Europe's Labor Laws Are Strangling Its Ability To Innovate, New Analysis Argues (worksinprogress.co) 98
A new essay in Works in Progress Magazine argues that Europe's failure to produce a Tesla or a Waymo stems not from insufficient research spending or high taxes -- problems California shares in abundance -- but from labor laws that make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets. According to estimates, corporate restructuring costs the equivalent of 31 months of salary per employee in Germany, 38 in France, and 62 in Spain, compared to seven in the United States.
The downstream effects are visible across Europe's flagship industries. When Audi closed its Brussels factory after cancelling the E-Tron SUV in 2024, severance ran to $718 million -- over $235,000 per employee and more than the cost of writing off the plant's physical assets. Volkswagen spent $50 billion on its electric vehicle lineup, failed to develop competitive software internally, and ultimately paid up to $5 billion for access to American startup Rivian's technology.
Between 2012 and 2016, 79% of all startup acquisitions tracked by Crunchbase took place in the US. The essay points to Denmark, Austria and Switzerland as countries that have found a middle path -- generous unemployment insurance and portable severance accounts that protect workers without penalizing employers for taking risks.
The downstream effects are visible across Europe's flagship industries. When Audi closed its Brussels factory after cancelling the E-Tron SUV in 2024, severance ran to $718 million -- over $235,000 per employee and more than the cost of writing off the plant's physical assets. Volkswagen spent $50 billion on its electric vehicle lineup, failed to develop competitive software internally, and ultimately paid up to $5 billion for access to American startup Rivian's technology.
Between 2012 and 2016, 79% of all startup acquisitions tracked by Crunchbase took place in the US. The essay points to Denmark, Austria and Switzerland as countries that have found a middle path -- generous unemployment insurance and portable severance accounts that protect workers without penalizing employers for taking risks.
Try being the victim of wagetheft (Score:2, Interesting)
The labour laws in Europe are useless anyhow. The UK might be the only place where I have been able to use them ("Constructive Dismissal") against a huge company and won. In Norway you can freely steal employees' wages and get away with it. It's such a cruel joke when your life depend on the next month's salary to come. I've had 2 years of severe depression due to being a victim of wagetheft and the police and nobody else in the government caring enough to actually upheld these laws. I got scammed out of a
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Most Americans have been victims of wage theft. It is incredibly common, and penalties are rarely enforced against employers -most people don't report it because they are afraid of retribution from their employer, or of their employer being shut down and thus losing their job altogether.
If you have suffered 2 years of severe depression because you were a victim of a common malady -your problems go deeper.
Re:Try being the victim of wagetheft (Score:4, Interesting)
My (California) company had an action taken against us for paying straight-time overtime (vs time and a half) for exempt employees (employees not eoigible for statutory overtime). It is common practice in our industry; many projects are compensated hourly by our clients, and while we tried to avoid making people work extra it was sometimes necessary). We also pay annual bonuses.
The letter of the law was pretty clear in our favor; the "judge" disagreed so we had to pay about 5x the difference in straight time and time and a half.
Ultimately there are plenty of cases of outright wage theft, and systems need to be in place to protect employees, but anything can be abused.
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If you're paying salaried employees by the hour, they're not salaried employees. Even if you're only paying extra. Looks suspicious.
Only salaried employees can be exempt.
And yes, in California, the judge will side with the employee, because the labor board doesn't care about employees any more than anywhere else, but they live to screw over employers in any way possible for the slightest reason.
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Elements for "paying by the hour" include things like reporting start time and end time. We later (on advice of legal counsel) changed the term to "hourly bonus" and paid it monthly instead of each paycheck. The "looks suspicious" warrants some level of investigation, but when the name is the only thing really linked to hourly performance it is overreach.
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Elements for "paying by the hour" include things like reporting start time and end time. We later (on advice of legal counsel) changed the term to "hourly bonus" and paid it monthly instead of each paycheck. The "looks suspicious" warrants some level of investigation, but when the name is the only thing really linked to hourly performance it is overreach.
In what delusional fantasy world is paying hourly bonus money not linked to hourly performance?
