Amazon is offering French staff up to a year’s pay to get them to leave as the tech giant struggles to cut thousands of workers in the EU.
The online retailer has been trying to tempt senior managers into voluntarily quitting by offering the generous payoffs, Bloomberg reported. Google is also offering similarly lavish severance deals in France.
The good folk go, get another job and have two incomes for the year – pay down or off the mortgage, that sort of thing. The duffers stay knowing they’ll not get hired elsewhere.
You need, that is, to actually be able to fire people. You also need to fire them.
Can they just insist all employees wear deodorant, and watch the French quit in disgust?
(They stink, you see, because they are French)
That was always the argument made against voluntary redundancies and why management hated them and unions loved them. They’re probably why all the old nationalised industries were crap for some years after nationalisation because they got left with the duffers.
When the very large company I worked for took over another, smaller FTSE100 firm there was a big rationalisation. Famously there was a senior guy in Belgium who was over fifty; Belgian law at the time (probably still now) said that due to his age his redundancy package would be his entire salary until retirement age, so he was sent home on full salary instead, for ten years
It’s not just a few duffers holding the company back. It’s whole departments.
You can actually see the effect from this in certain tech multinationals. The France-based salaries are a *lot* lower than in UK, reflecting the difficulty in firing.
Given that ‘social costs’ mean that for every €10 an hour you pay the employee, you have to give another €7 to the government, it’s not surprising that the headline pay is lower. On the other hand, tax breaks, especially for kids mean that a lot of middle class French white collar workers, on 35 hour weeks (actually rolled up into 7 week summer holidays) are quite happy. ‘Not working’ from home has only made this even better.
They should just fire them and take the fines.
It’s not like the French companies will actually pay them – Frogs are not known for being particularly law abiding, especially at those levels – cheaper to pay off pols.
‘They stink, you see, because they are French’
Hmmmm!!! I don’t remember the Frogs stinking when I visited Frogland so many years ago.
But now I think of it, I wasn’t wearing deodorant either.
Maybe I just stank more than the Frogs did??