This is not true, employers cannot fire employees without cause. The US has somewhat strong labor laws, but people are not educated about them and employers often ignore them. You'd be surprised how fast most HR departments will settle if you get a lawyer. GET A LAWYER.
Aha yeah, true, in the United States employers don't have much rights and can be quite easily fired for any reason. In Europe you usually need to have a valid reason to fire someone. Valid reasons can include refusal to perform work, culpable conduct, excessive sickness absence, reorganization, or company closure.
It doesn't seem a strong reason enough to fire where I am from (European country). In the law there are examples of reasons one could fire over and they all seem a lot worse than that. For example if you are drunk in the workplace, but even then employer must warn you first, so it seems like once it is okay.
In two of these cases the obvious solution is labour laws. In Europe you can't get fired just because your employer wants to fire you. They have to have a legitimate reason.
In many (most?) European countries you cannot legally fire an employee at will. There needs to be a process, and the employer has to be able to show that the employee cannot or will not perform even adequately (or actively harms the employer eg. by stealing), cannot be trained or reassigned to a more suitable position.
I mean, France is possibly an extreme case here, but in most developed countries this would be pretty unthinkable (assuming it really is a law that just allows small businesses fire people without notice in normal circumstances; firing people without notice for gross misconduct or due to liquidation is generally allowed, though in the liquidation case the employees would then usually be creditors for the notice pay that should have been paid in most places).
Such laws, if existed, would be of limited help. Would you enjoy to continue working when your boss badly wants to fire you, and your colleagues badly want to have you fired, but they can't by the law? How soon would you leave by yourself? Being fired usually at least involves some severance pay.
These laws could help though if it's just your boss who wants to fire you, but most of your colleagues would like to support you, even if silently.
And this is why we need decent employee protection law. Here in Europe you can't be fired "at will" like one can in the USA, so you can tell a boss who asks for this, to go stuff themselves.
I live in Australia, which generally has decent (but slowly eroding) workplace protections. But I managed to get fired and walked out of the building with zero notice. So I would not count on this even in a country with traditionally strong labour laws.
Different countries have different labor regulations that prevents people from being dismissed without due cause.
It nearly borders the impossible on organizations covered by unions where majority of the time a person can get canned is only they've done something foolish or criminal that is detrimental to the company itself.
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