[philipallstar]

> And on the "hiring risk" point: why should that risk be shifted onto workers, who have far less power, money, and protection than firms

Firms are just other people. They take on more and more risk. These days in the UK HR departments they often say you can't let someone go even in their probation period. Think how a experimental and risky a hire is, and how easy it is to quit a job that might not be any good vs how hard it is to get rid of an employee who isn't any good.

[lordnacho]

> Firms are just other people.

Firms aren't people. They are artificial constructs that we invented to solve an organizational issue a long time ago. Some aspects of natural persons were emulated in corporation law, but a lot of them aren't:

- Firms can't go to jail

- Firms don't naturally pass away

- They have their own taxation

- They can be in more than one jurisdiction at once

- There's more than one type of corporate entity.

It's just a matter of taking the right decisions regarding what rules we think are useful to society.

[robtherobber]

> Firms are just other people. They take on more and more risk.

I have to disagree with that, I think it's a very American interpretation on the situation.

A business is an organised legal/economic entity with capital, reserves, insurance, legal advice, hiring processes, and the ability to spread risk across many workers and time periods. It can come into (legal) existence and dissolve without anyone automatically becoming destitute or actually dying. In contrast, a worker has but one body, real health to care for, and far less financial buffer. I think that equating businesses and people not only hides the actual power imbalance, but ignores how reality works.

In terms of risks, sure, hiring involves uncertainty, of the financial order, not a life-or-death kind of thing. And it doesn't justify transferring the cost of that uncertainty onto the least protected party. Like I say above, we allow businesses to operate on the premise that the society benefits from their activities; there are risks associated with running businesses, but there's no point to have them if society stands more to lose than to gain by having them. No one is forcing businesses to ever increase their profits (and shift the risks) once they become stable, but it would be hard to argue that people can afford not eating, having a place to live in, or stop rearing children. We simply can't conflate these two entities here and blur the line between life ontology and legal (that is, made up) concepts.

The risk to the employer is that a bad hire can cost money, time, management effort. To the worker that can mean arrears, debt, eviction risk, food insecurity, etc., including death. In fact the very idea of labour law emerged on the basis of unequal bargaining power, which makes "freedom of contract" a fiction in many cases.

As for probation, from what I know is mostly a contractual/process tool in UK practice, not a magic legal lock-in. ACAS guidance does not say "you cannot dismiss in probation"; it says employers should have a valid reason and follow a fair procedure: https://www.acas.org.uk/dismissals

I see no reason to assume that a business model is entitled to be low-commitment; if it depends on labour, then the cost of employing people decently is part of the model. They are forced to accept it in order to be allowed to operate in society. Conversely, if the model only works by making labour disposable, that in itself works as evidence against the model, not against protections.

We should also try not to fall for the false symmetry between quitting and firing, in my view, because "easy to quit" is irrelevant to whether employers should have obligations or not. For the worker quitting a bad job still bears real costs (income gap, search time, stress, potential destitution), whereas when the employer fires someone it continues to retain the enterprise, assets, and ongoing revenue capacity.

This paper presents some useful details as well: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2039.pdf

[PunchTornado]

Yeah right. I beg to differ. I was just laid off by a company in London after 6 years with them. 3 months severance. And thats it.

[nickdothutton]

In large companies, especially those which do not depend on especially talented or specialised workers, HR is very much just a "people risk" department. People are an input, with them comes some risk, like tonnes of coal which might cause pollution, or sacks of ingredients which might go off and poison customers. Over many years I have come to understand this is how BigCo HR operates.

The risks might be different, they might be a bully, they might do bad work, they might be dishonest, or even just screw up (honestly) when under pressure, it's all risk to HR. I decided not to be an employee of such companies 20+ years ago, although I am not in the "commodity employee" set.

Feel free to adopt your own mental models.

[Leynos]

Colour me sceptical. At the moment you have no protection from unfair dismissal until you have been employed for two years. The change to six months doesn't start until next January.

[louthy]

If HR says that they’re lying. It isn’t true.

[array_key_first]

They might not be lying, they could also be stupid. It's the same way in the US. There's a mass delusion among people that firing workers is hard.

Um... no it isn't. Most states are right to work. No, you don't need to give severance. No, you don't need to announce it. And yes, that's all perfectly legal.

Is there a theoretical risk that an employee can try to sue you and burn a bunch of your money? Yes, but that risk always exists. Someone could try to sue you always, doesn't mean they'll win.

In actuality the risk is so incredibly small it's not worth thinking about.