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Notes -
If you want that in Europe, you hire a contractor. If you are unhappy with your plumber or gardener or sex worker, you can just hire a different company for the next job. Likewise, if you want to lease your property to tenants without being bound by too many legal safeguards, lease office space to companies.
But where humans are concerned, most societies recognize that just allowing total freedom of contract will lead to bad outcomes, because very often one human party will have a significant disadvantage during negotiations. In most places, selling your kidney or signing a contract which will put you into debt slavery if certain conditions are met is simply legally void, because if it was not there would be desperate people signing such contracts and ending up enslaved. Likewise, it is very rare that a prospective tenant can write the terms of a rental contract, because the landlord likely has a dozen alternatives lined up, while the tenant does not. The same goes for employment contracts.
And it is not like the US is some anarcho-libertarian utopia for employment, either. There are plenty of rules and regulations. You can't just put into contract that higher exposure limits for carbon monoxide will apply. You can't -- at least in theory -- fire an employee for not giving you a blowjob. Or fire all of your employees matching some protected characteristic. I imagine many states would forbid you from firing women for becoming pregnant, too.
The main difference is the burden of proof. In Europe, we have a whitelist of reasons to fire someone, while the US has a
blacklistblocklist of reasons for which you can not be fired.Now, I am sympathetic to arguments that these rules have adverse side effects. But simply arguing how unfair it is that you have some obligations towards someone with whom you have traded paychecks for labor for a decade is not going to convince anyone.
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