
What it costs to sack a worker - kirubakaran
http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=7933596&story_id=12209771
======
adamc
In the US, the real cost is the fear of litigation.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
But it costs so much more to keep a cancerous waste around who poisons the
environment.

I'm all for workers' rights (I once belonged to a union), but sometimes the
axe has to fall.

------
jhancock
The Economist has lost lots of credibility with this one.

I have lived and run companies in Shanghai for 8 years. The number for China
is completely wrong. Firing someone in China is straightforward. There are
rules to guard against improper firing, but they are fair and balanced.

The current maximum is 2 years salary and that is under rare conditions.
Normally, you pay someone between 2 weeks to 2 months. The new labor laws
generally stipulate 1 month pay for each year of service.

This is further negotiated, and generally reduced, by contract with the
employee. And that assumes you did not fire them for a "reason" which can be
put in contract as well.

You could have a contract saying employees must follow company policy. Company
policy, in turn, may say employees must be clean and follow certain dress
codes. You break company policy, you get fired, no excessive payout. Its very
simple.

------
pmjordan
The Zimbabwe figure is kind of misleading, unless it's corrected for the
insane inflation of the Z$. I just did a quick calculation, and assuming 10M%
yearly inflation, that works out to about 20 weeks.

~~~
wheels
It's not just misleading, including Zimbabwe on the list right now is just
silly. Their currency is essentially meaningless.

------
maxklein
This list is VERY inaccurate and completely misleading. I don't know who the
dolts where that published it.

~~~
maw
This is just a largely unfounded guess based on my feminine intuition -- and
note that I'm a dude -- but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it was
the Economist.

------
biohacker42
Has the cost of firing in France come down recently? I thought they had one of
the highest costs of firing in all of Europe.

Allegedly, it was cheaper to keep people on indefinitely then to fire them.
(That might have been government or union workers, not sure.)

------
davidw
Odd how rich countries that function well are interspersed with countries that
don't work quite as well (at least in terms of ease of doing business). Italy
is fairly low on the list, yet I'd take Canada or Britain's economy any day.

------
Alex3917
There might be no legal requirement to pay someone after firing them, but by
convention you usually get one month of pay for each year on the job. That
would make the US fifth on the list.

------
baha_man
The chart could do without the stupid graphic. I've heard of workers being
sacked by text message, but never by Post-it note. (If it _is_ a Post-it note,
why the drawing pin?)

------
mynameishere
I nominate taw's dead comment for "Most mysteriously dead comment of the
week".

------
time_management
How common is it, really, for someone to stay with a company for 20 years? And
why do I care about data that won't affect me on either end until, at the
least, 2028? Presumably, all these numbers will be very different by then.

