The premise of it being irreversible is wrong and far more complex.

Case study. In my country, most individuals do benefit from a severance on a permanent contract. Getting a permanent contract happens after working for a year if you're lucky or in a high demand job. In other cases, companies will use their power to stall as long as possible where beneficial. Temporary contracts do not have the same severance benefits, just wait the year and they are gone.

Severance itself varies case by case. Younger people with permanent contracts aren't getting multiple years in salaries for getting fired. Most older employees don't, either.

The entire premise also requires a largely immobile workforce. Workforce mobility in The Netherlands is actually pretty decent, with most younger people switching jobs every few years. This inevitably means these people have temporary contracts for a large part of their career, with much weaker severance packages. Top comment also discounts the obvious, trying to get individuals to quit themselves through e.g. legal bullying or bad benefits.

What do these permanent and temporary contracts stipulate? Presumably they are quite different than the standard US employment contracts that basically just confirm at-will employment, etc.

In NL, you generally start with a fixed term of a year. After the year, the contract ends. Depending on relationships, supply/demand, field of expertise etc., the employer will either offer another fixed term or a permanent contract.

Permanent contract means the employer does not have the exit condition of "wait it out" to get rid of an employee. Additionally, permanent contracts tend to have bigger benefits attached to them, both legally and infrastructurally (e.g. getting a mortgage on a fixed term contract is nigh on impossible for most individuals).

Legally, employers can only offer so many fixed term contracts before they are forced to hire permanently or cut off the employee. In practice, you will see more exploitative companies look for ways to extend this (alternative legal structures), whereas fields with more balance in power (like IT) tend to present permanent contracts after a single temporary contract.

Oh yeah this is to prevent employers from keeping employees employed on a fixed term contract or through an agency indefinitely thus denying them some benefits and protection.

We shouldn't normalise pushing people to quit via bullying of course. But bullying and bad benefits result from a company/employee mismatch, which changing jobs fixes easily

And changing jobs means you now no longer have the vast amount of protection you used to and have to build them back up.

For the majority of countries, your entire point rests on the premise individuals are choosing to largely be immobile. Tenure length isn't that different from the US, all things concerned. Significant, especially given some countries, but not nearly as dramatic as "impossible to fire".

The moment you introduce mobility, most of the safety is gone for a large portion of time. What we are seeing, is that younger people are hit disproportionately since job hopping tends to be the far better choice, and younger people do not start at incomes that get them comfortable. It is primarily the elderly that benefit from the current structure.

Because it's not an irreversible decision. Most countries allow a probation period where you can let an employee go if they don't work out. These are typically anywhere between 2 weeks and 6 months (depending on the training time expected).

Because if you are slow at hirering the candidate has accepted a position somewhere else by the time you get back to them.

You can fire people pretty easily in Europe. There’s rules around layoffs but they are also common. All the companies I’ve worked for have hired and fired relatively freely.

Again, different countries, different laws. It is objectively NOT easy to fire people in Germany, for example.

There is no such thing as "objectively easy".

In Germany very small companies can fire people at will. It's effortless and requires minimal bureaucracy. Same for firing people in their long trial periods.

In other cases, the difficulty depends heavily on the situation. The easiest way is to simply negotiate with the employee. The other options involve more work

Right but it’s still absolutely miles away from making hiring an irreversible decision.

There's usually a considerable probation period where the firing rules are much more relaxed. Germany is typically 6 months, for example.

Even after 6 months, typical compensation for being fired is 2 weeks of salary for every year worked. For most startup employees, this won't be a huge amount, given they have often only worked a few years.

Doesnt that make my point ? You can easily be fired in a probation period :-) and right before the probation ends is when the employer wonders if they should keep you (really hire you for good)

In theory, this is true. However, IME as a techie in the UK, those situations happen when there is a significant mismatch between the interview vs reality - from either side. Hiring based on referrals is one way to mitigate some of the unknowns.

After 5 months of being embedded in a team, firing someone who management doesn't like but who is popular with other employees will cause major morale issues even if they are still technically in probation.

Interviewing practices have very little connection to logic in the first place, and to the extent they do there's probably more connection to the general employer/employee power balance than any such specific consideration. American companies make candidates jump through hoops because they can; European ones don't because they can't.

It's not irreversible in any sense of that word.

First of all, you have a trial period of 3 to 6 months where you can fire someone without even giving a reason.

Second of all, you can have fixed-term contracts, like 1 or 2 years - also with the trial period.

Third, you can still fire people after the trial period, you just can't go Trump-yelling at someone "YOU'RE FIRED!!!" because of some small mistake or if you don't like their face. It's not an easy process, but also not impossible. I very much prefer it this way.

I'm seeing this at the company where a friend works. They have an american branch that completely changed the employee roster twice (!!!) in the last two years. Everything they do is a mess, every new person that comes brings a different point of view of how things should be done. In the end, they always end up falling back to implementing what their colleagues in Europe did. The europeans have been working together for 6 years now

PS: for my current job, where I have a permanent contract, the interview in-all took 55 minutes. About another 15 minutes of talking to HR on the phone and bam, here I am.

In the uk at least employers have a grace period of 3-6 months where they can fire you for any or no reason.

Having more protections than zero (at will) doesn’t make hiring anything as dramatic as ‘irreversible’