First-in-last-out is an objectively terrible way to hire and fire though. As an employee I feel personally invested in the success of the business I work for. I don't want to work with less competent employees because of an arbitrary rule. I want the weaker people to eventually be let go. I do want a safe secure workplace. I don't want people fired on a whim. I want training opportunities to be provided first. I want people's performance to be judged over the whole course of their employment not just the last quarter. But at crunch time I want the less well performing people to be let go rather than just the newest.
EDIT
Re-reading this I realised I missed some perspective. A key ingredient related to hiring and firing in the society I want to (and do) live in is that when someone loses their job they have unemployment benefits that cover a significant fraction of their salary. This gives them time to find another job and makes losing your job a much less traumatic event.
As an aside, Let go is such an interesting term. It's such a well accepted piece of corporate doublespeak.
It's like they want to go, and their employer is letting them. They're straining at the leash to be unemployed, and the employer graciously releases them from the burden of their contract.
I get an uneasy feeling every time I hear it. It twists the situation around, like you said, to make it seem like they are doing a great benefit to the employee.
My all time favorite ridiculous doublespeak is "we reached out to the employee and let them go". I heard that once from a company's pr dept. after firing a worker due to some public scandal.
The parent comment does allow for a way to let incompetent people go:
> if you want to sidestep that, you'll have to compensate the employee quite heavily
That makes it less attractive to fire an employee, but still potentially worth the business' while in some cases. It feels like it's tipping the balance slightly more in favour of the workers, and doesn't inherently seem wrong to me.
First-in-last-out isn't a good solution, it's just one of the bad solutions to the problem of firing replacable workers. The idea is that it's the starting point of negotiation, and the employer has to compensate to go around it, and that added cost to the employer is what gives more security with longer employment. It's important to note that it's very common for employers to still keep newer employees and use the compensation workaround.
Also, some people may not be aware that many countries have plenty of restrictions around layoffs, totally separate from the unions.
For example I work in a non-union company, and if I have children and you have none, you get laid off before I do. Regardless of who's "better" and who's been there longer. That's in Germany; I would assume, say, France and Spain have much stricter rules around layoffs.
EDIT Re-reading this I realised I missed some perspective. A key ingredient related to hiring and firing in the society I want to (and do) live in is that when someone loses their job they have unemployment benefits that cover a significant fraction of their salary. This gives them time to find another job and makes losing your job a much less traumatic event.