Claudia, leftists want you to believe that employment is suppressed by rich people’s “greed”, but it’s generally government (particularly leftist governments) that really suppress employment. The leftists play that same game here, and Obama’s the most prominent practitioner of it now.
It’s the nature of business to try to do the most with the smallest number of people. That’s called efficiency. Companies in every country do it. It’s not greed and it’s not cruelty, because it releases workers to do something useful, rather than sticking around in a make-work job. It also helps make everything more affordable to ordinary people – and ordinary people aren’t willing to pay higher prices just to keep unnecessary workers sitting around.
There are laws in various countries in Europe that definitely do suppress employment. Take the laws in France that make it almost impossible to fire a permanent employee almost no matter what he does. This makes employers hesitant to hire people, because if the employee doesn’t work out, they can’t get rid of him. The result is that you have people working one internship after another even into their mid-30s, and France has nightmarish unemployment. (There are laws and regulations in the US that cause similar problems for black workers, and I know there are businesses who are afraid to hire blacks, because it will be almost impossible to fire them if they don’t work. Since those laws are not applied to whites or Asians, those people don’t have that obstacle.)
Some countries require employers to pay for insurance for all employees, even for employees who already have insurance from some other source and don’t need it or want it from their employer. That needlessly raises the cost of employing someone.
Another good one: A court in Spain recently ruled that if you get sick on your vacation, your employer has to give you a second paid vacation. How nuts is that?! It just brings the basic cost of employing people farther up, so employers don’t hire. Spain has outrageous unemployment as it is.
In the US or Canada, or an Asian country, if a product suddenly gets extremely popular, the producer merely adds a second shift to meet the demand. In some European countries, you can’t get rid of those second-shift workers after you hire them, so instead of producing enough product to satisfy consumer demand, the product just gets scarce. I’ve particularly noticed this with Scandinavian products, if they’re not outsourced to China.
Then there are such hurdles just to starting a business. One of the MBA interns from Germany at one company told me about how he and his brother tried to start a business. He enumerated all the obstacles the government put in their way, from the huge amount of money they had to fork over just to incorporate (instead of $50, or whatever it costs here), the forced payments to the chamber of commerce, and other obstructions, and he said they finally realized they couldn’t afford to do it. Here they’d have been up and running – and employing people – very quickly.
There’s also a strange habit of many Europeans to refuse employment that they think is below their station, rather than take some kind of job to stay busy. So they stay home. Recently, an engineer was scanning my groceries. He didn’t want to rot at home, so he took that job. He’ll be an engineer again after the recession’s over, I’m sure, but he refuses to stay idle, so he’s not counted as “unemployed”. Many Europeans would consider what he’s doing to be humiliating, so they stay unemployed.