A business having to keep someone for some time that they don't like is the reality of labor and the cost of doing business.
If that business signed a contract for materials and turns out halfway through they don't like the materials, they can't just stop paying and fire the supplier. They have to deal with it as part of their business and move forward in the responsible and legal way.
Treating labor similarly isn't shocking and the social benefits of folks having job security are hard to overstate. For example, all the places with these kinds of labor controls seem to have A LOT less homeless.
I think it's fair to describe the way Elon fires people[1] as "whimsical". The reason the government has a role here is to prevent people getting fired for being black/white/male/female/etc.
(UK) The govt. does not force the employer to continue employing you - but they do guarantee you are given a fair amount of notice and some severance pay depending on tenure.
The above is in the case of redundancies, being ‘fired’ for cause has a different set of criteria and protections, but the onus is on the employer to prove beyond reasonable doubt what you are being fired for
In practice the first is sometimes true, and the second always.
Employment contracts in the US can be at-will, which means either party can walk away at any point for no reason.
Sounds awful, until you look at US salaries and average wealth levels. Turns out that easy firing = easy hiring = more demand for workers = easier to be an entrepreneur = even more hiring = more market power for workers.
I don't think you can infer causality here. There are plenty of countries with easy firing (think sweatshops) and abysmal wealth levels. The US is wealthy for a bunch of reasons, including being a superpower and controlling the global reserve currency.
Easy hiring/firing of employees may not guarantee a robust economy, but we can see from the situation in Canada, for example, that harder-than-necessary hiring/firing can definitely inhibit an economy that would otherwise be much stronger if it didn't have to deal with such artificial obstruction.
The situation can vary by province, but hiring/firing employees in Canada immediately exposes businesses to significant government-imposed overhead (both administrative and financial) and risk.
Maybe this is somewhat tolerable for larger organizations with dedicated HR and accounting teams, but dealing with all of the unnecessary and pointless government-imposed overhead and risk definitely harms the productivity of smaller organizations. This is especially true for small businesses that may consist of just one entrepreneur, who's also possibly facing tight margins, who'd just like some additional help.
I know of a number of small business operators throughout the country who would love to hire a first employee, or additional employees, but can't justify it due to the overhead and risk that is unnecessarily imposed by government.
I also know of businesses who had hired employees, but eventually had to let them go because the overhead and risk couldn't be justified any longer. Frequent and substantial minimum wage increases can really cause problems, for example, especially when margins are tight to begin with.
Many jobs in Canada are definitely being lost, or not created in the first place, all thanks to government-imposed overhead and risk that supposedly makes workers better off.
The US got to be a dollar-pringing superpower because of its commitment to economic growth.
If you look at places with easy firing, I think you’ll find they are growing extremely rapidly. Vietnam and China used to be the poster children for kids making sneakers and look at them grow today.
The US got to be a superpower because of 2 world wars and massive purchasing of US armaments by the allies, effectively transferring British Empire wealth across the water, kickstarting large local manufacturing, and being a safe production hub after the wars.
Only militarily did the US become a superpower in WW2.
I was an economic powerhouse long before then.
The 1930's US stock market crash brought down the entire world!
As another point, it's not possible to make a ton of money selling weapons if you don't already have a thriving manufacturing sector. You have to at least be doing well to begin with.
According to [0], the US reached parity with the UK (probably the richest country in Europe at the time?) in terms of GDP per capita in 1880!
Most jobs in the USA are "at will" meaning there is no contract and either you or your employer can decided to terminate the arrangement at any time for any (legal) reason.
You’re operating under an assumption that there is an employment contract with a long notice period in place. In many (most?) American jobs this is not the case.
In Britain the "casualisation" of labour is considered a big problem and unions fight it.
As we see in this thread, many Americans believe that it's actually a good idea. But if you go look at the actual behaviour at the top and bottom you see that as with many of these things the supposedly "bad" benefits labour movements in Europe fought to get for their workers are just like the things "good" senior management have agreed for themselves (but deny to their workers) in the US.
Honestly I think the difference is that there is a higher rate of self employment/small business ownership. The more legal burden placed on hiring and firing the more you fuck over small operations and give advantage to larger ones.
I think this may at least partially explain the attitude of americans. Less of an us vs them mentality cause many lowly workers ARE senior management of their own gig.
I think its even more whimsical to expect the government to step in and force your employer to continue employing you if they dont want to.