Was completely with you until the last paragraph. As the poster above me says, the more you regulate hiring, the more reluctant companies are to do so. You can look at the entire continent of Europe for a 500 million person example of this- sclerotic uber-regulated hiring markets with intense bureaucratic rules around who can be hired or fired, who can be laid off, under what circumstances, etc. The end result of this regulation is dramatically higher unemployment rates and companies that are terrified to hire FTEs because it's so hard to get rid of a bad one.
Worker protection isn't standardised. The countries with the lowest unemployment rates have relatively dynamic labour markets.
Try France: 8.7%, was 10% as recently as 2015. Italy: 10.2%
Of course, unemployment is much worse for young workers in these countries. If you can't fire anyone then hiring is risky, so jobs tend to end up taken by older workers who then "camp" in the jobs even if they suck. Reverse ageism at work!
Tend to agree with deregulating hiring but some economies with heavily regulated employment like Germany (I’ve lived there, it is a nightmare to fire grossly incompetent employees) have very low unemployment rates.
Hartz IV was successful. Germany decreased bureaucracy and employment protection/regulation to the extent that their unemployment rate went down massively. From 1994-2012 Competition Weighted Relative Unit Labour Costs in Germany declined by 30% and unemployment dropped from 12% to 5.5% from 2005 to 2012.
> The Hartz concept, also known as Hartz reforms or the Hartz plan, is a set of recommendations submitted by a committee on reforms to the German labour market in 2002. Named after the head of the committee, Peter Hartz, these recommendations went on to become part of the German government's Agenda 2010 series of reforms, known as Hartz I – Hartz IV. The committee devised thirteen "innovation modules", which recommended changes to the German labour market system. These were then gradually put into practice: The measures of Hartz I – III were undertaken between January 1, 2003, and 2004, while Hartz IV was implemented on January 1, 2005.
Hiring needs to be less regulated, not more so