I have a lot of family in France, and based on what I've heard from them, the flip-side of those kinds of employment protections is that employers become much more reluctant to hire people (especially young people and people considered higher risk based on background, skills, etc.)
Possible that this attitude (along with many other factors) contributes to the far less developed startup cultures of many Western European countries.
Spain has a 15-days notice for termination and Luxembourg 1-month, France 3 months for IT jobs (I'm French) and I guess employee protection laws are proportional to those figures. So I wonder whether it's essntially France which is considers the employment contract as a blood pact.
I am French. The 3 month notice is when employees want to terminate a contract.
The way the usual contract in IT (CDI) works is: you can have a 4-month trial period, which you can renew once. Then the employer cannot fire you without "serious cause" (and "bad performance" does not qualify).
Some side-effects of that are:
- Employers are afraid to hire, leading to long-term unemployment.
- IT is dominated by huge consultancies (because companies prefer to contract out than hire).
- As an employee, it is almost impossible to rent a flat in Paris during a trial period (because we also have laws that make it impossible to expell people who don't pay their rent).
- Acquisitions are complicated because the acquirer needs to keep the whole team. An exception is companies that go broke (in which case they can fire part of the team and then be acquired).
I understand why we have those laws, they are useful to protect some categories of people. But for higher revenue professions, we would be better off with a contract that is more flexible. More and more people are trying to work around this by creating single-person companies instead of being employed directly, but it is a mess (and the state is doing all it can to make it illegal...).
Possible that this attitude (along with many other factors) contributes to the far less developed startup cultures of many Western European countries.