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Comment by JazCE | Hacker News Reader

> In the UK (and most other places with fairly strong employee protections I imagine)

People keep saying this, but I'm not at all convinced anyone commenting really understands UK employment law. It's really only after 2 years of working for the same company that you get any decent employment protection.

It takes a bit more legal work, but if within the first 2 years they don't want you, they can get rid of you. If you're within your first 3 months of probation, they can just extend it to 6 months and get rid of you.

The UK is not a great country these days to go "employment laws keep you safe". There are better ones.

If you don't want these rug pulls and employment laws to keep getting watered down, instead of asking about 4 day work weeks, start voting for candidates and parties that have better employment laws at the top of their policies.

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So I made a very vague comment about it being more tricky to get rid of employees in the UK. If you think it's not actually that hard as "it takes a bit more legal work", great.. but we still seem to generally agree. It's a bit patronising to imply I know nothing about UK employment law because we have a small difference of opinion around how robust we would say the protections are.

It was a minor anecdotal comment based on my own experience of hiring/managing employees. Maybe I'm a crap manager but I've always found it labourious to get rid of people (especially passed the 2-year mark as you say). I may as well add that my wife has worked in HR for coming up to 15 years as well and I've been privy to all sorts of juicy legal drama via her.

I generally try and give every response to me some consideration but I'm not sure what else to say. Seems like maybe you just wanted to use my comment as a segway into your point about the erosion of employee protections, which you're entitled to do of course.

> Seems like maybe you just wanted to use my comment as a segway into your point about the erosion of employee protections, which you're entitled to do of course.

That’s like a quarter of the comments on HN at this point (minus the employee protections bit, usually it’s something much more insipid). It’s pretty much impossible not to trigger someone. Everyone’s got their pet issues and culture wars these days.

Well, that's...fine, I guess, right? I mean that's how conversations work in real life, right? Just as long as the parent commenter doesn't interpret it as a direct attack or a direct argument. It just takes the conversation down a different path.

I'll agree with the word choice of 'insipid' however...

Segways are dangerous, just look what happened to the one time owner [1].

ITYM "segue".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Heselden

I think I typed something like that originally but my phone autocorrect didn't like it. Assumed Segway was the American spelling

Meh, you contributed to a certain meme and they contributed a counter-meme because they feel strongly about it. I don't see the problem though their tone might put you on the defense.

But these vague claims are how we end up with memes like "oh that would never happen in $place/Europe/Japan" and such.

>If you don't want these rug pulls and employment laws to keep getting watered down, instead of asking about 4 day work weeks, start voting for candidates and parties that have better employment laws at the top of their policies.

I think in the US employers would be more amenable to a four day work week than making it harder to fire people arbitrarily

What would "better employment laws" look like for you? After all, the parent's theory was that she was fired because she was on the verge of getting additional employment protection, and her performance was mediocre, so rather than risk being saddled with an underperforming employee they fired her just to be safe. Stronger laws against termination would make this problem worse, either by causing companies to be even more aggressive to fire people before their probationary period ends, or try to mitigate risk earlier in the hiring pipeline.

Please show me the candidates that aren’t coin operated by big business. Either party is entirely beholden to the giant corporations and lobbyists. So voting literally does nothing.

>start voting for candidates and parties that have better employment laws at the top of their policies.

Unfortunately they may have other less savoury policies. Which is [one of several reasons] why I don't vote.

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