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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.
Uh, so you got hit with penalties in court because "labour laws are very generous towards the employees in France", which really means "we weren't following the labour laws in the country in which we had an office and did business", and probably finally means "we tried to screw employees in a way that would have worked perfectly fine in North America or other countries but got called on it in France, which cost us a bundle" ...
The fear of this sort of fiasco makes establishing the company in London instead far more attractive. So the French are ever more stripped of talent. As a Brit I am grateful to the French for sending us so many talented people, but for the folk in France this is BAD NEWS. And this sort of story will discourage risk taking there even more.
this actually sounds pretty good to me!
Yes, it is good. Unless you are among the 11% unemployed, or one of the many millions with short term contracts because no one wants to take the risk of offering you a real job. But once you get the permanent position, you can kick back, because the penalty for firing you is prohibitive, resulting in poor productivity growth, and a stagnant economy. But, no problem, just borrow more euros from the hard working Germans across the Rhine.
Not all French people dream about a secure job with little work. I know several that are hardworking entrepreneurs, bursting with ideas. Unfortunately for France, they emigrated to America, and are my co-workers and neighbors here in San Jose, California.
California wine is better too.
...
So? You think running a successful business takes some kind of extra special skill set? Higher levels of skill, talent, and perseverance than earning a PhD, and/or making a discovery, advancing science?
I have done both and I can tell you that the set of talent to obtain a PhD degree is different from the set of talent required to successfully run a business
The quality of Slashdot crowd has sunk to a new low, with people actually posting comments ridiculing people with skill set other than theirs
Where is the humbleness of a scholar, the curiosity of a adventurer and the tenacity of a researcher?
In other words, instead of nerds that we are attracting, Slashdot ends up attracting a bunch of ignorant assholes who think they are smarter than the rest of the humankind
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.
It is the basic conflict that the conservatives hold as justification for anti union action, and anti labor stance. The trouble is that they are not wrong, and Mandirva is a perfect example why. A company that employed expensive employees in an extremely employee biased legal framework has now been destroyed and all of those employee are out of work. In replacement of that company are any number of companies that have the exact same business model except that they operate in places that do not afford employee protections. In essence, the jobs were not lost, simply transferred to another location (All those Mandriva customer are now Red Hat, or Microsoft customers). At the end of the day, all other things being equal, employment will work like any other unregulated economy, and the jobs go to the lowest bidders (In this case, anywhere except France). Ultimately Conservatives and Liberals are fighting about labor laws, when they have all accepted a bad premise. The problem is neither the conservative viewpoint nor the liberal viewpoint. The problem is that everyone works from the assumption that capitalism is mandatory. Everyone is so busy arguing about which political faction has the right answers, when in fact none of them do. There is not a single political group on earth that has the right answers. They are all too busy worrying about the short term details that ultimately are irrelevant to the problem. Meanwhile the real root cause (human nature) is being almost completely ignored.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
France seems to be one extreme, but the US is the other extreme. Both could adjust their policies to something more fair for all stakeholders.
Interesting statistic I found verifying the claims: France has a lower poverty rate than it's unemployment rate, while the US poverty rate is 3.5 times higher than it's unemployment rate. Just having a job isn't that great when you're still in poverty.
Everyone in France who is employed is not in poverty. Intact some people in France who are unemployed are still above poverty.
There is a reason they have 11% unemployment.
The only reason it's that low is due to all the french people who want to work fleeing to more business-friendly countries.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."