Somehow companies are getting by just fine paying all of that leave in Europe (in fact, government pitches in too). It's just the kind of world you want: more disparity and lots of poverty in exchange for a lottery ticket to wealth or a solid baseline and fewer economic tophits.
Many of the 'side effect' realities, for example as cited by the OP are very real, and go somewhat unmeasured or sidelined.
Europe is not doing very well, it's treading above water, fumbling from crisis to crisis without any obvious pathways out. After the US-driven 2008 crisis, there were years of serious problems with the Euro, to the point wherein Italian banks (and others) were teetering on failure, two national governments were overthrown by the EU (Greece, Italy) there was a major migration crisis ... and then COVID hit. All of this with very problematic demographics, a rising China and an antagonizing US - it does not bode well.
That France (and arguably Spain and Italy) did not undergo similar labour reforms similar to 'sick man of the 1990's Germany' has created ongoing damage.
It's not all a 'one sided story' but there need to be intelligent labour reforms.
The commenter echoes real sentiments across the business community with respect to hiring, even if it's not so perfectly accurate - 'firing' people in France is actually very difficult and a legit barrier to anyone wanting to expand there, among other things.
People don't need to take a year off when they have children. They can, at some reduce pay perhaps, that would be a nice option, but the community doesn't need to share most of that burden.
Europe is fine, don't confuse the absence of tophits for an absence of a strong middle class. I'm tempted to say Europe is in fact one of the most resilient economies at the moment for this reason, but that is not a very relevant debate here.
What people need should be for them to decide. Staying with your newborn until the age of 1 does not seem wildly out of the ordinary for us a species (we notably born prematurely anyway). And then requiring equality also does not seem unnecessary to me ( in order to give families the choice of whose career to sacrifice).
You couldnt demonstrate better why I will never leave Europe for work, I just don't share that Protestant work ethic to which so much seems to be sacrificed. There are other things in life. Perhaps not yours, but certainly in mine. I wish everybody to opportunity to have a life outside of work, even if they decline to make use of the right.
EU as an economic space has huge internal periphery with all the typical problems thereof (high unemployment, flight of young qualified workforce elsewhere). It is quite easy to visualize, actually.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
My wife is a huge fan of Spanish culture. We travel there often (pre-Covid, but hopefully also post-Covid). Andalucía is by far the worst region in Western Europe I have seen, as far as hopelessness and lack of future prospects goes.
Or perhaps being a post-Roman nation causes unemployment?
Even though I'm partly kidding, I'm partly not.
Some of these things are so consistent, I wonder if we gloss over them and should contemplate they are underlying issues whereas 'employment policy' may be less relevant than we think. Maybe in some cultures people like to work more than others.
It's the opposite. French labour policy for example is a giant political boondoggle. It's one series of short-signed populist back-room deals after the next.
What 'serious reform' looks like is the 'Hartz concept' [1] - nothing like it exists really in the rest of the EU.
The results of French labour policy mean consistently almost 2x the unemployment rate of US/UK/Germany, for example. [2]
This is not an example of 'strong' it's an example of 'very weak' and it hurts quite a lot of people.
A perfect example of shortsighted, populist, untenable policy: Hollande's 'Supertax' on the rich [3]. This was an an act of self-destruction, not construction.
While Hartz is widely viewed as being a giant success, none of the French economic reforms made sense, and none of them have helped.
And FYI Europe doesn't have a middle class, and remember includes places like Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Greece, S. Italy which are actually quite poor.
European nations individually have 'decent' Gini coefficients, but if you do the 'EU-wide' coefficient it's quite bad. Average Slovak is nowhere near the average Swede.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept
[2] https://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemployment-rate.htm
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-7...
[0] http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?lang=en&data...
Companies simply can’t always pay people to not work for 6 months to a year, so they’ll go somewhere where they don’t have to.
Why ‘simply can’t’ a ‘multi billion dollar international business’ offer paid parental leave, if so required by law? This does not make any sense, large international corporations will do business wherever they can profitably.
This particular multi-billion dollar company certainly doesn't want to pay it. And so they get their employees from other places. They still do business in France and have customers there. They are a SAAS company. They just don't hire from there.
Also, they do offer paid parental leave. Just not an entire year of it.
If you can't decide within 6 months whether a hire is bad or not then that's on you. If you fail to fire them the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th year and so on then that's on you. How do another 4 weeks make your company worse? Maybe the french have an obviously worse system but I see Americans complain about practically any employment law that isn't theirs. They don't complain because it's bad, simply because it's different.
You don't seem to know about German employment law either because that's simply wrong. Basically in every company with more than 10 employees you can't fire anyone who has been with the company for more than 6 months, except for very few specific reasons which are listed here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCndigung_(deutsches_Arbe...
In most jobs nowadays, you have probation time, then time-limited contracts (maximum 2 x 1y) and then an unlimited contract. As a result, you can end contracts within the first 6 months, after a year and after two years w/o discussions or problems. That gives everyone enough time to sort out "bad hires" w/o any risk. Afterwards, a certain degree of protection starts, but money and reasonable rationale can end any contract.
It is just very different than the US "hire and fire" thing. In Germany and other places it is expected that as an employee I have a certain degree of stability in my life.
Hiring laws aren't, but firing laws are. When I worked as a corporate lawyer, we had lawyers who specialized in knowing the employment laws in various countries and advising companies on the process for exiting, the cost for doing so, etc.
I'd also disagree that people aren't paid by companies during parental leave. They are often topped-up by companies. This was the case at the law firm where I worked, and at the R1 university my wife works for. I'm sure it is also the case at FAANG, which have generous corporate leave policies.
So I guess that you meant this generous multi billions $ company has no operations in France?
If so, then I don't understand why they wouldn't hire competent French staff if their operations are located in other countries where other local labour laws apply, regardless of your nationality.
In countries where employers are on the hook for some or all of the cost, we just factored it in to the employee costs. Again, because software engineers were paid so much less in those countries it wasn’t a dealbreaker.
At least in the software field, the US salaries are so much higher that the overhead is not a big deal in European countries.
We had a lot of young people who wanted to relocate to US offices when they discovered the salary differences, though.
That's why you have a 6 months trial period, right ?