>> promptly got fired because they'd have to give him a pay raise
Not so great for the people, too... harder to get a job instead of just letting the new standard engineer go to the highest bidder. They might as well make it very hard to fire him to fix that problem, and then they'd could go full circle and be in France: it's so hard for employers to fire you that they never want to take a chance on you in the first place, and then they want to pay you less because you might turn out to be a bad hire. At least you get endless vacations :)
Or, just make it easy to hire and fire.. better for everyone.
It's counterintuitive but makes perfect sense once you think about it.
Would you put your money in a bank account if you knew that withdrawing it later was an uncertain, long, expensive process?
Of course not.
The same logic applies to hiring. It's a huge deal to hire someone if you know there's a lot of red tape and expense around lettig them go if you have to.
It's actually not a negative because any potential employee falls under the same laws and companies have to get things done. Your argument could equally be applied to a university degree, or to prior experience - both mean you expect higher pay and so by your logic companies are less likely to even interview you.
I'm not familiar with the situation in France but if it's as you say, you're just using the fallacy of the excluded middle to reject out of hand the possibility of a fair compromise.
> any potential employee falls under the same laws and companies have to get things done
The externalities are the killer here; companies slow down their hiring by default, economic velocity decreases, and escape velocity becomes unattainable.
> Your argument could equally be applied to a university degree, or to prior experience - both mean you expect higher pay and so by your logic companies are less likely to even interview you
That higher pay is not a given because it's not mandated. You might expect higher pay but then be sadly disappointed when you find out that the market doesn't value your additional experience or university degree the way that you do, even though you owe $100k for the piece of paper. (Of course, the opposite can also be true and hopefully often is, but the point is that the market decides based on what's most efficient for the company and will help them generate more money fastest.)
Because he's a bad example who worked for a shitty company who was firing half their workforce anyway. They would have found some other reason if not for this. Fun story though, one of the high up managers who pulled this and similar stunts later applied for a job with a friend of mine, and I got asked for my opinion. I was, uh, rather honest about my feelings and he didn't get hired.
I guess I just assumed that now that he had the proper credentials, he could go a get a job with them?
I'm not sure what your economy and job market are like in Australia right now, maybe this is a misguided assumption.
Also, in America, there's almost no ways to guarantee you a specific income, since minimum wages for salaries outside of government positions don't exist.
That's pretty fortunate for employed people (IE, you have a tangible and well-defined path to a specific salary number) but sucks for employers, lol.