union issues
- Thread starter Cherico
- Start date
Edgeplay_cgo
Well-known member
. . . in the Chinese sense.
Indeed. I am surprised that the unions would break with the dems. Given the obvious graft, general corruption and them straying from their actual purpose of giving the worker a better bargaining position in the free market (though just like the corporate types, they aren't looking for a fair shake, they are looking to their interests), and becoming of course arms of the Democratic party. Though, maybe, they actually still look out for the worker like they should to some degree, hopefully they do.
D
Deleted member 1
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American unions are implemented terribly. Making the unions part of corporate management like in Germany leads to a focus on long term corporate health instead of adversarial fighting over short term financial metrics. I really think that’s the real reason Germany has a bigger manufactury sector than we do at this point.
Hardly the only reason.
If the matter was ONLY the dysfunctional relationship between Unions and Management, all the Companies would have done would have been to move from Closed Shop States to Right-to-Work States. This has, in fact, happened, with considerable amounts of manufacturing moving out of the rust belt and Pac. Northwest to the American South, and most foreign car manufacturers that open factories in the US do so in Right-to-work states that lack the ridiculousness of Unions.
No, there's other reasons for Germany's maintaining of manufacturing while the American manufacturing heartland has been hollowed out and it's a LOT simpler: Protectionist German trade policies protecting their manufacturing sector from the forces that gutted the American manufacturing sector. While the US decided to embrace utterly one sided "free trade" deals, Germany held much tighter controls on trade that kept the playing field much more even between German companies and foreign ones, so they never had to face the same level of competition from manufacturing located in countries with practically no environmental laws, labor laws, and other systematic advantages that US manufacturing had to unfairly compete against (and, predictably, lose).
The dysfunctional US Unions certainly didn't help matters, but I suspect that had the US not basically opened our markets to countries that not only lacked out standard of living, but also our considerable number of regulations, we'd see a much healthier manufacturing sector in the US, even if it had shifted south out of the old rustbelt.