Why, are you implying American companies will only operate in Europe if they can break the law??? They sent an email, she didn't respond and they stated that because she didn't respond she automatically made herself redundant....In Ireland you cannot default to "you mad yourself redundant because you didn't reply", there was no agreement to change her terms and conditions (redundancy in Ireland is a legal agreement, if its not voluntary than they could not fill the same role, even with a different title, with someone else for several years).
This seems very misinformed and I would like to see a source on it. In many European countries it's fairly easy to fire people. I can use Denmark as an example as this is where I'm from, here you can fire anyone if their position is no longer needed within the company. It's true that you cannot just fire someone and then hire another person to fill the same position without legal repercussion. This is to prevent things like firing people who get pregnant, but if your company is removing the position entirely, like when you're downsizing, you can fire people.
There are ways to fire people you really don't want in your company, however, it's just a matter of how expensive it will be. The typical Danish outcome of wrongful firing is 1-2 years worth of pay, which is (as I understand it) much lower than the outcome of similar American law-suits. In Europe, this is mostly handled by due diligence, where companies enter agreements with an unwanted worker, giving them 1-2 years of pay to fire them legally. But typically this doesn't happen, because why would you want to fire someone with no valid reason?
Firing someone for not responding to a single e-mail is insane.
One of the advantages to running a company in Europe compared to America is that many European countries are designed to make it relatively "easy" to fire people. This is because we have really good social security networks. In Denmark we have something called a "dagpenge" system, which is a type of unemployment system where you pay some tax-deductible money to be part of an "a-kasse" that will then pay you a healthy sum for two years after you lose a job. The sum isn't quite "programmer level salary" in Denmark, but many companies tend to deal with this by offering 80-100% insurances for those two years through either unions, pension-fonds or private security. In the public sector the unions tend to do the same thing.
I think you may be confusing our overall workers rights with company to employee relationships. Because it's true that countries like France sees some massive worker strikes once in a while, but these have more to do with the government vs workers than anything and typically have to do with how long a work week, how early you can go on pension, how long the social security period should be.
It seems many Americans do want to start companies in Europe though. US multinationals directly employ about 190,000 people in Ireland, a country with a total population of 5 million.