You can't pay an hourly bonus without tracking hours. There is case law (at the federal level) that says that if you track hours, they're an hourly employee. It's a minefield, whatever you call it, because you're still tracking hours.
(And overreach is a specialty of the California labor board, especially when it comes to reclassifying exempt employees as non-exempt. Because it's a very easy win.)
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(IANAL, YMMV, different states may have different laws.)
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If the company's costs are largely based on hours, whether estimated for a flat fee or actual for billing, it's going to track hours, salary or not.
Irrelevant to whether or not an employee qualifies as exempt.
It's very common for certain salaried professionals to be paid for overtime.
Yes. They're called salaried non-exempt. (Also, the designation of professional has a specific meaning under federal labor law, which doesn't really apply to programmers, who have their own legal definition. "Professionals," in that sense, are people who are either licensed by the government in some way, or require specific education, like a university degree. In other words, doctors, lawyers, and engineers.)
Sometimes that's straight-time pay, sometimes compensatory time off, sometimes something else.
If they do not qualify as exempt (and s
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FWIW, our case was (professional) engineers. Part of the problem was if an EIT/FE was considered a state certification (vs a PE which is more obvious). EIT/FE are issued by the state, so it meets the letter of the law, but it does not confer any rights or responsibilities in and of itself and is just a precursor to the PE. Employees without FE or masters were always treated as hourly per the law.
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Not strictly true. It's very common in my field (consulting engineering) to pay, as one of my employee handbooks put it, "1/80 of the bi-weekly salary for every hour over 80 worked in that two week pay period". As a professional, I was exempt from overtime rules, but employees would not be happy working overtime for free when fees collected by the company were generally based on hours worked (whether estima
Re: Try being the victim of wagetheft (Score:2)
I've been a victim of over $30,000 in wage theft. I recovered half of it in a settlement. That large an offense is actually grand theft in California now but all DAs are pieces of shit so it is never prosecuted.
Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
We can't ignore the effects of our actions when it affects the lives of actual people in place of profits! Whatever shall we do?! /s
Re:Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't hire a taxi, you pay for a service. The taxi driver is not your employee.
slavery ? (Score:5, Insightful)
labor laws prevent companies from enslaving the workers... oh damn, we can't have that !
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Slaves can't quit their master, but employees can.
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That was my first thought as well. Of course, from a perspective deeply stuck in the dark ages, what Europe does looks suspect. But here is the thing: Despite all its problems, Europe is actually a good place to live and it works reasonably well.
It's easy to fire in Denmark (Score:5, Informative)
In Denmark it's easy to fire people. "Flexicurity" means that it's easy to fire somebody in Denmark but generous employment insurance and retraining programs means it's a much lower burden on employees if they are fired.
Re:It's easy to fire in Denmark (Score:5, Interesting)
In the Netherlands, there's a rule that an injured employee will receive 70% of their wages for up to 2 years. But it's payable by their employer - whether the employee got hurt at work, or on the ski slope or whatever. Why is that bad? Large corporations simply self-insure against this risk: the numbers even out close to the average in larger groups. But if you only have 5 employees, you can absolutely not afford to run the risk of losing an employee for 2 years while still having to pay him, so you have to take out very expensive party insurance against that. Labour laws that offer good unemployment benefits and retraining on the employer's dime suffer from similar problems, that's what this article is about. Better to carry these risks collectively.
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It doesn't really matter if it's paid for by the state, corporate tax, or income tax, in the ed it all amounts to the same thing. What matters is that it's a collective arrangement, not something any individual company is on the hook for.
That is exactly the point I wanted to get. Try and convince US companies and people to adopt a system like that without them screaming "BUT COMMUNISM!" in terror!
No Throw away people (Score:5, Informative)
The wealth gap between the top 1% of the bottom 50% is growing in the USA and it unhealthy. To hide this politics has become highly partisan so the wealthy can point the finger at the other side and say "see it's their fault" where as in truth it's the fault of the billionaire class.
Good on Europ for actually understanding a country, its culture, its well being is made up of PEOPLE of all walks of life, not just the rich.
