to provide anything to me? This seems to be a bit of projection.

A good standard of living was possible with a single income 50 years ago (just). It's barely possible today with two average incomes in much of the US.

Personal I am supporter of the Henry George Single Tax model to fund society instead of income based taxation

(Which isn’t to say we should make them work less, but we should get them smaller trucks like other countries have.)

These are choices I make in a free(ish) market. Companies offer their goods, I choose to buy or not

Similar with labor, I go to the market offer my knowledge and labor for a Wage, if I set my price to high companies will refuse to hire me, if I set my price to low I am missing out on profit.

Income Taxation is in no way voluntary exchange like that, the government with the full authority to initiate violence injects itself with a demand that for every hour of labor I sell I must provide the government with a 10-40% cut of not only my profit from the sell but the gross transaction price. They do so under the threat of violence (aka imprisonment) if I refuse their order.

The fact is that the government, like a common thief, says to a person: Your money, or your life...The government does not, indeed, waylay a person in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.

How is paying employees to sit at home not working anything other than charity/

To me the obvious flaw in this type of society has always been that it provides no guard against the concentration of wealth and by proxy power. It works with a theoretical amorphous blob of people who have no ties to location and an infinite supply of land and resources. In reality the populace would quickly become slaves, with the only interest of the organisations in control of their food, shelter, and transport being the extraction of ever larger sums of money.

I'm honestly not sure how someone could look at the state of the corporate world and say "I wish these guys controlled more of my life". We've already seen this type of rent seeking become prominent in digital media and it hasn't improved anything for the populace.

The profit motive is functional enough for things that aren't necessities but we know exactly what happens when a profit driven entity has a near or local monopoly on something necessary for life. Look to the early railroads and company towns as an example.

> In fact history shows that government is generally pretty poor at providing any of those things

That's a bold claim without any proof. I'd argue the opposite. The vast majority of the population is now both numerate and literate and most countries have a usable road and rail network that's accessible to everyone. Beyond that government programs have been responsible for the eradication of multiple diseases.

And who does history shows as being better at it?

Yeah, you could just 'take away its funding' and just do away with the military in a private environment. Which brings us to...

> Like all socialists, you are the delirious one

...the delirium of thinking that you would be able to keep your freedom and agency at the moment which you lose that socially-funded, democratically controlled military after you take its funding away in a private market environment. Which will make you immediately a subject of the richest man who did not take away the funding of the military outfit he supports.

> All taxes are evil.

The people from the country that kills its people when they cant pay for healthcare is telling us that all taxes are evil, even as their very infrastructure collapses.

THAT is delirium. Nothing else.

Plus, as noted elsewhere, you are getting benefits from the taxes you're paying now, only just on some of it.

I don't know which country you're living in, but surely the money you paid into a pension scheme - be it public or private - doesn't just disappear because you moved to another country?

Spain is famously full of UK pensioners receiving and spending their pounds there. Heck, my father worked for a few years in Belgium in his youth, without even being a citizen, and that still entitled him to a (minuscule) Belgian pension later on, in addition to his more substantial one from his subsequent decades of work in a different country.

Can you explain what you mean by this part?

It'd be far more desirable to return to situations where most of the budget is spent on luxury and only a little is spent on any kind of milestone, but that's a campaign most politicians aren't winning votes with.

If non-income based taxation worked, societies would be using it. Every single form of taxation was tried throughout history. This is the one that works.

> That is a bit of projection there.

No. The ones who BELIEVE that things will 'just' be 'okay' if they just leave things to 'the market' are repeating the Christianity's format of faith. That there is a 'good god' that will just make everything 'okay'. That's why it is faith.

> Individualism is about the rejection of a "higher power", in your case this higher power is "the state" having replaced a god or gods

Organized, well equipped and trained authoritarian forces do not give zit about the rejection of their authority by the individual people. The moment you lose the guarantor of your freedom and rights - the democratically owned and controlled society - is the moment you are a subject of the strongest armed bunch nearby.

> Modern society was build by voluntary exchange of free individuals, not government.

The modern society was built by literally the organized French Revolutionaries deposing the aristocracy, making everyone equal and creating a social and legal system that ensured that. There hasn't been any 'voluntary exchange' of power on the side of armed, organized minority tyrants.

Neither the society was formed in American Wild West, where if you were upset with your local environment, you could just kill some more Indians and steal their land and prop yourself up on the stolen land in the most libertarian fashion.

Such philosophy is great while there is free land to take. The moment the free land runs out, things change. Just like how it happened at the end of 19th century in the US.

> the entire US model of government is build on the fact that freedoms and rights need to be protected FROM government

Yes. And that's why the US is in knee-deep sh*t. Becaue large slaveowners who had gigantic amount of land, wanted to protect their land from redistribution like how it was done to the deposed English nobility. Hence you got 'checks and balances' to prevent the democratic majority from asserting their will, with an openly declared intention by the architect of your constitution, John Adams, that the 'opulent' (rich) must be protected from the 'tyranny of the majority' (the people).

And as a result, you are killing your people when they cant pay for healthcare, 42 million working families are suffering hunger, you are still paying the $4 trillion Iraqi war debt that you accrued for the privilege of murdering 1 million Iraqis, and your infrastructure is failing.

But hey - the rich are far richer. So that is 'okay'.

The programmer with 5 kids does make more than the one with no kids because he pays fewer income taxes. So the answer to your question is yes: it's how it already works.

First time in Europe? That's pretty much a given here, more kids = bigger tax break = more netto pay.

For example you decry the " inefficient space usage " of modern housing, and suburbs, however many people clearly prefer to have single family structures on plots of land over living in densely populated area's

I am one of those people, I would never choose to voluntary live in a dense city like NYC or even LA

I can think of nothing more nightmarish then living in a multistory apartment building. I lived in a 3 story building once, and got out of there as fast as I possibly could. Today I live in a typical suburban neighborhood, with homes on 1/2 to 3/4 acre lots and about 40-100 foot separation between home even that is far too tightly packed for me, and would prefer even greater separation.

Governments attempt to control sprawl and force more density is in part what is driving the massive increase in cost for Single Family homes.

So it is not a correct statement to proclaim the free market is not solving problems, it is that people that guide the market reject your proposed problems and the solutions you desire for the problems, in that rejection the only way to do it is to impose government regulations by force.

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/