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Comment by eunos | Hacker News Reader

Many IT folks were cocky during the post-COVID height. Some even mock Unions for making firings harder, worried that their "incompetent" co-workers difficult to boot.

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Many people in software especially have been successfully convinced that any kind of unionisation will be to their detriment. That they’ll suffer lower wages and “difficult to fire bad workers” will be inevitable result of unions, despite both these things happening already.

I'm in a union and I still criticise unions for this. You can't make it harder to fire people unfairly without also making it harder to fire them when they're actively harming the business and/or their co-workers.

Come on, the myth that it's hard to fire incompetent people is total bullcrap, perpetuated by executives to avoid dealing with unions. I live in one of the countries with the strongest union protections and traditions in the world. It's not hard here to fire someone if you want to fire them´, even if in union.

I live in Australia and it's an absolute pain in the arse to fire someone for performance issues, assuming they work at a medium or large business (e.g. of more than 20 people) and they've made it through their 3-month trial period. You have to PIP them and the process takes months.

I've known of two engineers whose managers told me they would have fired them, but higher management wouldn't let them initiate the PIP process. The one case where I worked at the company was pretty bad. We had to shuffle the individual off onto makework jobs where they couldn't do much harm.

I don't think it's fair to blame this entirely on unions when it's the result of big businesses being too scared to follow a process that was given to them by the government. Unions mostly fight real unfair dismissals and only play a minor role in creating a chilling effect. Still, in practice it's hard to fire someone.

I think I'll take that over management doing lay offs because vibes or whatever.

I don't completely disagree and I prefer it to systems with zero protection. At-will employment from the US seems bad. However, siva7 said it was a "myth" and "total bullcrap" that firing incompetent people is hard, and it's just not.

I think it’s because it is hard to hard to fire incompetent people, and the software industry is absolutely flooded with them?

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