Chinese Courts Rule Companies Cannot Fire Workers Simply to Replace Them With AI
https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-04-30/chinese-courts-rule-companies-cannot-fire-workers-simply-to-replace-them-with-ai-102439602.html
I think this is great and would force companies to work on long-term solutions to improve their products instead of short term solutions like layoffs which only increase share price to give the executive board more bonuses.
There was a good economics paper on this phenomenon recently:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617
The TL;DR of this is: companies are financially incentivized to automate as much as they can and it is very hard to change this. But when one company automates and lays off workers, that affects all other companies (since the workers no longer have wages to buy goods and services). If all companies are automating and laying people off, everyone ultimately makes less money.
They propose as the solution what is basically a tax on layoffs: if you lay people off, and those people don't get re-absorbed into the job market at equivalent or better-paying jobs, then you gotta pay the difference in wages as a tax. The money from that tax goes back to the workers (they propose partially for income replacement and partially for retraining).
From what I see, Germany and other vassal states are just copying the US as usual and trying to fire as many employees as possible to show their "AI efficiency". So I expect that SAP won't change their course unless there is intervention from the EU or the state to save the economy when the AI bubble bursts.