Right, so she's cool by letting him keep his job for some period of time while he looks for new work with minimal expectations from her - but then when she could use his help just once in exchange for paying him thousands and thousands of euros for doing nothing, she should have the hammer brought down on her?
It's amazing how little empathy this thread has for people that create companies and struggle through the employer's side of trying to be decent to people while trying to run a thriving business.
It's amazing how little empathy this thread has for people that create companies and struggle through the employer's side of trying to be decent to people while trying to run a thriving business.
No. This is Hacker News. You'll find that the majority of posters here are apologists for entrepreneurs and employers. When you can't even hold this crowd, that's a pretty good sign the employer's thoughts are so tangled up in their skewed perspective on labor that they can't even be badly rationalized into something approaching reasonable.
"Letting him" keep his job? I think you'll find that in Belgium, like in most of Europe, there are mandatory notice periods that range up to around 3 months (even more in some countries in special circumstances, such as plant closures). Outside of exceptional circumstances, he had a legal right to keep his job for some period of time after being given notice. There's nothing in her post that indicates that she out of the goodness of her heart had given him more time than his statutory notice period.
There's also no indication he was doing nothing during his notice period - surely if he'd been doing nothing, she'd have known already, and not expected to be able to reach him even outside of his contracted hours.
No she couldn't. In countries like Belgium or France when you fire someone you must give them notice. They then get 3 more months until the point they no longer work for you.
This gives employees time to find something else, and is also beneficial to public finances : the employer effectively bears the cost of the first 3 months of unemployment of this person, after which the state will cover.
But, to be fair, it also discourages hiring employees unless you know you can keep them, so there is more unemployment than there would have been otherwise.
Not in Europe. He'll have to have been given weeks/months of notices, so that he can look for a new job in his spare time and not be completely fucked up.
It's too bad you're getting downvoted. Even though the business owner's expectations of continued work out-of-hours are unreasonable, her method of letting this guy go actually seems pretty empathetic to me too.
Honestly, I would much rather be treated this way than walked to the door and told to wait for security to come by with a box of my stuff.
Nobody is (or few are, I'm not gonna count) criticizing the termination process, as it's about as empathetic as can be realistically expected.
The heat is coming from how she disavows that decision (and process), and is somehow surprised that he's not enthusiastic to not just put in the contracted paid-for time but won't go above-and-beyond to provide free services for her sole benefit. That's not "trying to be decent to people while trying to run a thriving business", that's expecting people to consent to be taken advantage of.
BTW: being shown the door with a check for 2-3 month's pay (not unusual in the USA) is quite palatable. Shows due appreciation without expecting someone to labor under a dark cloud when they should be out looking for work.
Getting a months-long notice period is required by law though. She hasn't mentioned doing anything more than just what she's legally required to do (oh except expecting a terminated employee to be on-call 24/7 and work unpaid overtime on request)
It's amazing how little empathy this thread has for people that create companies and struggle through the employer's side of trying to be decent to people while trying to run a thriving business.