[rndgermandude]

Labor protection may help with keeping your current job. But they probably will not help with you advancing your career, and they will not help with your co-workers looking funny at you because somebody on the internet alleged you are a so-and-so-ist. Or customers and/or other partners refusing to work with you. And so on.

Back in school (in Germany[0]) we had a case of a teacher, who among other things taught PE, and who was falsely accused of "inappropriately touching some girls". The girls in question told everybody (except the teachers of course) that they will be fabricating such a story as "revenge" for the PE teacher actually trying to make them take part in PE instead of just sitting around. As soon as the police got involved, they backed down and recanted, apologizing and basically claiming they considered it not "a big deal" and just a "prank", but by that time the damage was done.

The teacher in question had been suspended during the investigation and of course that was the talk of the school and everybody including their parents knew about it. After being cleared, parents would constantly ask to take their kids out of his PE class "just to be sure", so he ended up not teaching PE at all anymore shortly after. Afterwards we usually saw him eat alone, as the other teachers seemed to avoid him, and roam around alone in the halls during breaks instead of going to the teachers lounge like everybody else. He retired as early as he could.

Not directly related to "cancel culture", but to the mindset that goes with it, my mom told me later in life that back in elementary school, one couple took out their kid of my sisters' class before school even started, because their kid had been assigned a teacher who... was male. That was enough. There was no allegation, no rumors of inappropriate behavior, no nothing. The parents in question had never met him before either. He just was male.

[0] Germany has (had) very strong labor protections for teachers. All teachers, including the one I am writing about, used to be "officers of the state" (Beamte), and therefore in order to be fired they'd either have to commit treason, an act against the democratic order, or a crime resulting in a felony conviction of no less than 1 year in prison. These days, a lot of teachers do not automatically become "officers of the state" but are merely employed.