Depends a lot on what country, but I think you'll find that the ratio of full-time employee vs contractor/at-will employee in most European countries will look very different from how that ratio looks like in the US (or other similar countries).

▲

ragall 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, but that's very different from saying that Europeans have would never accept it. It's already happening quite extensively, though not as much as in the US. Europe seems to be 20-40 years behind the US in various economic and social developments, but it's not immune from them.

▲

embedding-shape an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't read "we'll never accept here" as "it's be impossible", more like "we won't base our entire economy on that, it's not what the average person wants", because obviously Europe has various staffing companies already, and if you add a tiny bit of nuance into what they said, I'd agree with it too.

> Europe seems to be 20-40 years behind the US in various economic and social developments

That's one perspective, another is that US is 20-40 years behind Europe because the average person can barely afford to stay alive in the US right now, which is much less of a problem in Europe. But it all depends on what you value, I'm not gonna say one is more "correct" than the other, we all have our preferences and so on.

	▲	ragall an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> But it all depends on what you value, I'm not gonna say one is more "correct" than the other, we all have our preferences and so on. I wasn't talking about values. Yours or mines are largely irrelevant. 40 years ago, much of the US economy was made of stable jobs. Contingent jobs used to be few, labour unions used to be much stronger. Europe is under the same economic pressures as the US, and it's slowly trending in the same direction, just with 20-40 years of delay.
	▲	alephnerd 44 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> That's one perspective, another is that US is 20-40 years behind Europe [...] The US's HDI (0.938) is comparable to New Zealand and Liechtenstein [0], and significantly above Austria's (0.930), France's (0.920), and Italy's (0.915) [0], and the EU's HDI is itself 0.915 [1] - this puts the EU roughly in the same position as the US almost 16-17 years ago [2] despite both having a similar population. That said, once you break the 0.900 range, the differences are essentially cosmetic so Europeans or Americans saying either are significantly behind the other from a developmental metrics perspective is dumb and deflects from issues that exist in both the US and Europe. [0] - https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union [2] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA/?levels=1+4&ye...