Your comment reinforces the point mvdwoord made. It ought not be up to a person to find the right job. It is up to society to enforce basic worker protections. Failure to do so leads to exploitation. The U.S. is not as nice a place to live as other rich nations.
The U.S. is not as nice a place to live as other rich nations.
Funny that the waiting list to immigrate to the US can be decades long. I guess those people are just too stupid to know how bad it is in the US?
Also, I immigrated to the US from one of those other rich countries and I think quality of life is better in the US (but it's all a personal preference).
There are lots of countries in the world that are less well off than the U.S. I have not made any claims about living conditions in those countries being worse or better than the U.S. I've not made any claims about people coming from poorer countries being dumb or even people coming from richer countries to the U.S. being dumb.
I made the claim that the U.S. is not as nice a place to live as many other rich countries. Objectively speaking this is a true statement. The U.S. ranks lower on many measurements of living standards. Of course there are counterexamples in that some people have a better standard of living in the U.S. than they did in another country but we need to be mindful that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Nope - nothing objective about it. I moved to the US from a European country with a supposedly higher standard of living. I worked longer hours here, experienced workplace bullying, and a whole host of things that would be illegal in my original country.
However I also experienced more freedom and diversity and was able to find a much more heterogenous community, as well as do things that were simply not allowed in my home country.
My life is much richer here and so the US is much nicer for me to live in.
The US has one major thing going for it when it comes to immigration. Being a melting pot, it is much easier for someone to come in and find a community of people from their own country to make the transition much easier. That, and English is more common as a second language.
> I guess those people are just too stupid to know how bad it is in the US?
US marketing is the best in the world, no doubt; maybe "mistaken" or "deceived" is more accurate than "stupid".
A few observations:
- people trying to immigrate to the USA come predominantly from desperately poor countries that are, indeed, not as nice a place to live. (People from those countries are also frequently denied tourist visa to the USA, btw.)
- among my fellow students at a good university in California that came from first world countries, only about a quarter decided to stay for longer than a few years.
- among Chinese that go to study in the USA, increasing numbers apparently choose to return to China.
> it's all a personal preference
To a large part it is.
Among expats that have options and have seen different continents, the US is more of middling choice, I'd think, but for some people it just clicks and they love it. (And NY is in a different category, anyway.)
It's not. Immigrants from first-world nations get fast tracked through their green card and naturalization process because the quotas aren't exhausted as rapidly as those for poorer nations.
I know several people who have emigrated from some of the above countries to the USA, because running a small business is extremely painful (see for example France).
If you think about companies as "us versus them", where "us" is workers and "them" is giant faceless monolithic corporations, then your idea that enforcing worker protections is a high priority might make sense.
But most companies are small. I run a software company ... I am just a guy trying to get by, who now in addition to the normal-person's burden of making my life go, has to also make a company go, and that company provides jobs for 10-12 people.
If you make my situation much harder than it is, the company would cease to exist or would downscale to 2-4 people, shedding the majority of the jobs. I am not a faceless corporation, I am just a guy who wants to get interesting things built. My little company is certainly not set up to "exploit workers", especially not on an industrial scale.
Now, paraxoically, if you add a lot more friction to what needs to happen to run a business (regulation around hiring, firing, invoicing, etc), then people like me drop out, and then what you mostly have left is the larger companies who do want to exploit workers because that is just kind of how larger companies work. Plus then you lose all the innovation / energy / economic activity that comes from smaller companies. It maybe seems like not the best idea. (If it is, how come Silicon Valley is not in France?)
As an investor, I fund a small French company and I have seen some of the crap they have to deal with just because they have a handful of employees. It makes me very glad I don't live in France.
I don't see things in terms of workers vs. employers. I see things in terms of what is morally right and what is good for society. People should not feel forced to come to work when sick. People should not be forced to work while on vacation or pressured to not use their vacation. People should not have their access to healthcare dependent on their employer.
Go to reddit/r/personalfinance and you'll read lots of stories of people in shit jobs being taken advantage of by their employer. A society that allows people without money/education to be exploited is not a good one. In the U.S., from my perspective, we have a "I've got mine, fuck you" society. I'm not exploited at my job and I have a very comfortable existence. However, many of my fellow countrymen are not so fortunate.
What about the other burdens you don't have to worry about in these countries like healthcare for employees?
Also, those restrictions on firing may be giving you a lot more potential employees. Changing jobs is a risk and if you were able to fire them after a week then that would be a major financial setback for them.
One thing I think a lot of people in business agree about is that we should adopt a more European approach (the Swiss approach is particularly good) to healthcare. You're right: the American approach to health care is a disaster for small employers.
I agree ... it doesn't make any sense to me that an employer should have anything to do with supplying healthcare to employees. It just makes the system more complicated. I'd be happy with simplifying that out.
But this doesn't seem to be nearly enough to tip the balance in terms of operating a business overall ... I consistently hear from people how much it sucks to operate a small business in Europe. I don't see what's wrong in principle with having worker protections kick in at a certain company size, but that doesn't seem to be popular.
Most worker protection laws in Germany only kick in when you've got a certain number of employees. I'm too lazy to look up the number, but it's small, single-digit I think.
In IT, Canada is pretty good, too, and scores higher than the US on some business indicators. There is probably more paperwork involved since there are no LLCs so you'd need a corp, but it's very manageable with an accountant's help. I also haven't heard of patent trolls or lawsuits being a problem, which is something that would scare me if I lived in the US.
Of course, if your business is in maple syrup or something else with heavy government intervention, then your experience will likely be quite different. :)