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The wealth gap between the top 1% of the bottom 50% is growing in the USA and it unhealthy.
That sort of wealth inequality is really required for this kind of pie-in-the-sky startup culture, though. You need people who are so obscenely wealthy that they're willing to bet on the longshots, because people with more modest levels of wealth tend to stick to more conservative investments. If you want Teslas and Waymos and startup companies with corporate visions like "let's litter every sidewalk with rental scooters and see what happens", insane levels of wealth inequality are part of the package dea
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So clearly you've left the US, for all those other countries that wished and got what they wanted. Stagnation.
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The wealth gap is irrelevant for amount of invention being done.
Shutting down a car manufacturing plant doesn't have anything to do with amount of innovation either.
What's problematic in Europe isn't the labor laws, it's that it's hard to commercialize inventions because it's way too expensive to produce small scale due to the amount of regulations around products, product responsibility etc. I could probably have created and manufactured something, but it would have required navigating a minefield of regul
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YMMV, but in general when I have looked at CE compliance and the Directives attached, they generally are surprisingly well written, with a view to actually being implemented. They seem to aim at not killing your customer, so not IMHO a bad thing.
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That sort of wealth inequality is really required for this kind of pie-in-the-sky startup culture, though.
Kickstarter suggests that's not true.
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Bullshit.
Has the EU stopped all corporate "creativity?" (Score:3)
I'll admit - I don't understand how companies haven't gone cat and mouse with this. For example, if a company wants to create a speculative product, couldn't they just fund a "contracting company" that hires people? If the bet is successful, the parent company buys out the "contracting company" - otherwise, they stop paying the other company and it just goes bankrupt.
I think it's basically "tactical insolvency."
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I'll admit - I don't understand how companies haven't gone cat and mouse with this. For example, if a company wants to create a speculative product, couldn't they just fund a "contracting company" that hires people? If the bet is successful, the parent company buys out the "contracting company" - otherwise, they stop paying the other company and it just goes bankrupt.
I think it's basically "tactical insolvency."
The cat and mouse game does happen since companies do try these kind of tactics, but regulators know them well too.
If a company exercises enough control over a contractor, regulators can decide that the relationship is effectively an artificial construct meant to skirt employer's obligations. If that's the case, the company can be determined to be the actual employer of the contractors, with all obligations that come with that.
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A common issue in construction is that a building is not going to be built by the investor company, its going to be built by the investors shell company. And since the investor company is not a mason/lumberwork/foundation company, they are going to hire other people to do the work, which is also going to hire other companies for specialist work. A few might spot the issue here. If there is a different company doing the outer shell and moisture barriers, then the company doing the drywall or the foundation h
The USA could do better. (Score:2, Interesting)
Even better would be a universal basic income. Then companies wouldn't need to pay so much in severance. Also it would eliminate the need for the minimum wage and various forms of welfare, including Social Security unemployment and retirement benefits. And a lot more people would
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Even better would be a universal basic income.
I keep coming back to this.
On the flip side is unemployment benefits. They kick in after losing a job and stop when you get one. It works better, especially for people on lower incomes if it happens fast. Really fast. In the limiting case instant.
And, well, the most efficient way of doing that is UBI plus a higher tax level so that for most employed people it's a bit of a wash.
So, a few years ago I crunched the numbers. You can plot basically gross vs net income
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How about the basic problem that in taxing income we're taxing both consumption and saving? We shouldn't tax saving, because saving is a precondition for investment, which is a precondition for improving productivity, which is the whole enchilada.Tax consumption. If you must, add your redistribution after that, so that the poor can consume too. One can even run monetary policy through a vat instead of banks, but that's another story.
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How about the basic problem that in taxing income we're taxing both consumption and saving? We shouldn't tax saving, because saving is a precondition for investment, which is a precondition for improving productivity, which is the whole enchilada.
Firstly, this is a completely different system. My hypothesis is that UBI is pretty close to what we're doing already but much more efficient and without a ton of the holes that have to be patched around and filled in.
