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Mandriva CEO: Employee Lawsuits Put Us Out of Business
Julie188 writes: As you probably heard by now, Linux company Mandriva has finally, officially gone out of business.
The CEO has opened up, telling his side of the story. He blames employee lawsuits after a layoff in 2013, the French labor laws and the courts. "Those court decisions forced the company to announce bankruptcy," he said.
basically slavery for engineers
Considering how many people, like Bill Gates and Mark Suckerberg, think that engineers are subhuman, you are correct. I worked at Microsoft for nearly a decade, and other than a couple of days off at Christmas, I wasn't allowed a single day off. Not a single day. My health went downhill during that time. Working 90+ hours a week for nearly ten years will do that. Working there almost killed me
I now work as a physics teacher in the city of Seattle. It's awesome. I teach less than half of the days a year, and I'm home by 3:30pm nearly every day. The job is so easy, and I make nearly as much as I did when I left Microsoft in 1999.
That's the lawyers. But the injured parties probably got some of their compensation. Maybe even all.
I once worked for a company that had an office in France. To get rid of an employee, you had to give them an extra year of pay, and even then, they could sue you for more, and probably win. If you own a company, and create jobs, the French consider you to be a criminal. There is a reason they have 11% unemployment.
Boo hoo. A corporation didn't get to leave its employees holding the bag.
No sympathy whatsoever.
The employees were left holding the bag anyway, since the company filed bankruptcy and won't be able to pay them. Literally no one won in this scenario. Probably the only people who won were the executives who can now get another CxO job at a company that can give bigger bonuses.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The problem with deferred payments is that he was assuming the company would stay solvent to make those deferred payments out of future revenue. If they went BK, he's not going to make those payments. I doubt he'd be willing to post a bond for those deferred payments, nor would anyone insure him for it.
And as for the reputedly punitive aspect of laying someone off in France: you knew that going in. The *wise* business plan is to put reserves aside to cover this eventuality. Or, you can *gamble* that you'll be solvent.
Here in the more libertarian US, lots of employees have been hung out to dry when the employer goes BK. Having your paycheck bounce is no fun. Worse yet is if the employer has been not making the withholding deposits to the IRS.
It's not just startups. Trying to do business in France is insane. The bureaucracy is nightmarish and I really suspect bidding processes are rigged. The labour laws are far too skewed towards workers and away from companies. I certainly don't believe in exploitation, but you need balance.
I run a small software company with customers all over the world, including North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa. We do very well in Europe except in France; that's a desert for us. We've basically given up because it's just too difficult to do business there, and we're happy enough to work with more business-friendly countries like the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, etc.
This always ends badly for employees in the US.
Companies in the US typically fold and stiff their employees because there are no strong laws which protect employees in this situation which have any teeth.
In the US:
1. There is employment at will. The CEO can dismiss staff with no recourse, provided all back pay is paid in a short time.
2. Most states don't require vacation accruals be paid out. California is an exception here.
3. Senior debt and taxes take precedence over paying employees, and there is a limit to how much back pay can be paid out (180 days or around $12,000 whichever is lower).
4. Most employees are covered by predispute arbitration contracts preventing them from going to a jury trial. California may change this with AB 465
5. State departments of labor are toothless and or afraid of going after businesses.
6. There is no legal mandate to pay severance pay.
French law is much more employee friendly. If a company is on its last legs, the employees should get the wages they worked for/
All of Europe has a very "non-american" style hiring and firing system.
In the US, you can fire anyone who doesn't belong to a union, at any time, for any reason. This makes jobs have no sense of permanence, and as a result, you constantly get "more expensive, less efficient" people replaced with "cheaper, less competent" people.
In Europe, most countries do not have at-will employment, so you are essentially creating a job for life, so better get as much bank for your euro as possible, because those french employees are super-expensive to have.
And yes, like other posters will mention, no company that produces products except Louis Vuitton and Hermes are willing to create jobs in France. When you need French "support" you hire from Canada (Quebec.) When you want people who can be hired and fired like Americans, you hire Bilingual Canadians from outside of Quebec (eg New Brunswick) because Quebec's language and labor laws are nearly as stupid as France. The companies in Canada try not to hire in Quebec, because the laws there require all business to be done in French. That's why Quebec has it's own media company that also owns the television and wireless. Everyone outside Quebec... you will see "Bilingual" job postings, but the jobs will be outside Quebec.
I digress though. I'd rather Americans outsource to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Because countries like India and the Philippines have no labor laws. So companies that outsource to those countries are trying to replace "one person who speaks and understands English competently" with "100 people who neither know English or the job competency."
those affected throw their sabot into the gears when treated in a way they perceive is incorrect,
That only works once. You get yours (maybe), nobody else will have the opportunity to get anything. In this case it appears the terminated employees will get less than they would have if they had compromised rather than taking down the company.
That's not correct. In France, as in most of Europe, it's standard for severance pay to increase with the amount of time worked. More over, the general expectation is that companies should try to avoid firing people. They can offer training, or move them to anther position first.
We are trying to avoid the race to the bottom that the US finds itself in, where people are discarded the moment someone slightly cheaper comes along. Shit jobs are a false economy for society, which is why living standards in France are so much better than most of the US.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC