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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Unions in the UK and US are antagonistic to the point that they will gladly destroy a company or even an entire industry rather than give an inch (union bosses don’t care, they are very well looked after, strangely). But unions in France and Germany are far cleverer, they would never kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. That’s why Germany is strong in manufacturing AND has superb working conditions... and the UK has a service economy and zero-hours contracts

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Smart unions everywhere do that, but because of that they also regularly sell the workers.

In argentina, unions are constitutionally protected. Union leaders are defacto politicians, as they cannot be arrested for many crimes without congress approval. What is unique about argentina is that unions are right-wing and shut the left-wing parties out. And the left parties (socialist, communist) always denounce that the unions are constantly selling off the workers.

Today, the strongest union leader is getting indicted because it used union's funds to sustain his own soccer club.

That’s why Germany is strong in manufacturing AND has superb working conditions... and the UK has a service economy and zero-hours contracts

Bravo, well said. Solid working conditions, meaningful employee input to company decision making processes, and excellent remuneration for all doesn't really impact the bottom line but significantly improves quality and productivity in most cases.

In my experience Unions in Poland will sooner let the company close than give an inch, to a point where the government is bailing out private companies just so they wouldn't get a massive strike by the unions.

Unions in the US and UK are antagonistic because businesses have been trying to destroy them for over a century. Many companies actually had striking workers murdered in an attempt to control unions.

German unions are less antagonistic because they are required by law to get representation on the boards of all companies with more than 500 employees.

And France has...?

High productivity, great worker protections, and high unemployment. Seems to be a mixed bag but the workers who have jobs wouldn't trade it.

France is a very interesting country. I would really like to know details about labor conditions there before making the default judgement that I used to when I was younger, that unionization and over-regulation had basically killed the French economy, causing the high levels of unemployment. They seem to have a system of protecting their workers, now if there was a way to also increase innovation/employment so more people could benefit from this system ...

At the moment it seems to be a choice in the developed world for high unemployment or high ratio of poor part-time workers , there's not enough work for everybody anyway so I'm not sure which one is the worst.

"The only way a union can effectively increase the wages of its workers is by reducing the amount of workers" - Milton Friedman

I like Friedman but this manifestly isn’t true: it’s about the ratio of capital (and management) to labour. Any profitable company can set this ratio to whatever they want.

A decent way of life and some semblance of culture.

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