Second what would your system look like? What k
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The other thing about saving is that if you can depend on UBI, and it's enough to live on, then that takes the pressure off of individuals saving for retirement. Right now the amount of money people have to save for retirement in the U.S. is actually a problem, because there's no safe place to put that much money. And so we wind up with things like private equity and various other forms of securitization a specific group of which led to the 2008 crisis.
All of these securities are just ways of storing value,
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The other thing about saving is that if you can depend on UBI, and it's enough to live on, then that takes the pressure off of individuals saving for retirement.
So, we do have state pension here, but of course it's another whole ball of crazy administration. You need to pay in to get it, unless of course you can't... and it's basically too low to live off but richer pensioners get a really sweet deal because pensions are taxed less meaning half the country is angry about geriatrics living in abject poverty
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Genocide is a major cost of Socialism.
As Socialism is inherently totalitarian, the end of Liberty is a cost of Socialism.
We spent over a hundred years watching Socialism fail to bring about anything but mass suffering. We watched it cause almost every genocide in the 20th century. The closest it has come to success is the oppre
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This is laughable McCarthy-level red scare nonsense. You label the original Nazis as socialist, which is the most terminally wrong thought in modern far-right populism and tells me you have achieved immunity to evidence or reason. You label modern China as socialist which is just about as wrong (they're authoritarian state capitalists who disappear anyone who dabbles in Marx-ish thought).
The closest socialism came to success was the democratic socialist government of Chile under Allende, which Henry Kissing
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And if you'll remember your Marx, you may recall that "State Capitalism" is a stage of... Socialism! The funny bit is that he meant for it to go from Capitalism -> State Capitalism -> Socialism -> Communism, but China went the other
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So, you didn't notice the words "Socialist Worker's Party" in the name, "National Socialist German Worker's Party"?
Do you also believe that North Korea is a Democratic People's Republic? If not, why not? The rest is historical-revisionist nonsense that anyone who learned anything outside of Conservapedia would laugh at, but this one is logically testable. The problem is the same.
If Socialism worked, it would work. Capitalism couldn't defeat it if Socialism actually worked. Quashing it wouldn't be possible.
Countries don't win wars or foreign-backed attempts based on inherent goodness, as much as I wish they did. It's based on who has the most powerful set of weapons or who's has the best Department of Underhanded Dirty Tricks. Having a working eco
Europe has failed to produce a "Tesla"? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: Europe has failed to produce a "Tesla"? (Score:2)
Tell me you know nothing about Europe without telling me you know nothing about Europe.
(Or the USA, for that matter...)
They were designed for a different situation (Score:2)
They make a bit more sense for an established company that doesn't change
They fail catastrophically for risky startups
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Europe is such a drag (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep dealing with US manager that just don't understand employment law or rights. They don't understand that they cannot just fire someone they hired because they can't really do what they themselves have hired a candidate for in France.
They get so confused when they want to make people redundant in Germany but the person they want to make redundant also has to agree or they cannot proceed.
Honestly I'm all for innovation and entrepreneurship and corporate profits but you mustn't be allowed to shit on staff. They are not serfs, they are not plebs, they are human. The fact the US has such a ruthless style of employment is also the reason why some people need a job and a "side hustle" and work mad hours to afford crackers.
Fuck your greedy, love and let die BS excuses around "innovation" by treating people like cattle cause "ugh sorry all 900 of you on the zoom call are fired, cause margins, good luck"
Maybe some people love stress because job security is minimal but if more Americans come to work in Europe I have a feeling they'd prefer it. Heck even us Brits look at the time off, benefits and protective labour laws in EU states with envy!
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If so, then how do you explain Brexit? You'd think that all of the working class would have voted against it to keep those labor laws and benefits.
Re:Europe is such a drag (Score:4, Informative)
Heck even us Brits look at the time off, benefits and protective labour laws in EU states with envy!
If so, then how do you explain Brexit? You'd think that all of the working class would have voted against it to keep those labor laws and benefits.
They were lied to by the propaganda machine.
