You can fire people in Europe and hiring is by no means more convoluted than in the US.
Typically here you have 3 to 6 months probation period where you can be fired at any moment. Then your rights increase with your tenure.
The other big difference is that when you leave a job, you usually have 1 to 3 months of notice period while in the US that tends to only last a couple of weeks.
Overall this gives people a lot more security and I think we have a much better balance because of it, at least in the tech industry.
Industries with higher turnover (like hospitality) typically only hire employees as contractors so they can fire them at any time.
They're required to keep minutes from face to face meetings for compliance. Of course people still talk informally but they need to know to constraint what they talk about in those circumstances. This likely was triggered because some employees were using whatsapp to evade compliance checks on topics that should have been regulated.