March 22, 2006
Ah Paris! Now I'm Firing
You For No Reason
Not
long ago, I fired a bad employee. A really bad employee. The
worst hire I ever made. No, make that the worst hire anyone ever
made. If this person finds another job, it will take a gargantuan effort
for that company to avoid bankruptcy before its new employee’s first
lunch break. (Then again, you have to show up to have a lunch break, so
this could provide a grace period of several days, if not weeks.)
So I
fired the poor person. For no reason. Not that I didn’t have a reason.
Oh I had reasons. I had so many reasons, I would have missed dinner had
I taken the time to enumerate them all. Dinner in 2049. Oh, I had
reasons.
But in
the state in which I live, where the policies are not all that friendly
to business in many other ways, you can at least make people at-will
employees – allowing you to fire them for any reason or for no reason at
all.
No
reason is always the right choice, because you can’t argue with nothing.
If I fire you because you showed up late, you can say you tried but you
were stressed and your sister is mad at you and this is all so hard and
. . .
So I
fire you for nothing. I simply decree it to be so. Be gone. It’s the
only way to go.
This
brings us to France. Cultured, sophisticated, better-than-us France.
Where the thought of us cowboy Americans walkin’ ‘round, spittin’ chew
‘n scratchin’ areselves is so – how you Americans say? – gauche.
Yes.
That France. Well, it seems Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has put
his weight behind a new law that allows French employees to fire people
for no reason. No reason at all! Well, with a couple of conditions.
You
can only do it if they have worked for you less than two years. And you
can only do it if they are younger than 26. After that, you’re looking
at the equivalent of national teacher tenure. And much of France is
reacting as if the entire country was nothing more than a chapter of the
National Education Association.
Union
leaders say de Villepin is creating a generation of “disposable workers”
and they are considering a call for a general strike. Major
demonstrations have occurred nationwide. De Villepin is under pressure
to reverse the law.
And
these people wonder why we always pick them last when we’re choosing up
sides for wars.
It’s
hard to imagine that the French population at large really thinks job
security should be defined as your employer needing a court order to get
rid of you. But then again, I’ve never smoked a clove cigarette, so I
can’t say for sure what goes through some entire countries’ minds.
What I
do know is this: Their unemployment rate is much higher than ours. Their
economy is growing much more slowly than ours. And this is the second
major incident of widespread youth demonstrations in a mere few months,
although I seem to recall the last rash of youth exuberance was more
properly described as “riots.”
This
is all so hard for us extra-chromosome cowboys to understand. Here in
America, we just fire people whenever we feel like it – unless they are
union members, judges or certain football coaches. And yet we have far
fewer people out of work – as a percentage of the workforce – than
France does.
How
can this be? I’m going to go into my office tomorrow and fire all the
rest of my employees for no reason. Because I can.
Except
that my employees have job security, because they work hard and
they are valuable to me. I need them. I could fire them, but I don’t
want to. I’ve already blown through my obligatory
worst-hire-of-modern-times and, having corrected it, I have no desire to
fire anyone else.
There
are a lot of things you can do to make people not want to fire you.
Marching in demonstrations, making demands and threatening strikes isn’t
the kind of stuff I usually put on the list, but c’est la vie,
Pierre.
You’ll
be 26 before you know it, and then they’ll never be able to get rid of
you.
© 2006 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
Click here to talk to our writers and
editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.
To e-mail feedback about this column,
click here. If you enjoy this writer's
work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry
it.
This is Column # DFK20.
Request permission to publish here.
|