Re: Europe is such a drag (Score:3)
Plus, whilst it was a non-binding vote, the PM at the time said "Ok, we'll leave", and then resigned.
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The fact the US has such a ruthless style of employment is also the reason why some people need a job and a "side hustle" and work mad hours to afford crackers.
Some people? That's a majoity of their workers. But their top 10~20% workers make big paychecks that the rest of the world oohs and aahs at without noticing that, or the fact that a hospital stay during a gap in health insurance coverage could send one of those top workers straight into bankruptcy.
Finding the balance (Score:3)
The EU is probably too strict, while the US is too lax. Canada may be one country with a better balance. At the very least, the EU countries need to loosen the laws up a bit for business with less than 6 people, since one "unfireable" employee can end up taking down the whole company.
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Can confirm as both a former employer and former employee, Canada has a good balance. Also, healthcare insurance is not tied to employment here, so employees don't have to stick it out at a hateful job and companies don't have to spend massive amounts on health insurance.
And yes, there should be nuances in the law based on company size and maybe also on how long the company has been in existence. A startup in its first year of operation, or a small business with 5 employees, should definitely have more
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Ability to innovate? Give me a break! (Score:3)
Wasn't profit supposed to be the reward for the financial risks taken? I mean, you invest money and, hopefully, you get a lot more money in return. Things go bad, you lose your money. Simple as that.
It seem to me that these great entrepreneurs want the rewards but none of the risks, but bad bad labor laws keep getting in the way. Good thing that there's always someone ready to teach us so proper business practices...
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Labor laws make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets? Well, cry me a river! Wasn't profit supposed to be the reward for the financial risks taken? I mean, you invest money and, hopefully, you get a lot more money in return. Things go bad, you lose your money. Simple as that.
What the article is complaining about is that you don't just lose the money you spent developing the product that didn't make money, but you keep on bleeding money for several years after that, because you have to keep paying the people you hired to work on the project.
The solution is to be a very small company, such that when your product doesn't work out, you just go bankrupt.
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Wasn't profit supposed to be the reward for the financial risks taken? I mean, you invest money and, hopefully, you get a lot more money in return. Things go bad, you lose your money. Simple as that.
Sure, but in this case the money you invest is for material, buildings, equipment, and salary. Take your risk and try to make something new, and say run it for 3 years. It doesn’t work out. You sell the left over material, sell the buildings, or use both on another project. The salary is spent, you hired people and they got paid for 3 years. The product didn’t work, maybe the people you hired were bad at making the product you wanted, maybe you described the wrong product, maybe they made a
I think we've had enough innovation. (Score:2)
Maybe let's cool it for the next few decades so we can get our money back from these tech corporations.
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Yawn
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Why would anyone cry to you?
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Life existed before cloud computing.
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If economic growth and technological innovation are your only metrics for success then China will beat the world with their slave labor, government-subsidized innovation and minimal environmental regulations. People don't want to live in that kind of society and toil like Foxconn workers right up until robots and AI make it impossible to get a job and they only have 7 months' pay to survive on for the rest of their lives. Good luck having a culture or civilization survive that. I'm sure Europe doesn't mind
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That's an example of Goomba fallacy. Most Europeans want a decent society to live in, European pro-business think tanks want a capitalist hellscape to make high-yield short-term investments in. Not the same people.
Fight fire with fire (Score:1)
Sounds like propaganda. (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: European here.
While structural changes are due and the French are way overdue with loosening some of their very cushy labor laws and pension mechanisms, this whining sounds a lot like corporate propaganda to me.
For one, many large critical or significant corps throughout Europe score obscene amounts of subsidies and bail-outs when times are tough and experience first-class treatment by their governments when it comes to protecting their markets.
Then there is the modern capitalist LLC structure that can juggle bankruptcy and labor responsibilities with comparatively litte effort and some LLC and holdings wired up in the right way to enable creative ledgering.
I presume this to be propaganda to loosen labor laws in general or it's whining from large corps that they can't just turn nimble on a dime by dumping thousands of employees on a whim, despite having all the benefits mentioned above.
