The laws on "licensement," as firing in France is called, are complex enough to fill a book, but in the end there are essentially four ways for an employer to deliver a pink slip.
The French word is "licenciement". The guy decides he needs to put the French word in his article, and he is not even fucking able to find the proper way to spell it?
Sloppy. Incompetent. Tedious. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
So France does have legal books called Codes, that lay out the law in detail. America and Britain may have less of this, but common law, custom, and jurisprudence need to be studied in its place.
One thing I don't get is this: if America is so free of legal rigmarole, how come the practice of law is such a big activity there?
They could have said something sensible such as "an average workman's weekly wages" or something of the sort... guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper
By the way, they probably could not foresee inflation in the way it exists today. Why would you have permanent inflation unless you print a lot of papermoney to cover the costs of a war? Which they had just done, making everybody convinced that metalmoney was the way of the future.
Coincidentally, the swedish voting law from 1866 contained economical barriers towards voting for the parliament. Fortunately they put them in exact numbers. Inflation meant more and more voters until liberals and socialists could win on a universal and equal suffrage platform. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
So the coincidental thing was the probably unforseen consequences of making a fixed sum a limit, in the US leading to all cases tried by jury and in Sweden to universal suffrage. Of course both these developments could have been halted, but they had the inertia of the established. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
I was reading the Blanchard paper that Jérôme referenced somewhere and it seems pretty clear to me that this is a problem with many possible solutions that are all complicated. Throwing the workers to the wolves is not the only possible solution.
The difference is in the purpose of the laws. In American labor law the broad purpose is to support at-will employment, with the principal exceptions being unionized labor and government service. If the purpose was to provide worker protection we would have a kazillion laws to describe how to do that, instead.
