>Not true that in Austria you can be terminated for any reason at all. There are protections in place.
Not true at all what you claim about Austria. There are zero protections in place for workers here unless you're over 50 or work at a place with a union (worker's council) that will fight for you. If you work for a small tech company you have no protections against unfair dismissal. Basically your boss can tell you at any time "in 30 days you won't work here anymore, goodbye" without any reason. Unlike other EU countries where you need to provide a specific legal reason why you're letting an employee go or you can get sued for unfair dismissal like the man in the article did to his former employer.
I spoke to Arbeite Kammer after being dismissed for no reason by a douchebag boss and they told me "your employer doesn't need a reason to dismiss you according to Austrian labor law".
My jaw dropped when I realized that Austria is basically, similar to US in this regard, where you get no protection against unfair dismissal except that here you get about 30-60 day notice period to find another job while you continue to work for your current employer. Austrian employers are even allowed to dismiss you while you're on sick leave. Crazy stuff.
you seem to mix up something. termination with advance notice is a normal process and pretty much always possible. i doubt there is any country in the world where you can't terminate employees with sufficient advance notice. the periods for advance notice differ but the process is otherwise the same in austria or in germany for example. and i am pretty sure most EU countries are similar. i only heard about france having much stricter rules for termination. so how is austria worse in that regard?
in this particular example, the legal date for termination in austria would have been december 31st (because by default it is 6 weeks notice after august 26, to the nearest quarter)
in germany it would have been september 30th.
>termination with advance notice is a normal process and pretty much always possible. i doubt there is any country in the world where you can't terminate employees with sufficient advance notice
I think you are misunderstanding. Unlike Austria, in most others EU countries you can't terminate employees, even with notice, without providing a reason.
I disagree. Austria’s labor protections are fine. If you make rules around dismissals stricter then you greatly harm the ability for a company to hire in the first place. The current rules give you plenty of protection as an employee that you can find a new place of work and not suffer financially.
When they're objectively worse than every other EU country, bordering on competing with the US, I can hardly call them "fine".
>If you make rules around dismissals stricter then you greatly harm the ability for a company to hire in the first place.
Please stop parroting the propaganda of the conservative party (ÖVP) who are bought and paid for by the business elite and would gladly tell us working 60h/week is in our best interest. The stricter employee protections in other EU countries haven't harmed the economy or innovations there. Do you see Netherlands or Sweden doing poorly economically because of their better employee protection laws? In fact their innovation and tech sectors are far above Austria's.
Nor did the lack of employee protection laws boost Austria's economic sector. Have you looked at Austrian skilled wages? They earn the lowest wages of all the German speaking countries causing an exodus of doctors and other skilled specialists to Germany and Switzerland, while Austrian devs make Eastern European wages. So how did the lack of worker protections help with this?
Maybe fixing the needlessly complex and conservative bureaucracy and high tax burdens on employers and employees would help improve the Austrian economic sector and make it more competitive and attractive for business, instead of taking away employee rights in a race to the bottom hoping that going the sweatshop route will make it more competitive.
There is a lot I want to fix in Austria from bureaucracy to taxation of stock options and more. The employment law is very fine by me.
If you think that you will get better wages if it’s harder to dismiss employees I have doubts. The main reason devs don’t earn enough in Austria is that it’s hard and expensive to have a business there and that the country is not appealing for employees. That means that the few good IT companies have a small labor pool and need to relocate developers for whom the country is not appealing.
Not really, because there are other options around. For a gross salary of 100.000 Euro (which is already high, but not necessarily for software engineers) the employer pays 125.000 Euro, after taxes the employee retains 61.000 Euro. Stock options are generally taxed as income as well.
So the general taxation situation and the complexities in doing business (lots of notaries needed, slow processes) make it unappealing.
Not true at all what you claim about Austria. There are zero protections in place for workers here unless you're over 50 or work at a place with a union (worker's council) that will fight for you. If you work for a small tech company you have no protections against unfair dismissal. Basically your boss can tell you at any time "in 30 days you won't work here anymore, goodbye" without any reason. Unlike other EU countries where you need to provide a specific legal reason why you're letting an employee go or you can get sued for unfair dismissal like the man in the article did to his former employer.
I spoke to Arbeite Kammer after being dismissed for no reason by a douchebag boss and they told me "your employer doesn't need a reason to dismiss you according to Austrian labor law".
My jaw dropped when I realized that Austria is basically, similar to US in this regard, where you get no protection against unfair dismissal except that here you get about 30-60 day notice period to find another job while you continue to work for your current employer. Austrian employers are even allowed to dismiss you while you're on sick leave. Crazy stuff.
Very backwards employment laws for an EU county.