I'm not buying this. This sound 100% akin to the nonsense about "shortage of skilled labor" and other bullshit we constantly hear here in Germany and in other places. Corporate bullshit propaganda, that's what it is. Nothing else.
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I presume this to be propaganda to loosen labor laws in general or it's whining from large corps that they can't just turn nimble on a dime by dumping thousands of employees on a whim, despite having all the benefits mentioned above.
Could be, but on the other hand something is different about how many new product categories come out of the US and the EU compared to investment. Is it just an accident that Apple, Netflix, Google and Amazon are all US companies? Could be. I kind of think there is some sort of systemic difference though. Maybe it isn’t “cheep restructuring”, I mean if it is worth billions of dollars to try to design a good EV maybe it doesn’t make any real difference if during unwinding VW has t
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Maybe, I mean it is all random conjecture. We have only the facts “US=more innovation, EU=less” not any real way to determining the cause. However I lived in the UK for a few months back when it was part of the EU and it didn’t feel any less free then the USA did. Granted I didn’t try to start a business in the UK, and I just kept working for my US company taking pay in my US account, and paying US taxes, and paying for stuff in the UK. Buildings were older, plumbing was weird,
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From what I've read, getting a hold of land where you can build facilities is more difficult in the UK and EU than in the US. More zoning, planning and environmental hoops to jump t
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Be careful (Score:3)
Be careful about change
The US is also waaaay deeper in debt and it's citizens have a lifespan shorter than the EU average.
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I’m guessing the shorter lifespan has a lot more to do with our deeply crappy healthcare system than any sort of restructuring laws. Deeper debit you could have a real point, being out of work with very little safety net makes it easy to run up debit.
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I think it's all related. If it's easier to get rid of people, it's easier to fall into debt.
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And the US debt ratio would put it just below Italy and little above France; #3 if you were ranking them.
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No, it's 3 years (78.8 versus 81.7). And every day counts! If your bank told you it charges 3.7% of your deposit as account keeping fees, you'd walk. At least, I'd hope you'd!
Italy? You're really scraping the bottom of the barrel comparing EU nations here. Besides, they got the ECB and comparatively better performing economies like Germany that help each other out.
The key difference between Italy/France/Greece and the USA is there's about no authority or combination of banks and funds that can stabilise the
failed to develop competitive software internally (Score:2)
Bog standard centre-right thinktankery (Score:3)
Works in Progress is a journal for clever right wing think tank types, and always has been. Obviously, they're always going to argue for looser labour laws.
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Yeah Slashdot shouldn't be blindly amplifying a pro-business think tank's articles, we can do better than this.
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There are worse sins, but there are also more interesting takes in Works in Progress, eg the articles they've done on housing.
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Those people are the owners and executives at larger companies, who have grown so rich and distant from their workers that they see them as replaceable cogs in a machine rather than human peers. Those at smaller companies may grow into them. Even if they tried to be angels, the economic system would incentivize them to do the same awful things.
The question one must ask (Score:1)
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If Europe wants its own domestic tech industry able to supplant foreign companies domestically and maybe even compete globally, changes will have to be made. Since I keep seeing that Europe wants to do that, a hard choice is inevitable.
I think current outcomes show that Europe cannot have it both ways.
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This isn't even about electric cars, it's about a specific electric car company with a wildly overvalued stock that European business interests are financially jealous of. Europe had electric cars first, produces a respectable number of EVs now, and has a greater proportion of electric cars on the road because a greater fraction of the population can afford them. Europe is an EV success story.
I mean sure, if you can pay FA (Score:2)
then of course you can "innovate" more.
Is this paid for by corprorations?
dubious numbers (Score:1)
Funny they claim "corporate restructuring costs the equivalent of 62 months of salary per employee in Spain" - where companies can generally fire anyone without any justification if they pay the worker a compensation of ~1 month for every year the worker has been at the company.
(I am not a lawyer, the exact payout is 33 days per year but has numerous exceptions, etc etc)
Innoavation (Score:2)
That's, like, how the execs and their friends can make a mint, while the people who actually do the business of the company get screwed, right?