Of course you'd want to put those terms in the employment contract, not just a verbal promise. Surely you wouldn't get exactly the same protection as in another country with a completely different legal system, but at least you could get part of it.
And yeah, they could terminate the contract, but they would still be bound by its terms that say how they can do that, with how much notice, for what reasons, and how much they will owe you.
Contract law is strong. If a company deliberately gave the employee lots of rights in an employment contract (in return for less pay), a court would hold the company to that later whilst it was solvent, even if company management later changes it's approach.
Personal experience - emigrating to the Netherlands after higher education is a well-defined and relatively easy process. After graduating you're able to apply for a "search year" residence permit which entitles you to residence and full access to the Dutch job market. (https://ind.nl/en/residence-permits/work/residence-permit-fo...)
Normally then you're able to get a "highly skilled migrant" permit (with less restrictive criteria than had you not studied in NL) which is renewable, then eventually after passing some language and integration tests and sufficient time you're eligible for long-term permanent residence (or even citizenship).
It's a refreshingly sane approach compared to the US.
>By requiring U.S.-built and registered ships, it guarantees high safety and quality, which is really important for complex operations like wind farms.
It certainly doesn't - there are enough "cowboy" US operators who are working far below the quality and safety standards which are practiced by European contractors. It's really a struggle sometimes to ensure that things are done properly and safely in the US. It's a practically new industry in the US and there is a lot of catching up to do.
>is the Jones Act really the thing standing in the way?
It obliges some pretty ridiculous transport and installation methodologies to construct wind farms that just don't exist anywhere else on the planet. This adds significant cost, complexity, and risk and makes US offshore wind farms more difficult and more expensive to build. So much hinges on contorded legal interpretations of what counts as a "coastwise point" and how that relates to "trade" between two of those points in the US.
In Europe, a specialized heavy lift crane ship or jack-up can sail into port and take on multiple foundations, transition pieces (the part between the foundation and turbine), or turbines and sail to the wind farm and install one after the other as fast as the weather permits. And to protect those foundations another specialized ship can come either before or after (or both) and place rock as efficient as possible. And a cable-lay vessel can come along and cut trenches and lay cable all with its own specialized subsea tooling. This is literal decades of development of best practice in terms of cost and efficiency.
In the US that's not possible.
The foreign heavy lift crane vessel can still do the lifting offshore - but, generally speaking, it can't go to port in the US and pick up anything to install offshore because, the US port is "coastwise point" A and the seabed offshore is point B and that counts as "coastwise transport." So that's where feeder barges come into play. The crane ship (or jack-up) sits offshore, more or less stationary (it's permitted to rotate, because that's technically not transport from point A to point B) and components are brought out by tug and barge. Not to mention the embarrasing physical state of & significant lack of fit-for-purpose cargo barges in the US...
The foreign cable lay vessel can still lay cable between two US points (there's an exception), but it can only make the trench to do so by "jetting" or "fluidizing" the soil because "cutting" or mechanically doing so would be dredging, and that's not allowed by any foreign vessels. If the soil conditions don't allow that, then a 2nd US-flagged vessel has to come. Huge cost increase, and again more complex, multi-stage operations.
The rock protection also gets a lot more complicated, depending whether it's US or non-US rock and depending on the foundation design needs to be installed before, or after, or both before & after the foundation itself is installed. It's a huge puzzle with potentially excessively expensive logistics.
All of this is possible & reality, but it's so much more complex, costly, and difficult. It's many more puzzle pieces to fit together accounting for tight supply chains, high weather risk & impact, and global competition where it's just a lot easier to do things elsewhere.
Doesn't that depend on the state?
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