Step 1: More job regulations.
Step 2: Employees cost more and are harder to get rid of; Businesses less inclined to hire.
Step 3: Jobs are hard to get, so employees ask for more security from the government.
Repeat.
As a) these jobs are by definition locally bound and b) the ruling affects all employers in these industries equally, I have a hard time seeing how that should negatively affect the employment situation.
Edit: We had a similar event in Germany: About a year ago a minimum wage law has been introduced. The industries affected are largely the same. The fears were the same: Overregulation was expected to be a job killer. The empirical results: New regular jobs have been created in these industries.
Or do you think it's a breeze seeking a job in France (unemployment ~10%), Italy (unemployment ~13%), Spain (unemployment ~20%), Greece (unemployment ~25%)...
There's many others if you want to take a look. http://www.statista.com/statistics/268830/unemployment-rate-...
I did not say it was caused by EU regulations, just that Europeans (which include local governments) are in a vicious circle.
All your listed countries have higher working hours than Germany. In fact, the working hours in Greece are 50% higher than in Germany.
Annual working hours are highly correlated with unemployment rate. Note I'm not saying that a causes b, but the correlation is obvious.
On the other hand, there is no empirical evidence of workers' rights protection causing unemployment. That narrative often gets repeated, but that doesn't make it true.
Interesting... but like you said, it's just a correlation. Could as much be that people are less likely to work many hours when there's full employment, or when a country is richer.
> On the other hand, there is no empirical evidence of workers' rights protection causing unemployment. That narrative often gets repeated, but that doesn't make it true.
As a business owner, every additional regulation regarding employees is increasing my cost. (And it doesn't matter if I would have agreed anyway with what the law says; I still have to waste time learning it, more paperwork, less flexibility.) So I know that the more regulation there is in this field, the less I'm inclined to hire. It's not a narrative, that's my reality.
My point was that it doesn't matter if every other business in your industry bears the same burden, too. Your competitive position stays the same. No profit opportunities are lost.
A lot of American business owners complain that their business is "hanging on by a thread". This is because they are operating at the lowest energy state which provides little safety margin for failure. If there were stronger regulations in America, then fragile business models would not be able to attract investment.
They have very little to do with worker protections. If they did it would have been like this for a long time before 2008. They weren't.
It's not a zero-sum game where the only way you keep unemployment low is by going full USA and stripping workers of any kind of protection at all.
I guess that would explain why I do software dev in a working salt mine.