I actually respect he French attitude and willingness to stand up for their rights and way of life. We can endlessly debate whether they take it too far but in the backdrop of the rest of the world doing fuck all, I see it as a positive.
Sure, I didn’t actually expect an off-hand remark like that to be taken as a serious comment on the French labour situation. (It’s... complicated, seems to have no good solutions, and I have mixed feelings about it given that France is one of the few places in Western Europe that has actual, genuine socialists rather than social democrats, but yes, the fact that there does seem to be a serious discussion going on, with a decent range of options and real power to enact them, makes up for a lot of my gripes about the quality of the arguments used.)
The point was that while Europe, as a rule, does lean towards more labour regulation than the US, the specifics vary so much that this is about the only useful generalization you make about it. The rest heavily depends on the country, and even geographical proximity doesn’t really play into it. (But you would know all about that, I expect.)
True, it's complicated, but I can offer the counter generalization that the US view on European worker protection is dramatically overstated.
Case in point, Germany did not have a minimum wage...AT ALL...until 2015. In the Netherlands, there's an entire class of workers on "zero hours" contracts, which give said workers none of the traditional protections.
Protections that even in the best of cases, an indefinite work contract situation, are strongly hollowed out by now.
