The more legal protections you have against getting fired, the less…

I thought about the Danish model while reading the recent reports from Germany about workers at troubled Opel factories

wites Thomas Fuller in the International Herald Tribune (emphasis mine).

The automaker is so desperate to lay off employees without making too many waves that it is reportedly offering buyouts of as much as $200,000, or $266,000.

The corollary to this generous offer is of course a familiar but key question for Europe: Who wants to hire someone if the cost of firing them is such a huge sum?

It is an unpopular question in Europe because many people have come to think of employee protections as part of a higher form of civilization. Making it easier to fire people, by this logic, is slipping backward in social evolution.

That is not the thinking in Denmark, however, which after all is a pretty civilized place.

Protection against dismissal has never been a major issue" [in this European welfare state par excellence] said Einar Edelberg, deputy permanent secretary in the Danish Ministry of Employment. "It's easy to fire — and accordingly, it's easy to hire."

And that's the main point, say Danish experts on the system. …

One footnote on the Danish model: Workers here tell pollsters they feel confident about being able to find work. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development showed that workers in Denmark led the world in a feeling of employment security, along with workers in the United States [!]. At the bottom of the list were countries with higher degrees of protection, like France and Spain.

The moral of this story: The more legal protections you have against getting fired, the less protected you feel.