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Comment by Leszek | Hacker News Reader

Germany has similar workers' rights and protection from firing, yet it has a lower unemployment rate.

German labour law and culture are utterly unlike the US. Under NLRB regulations the kind of long term, relatively collegial, give and take contract negotiation that is mundane in Germany is illegal. Volkswagen and other German car companies would like to have the same system in the US as in Germany. They don’t because it’s illegal.

Remember that the unions is in the VW board.

I don't think VW should want to want that even if they do.

Having 3 months mutual contract disbandment time favours the employer way more than the employee. It's huge being able to replace a person in an orderly manner.

Also I believe given big corps. inefficiencys and internal "politics" not being able to fire who you want at random but in predetermined order is also good for the corparations since you will automatically keep the employees with the most experience and not make stupid shortsighted savings or fireing people the bosses don't like.

Plus in Germany, you have what's called a probezeit, or probationary time. It can't be longer than one year, but it's a time where either party can end the work contract if it's not working out.

Those German worker rights, and strong ties between companies and unions were supposedly among the reasons why Walmart failed in Germany:

“They didn’t understand that in Germany, companies and unions are closely connected,” Mr. Poschmann said. “Bentonville didn’t want to have anything to do with unions. They thought we were communists.” [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/business/worldbusiness/02...

and nothing of value was lost

>In Germany, Wal-Mart stopped requiring sales clerks to smile at customers — a practice that some male shoppers interpreted as flirting — and scrapped the morning Wal-Mart chant by staff members.

This is just fucking insane. That's not a supermarket, that's like a cult.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpPUUWp5sO4

It's one of those awful ideas that seems to bubble back up into the corporate mind periodically. IBM actually did the same thing back in the first half of the 20th century (see https://www.networkworld.com/article/2333702/a-history-of-si... for the full history), even going so far as to publish a songbook titled "Songs of the I.B.M": https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/tripp...

They kept it up into the 1950s, when Tom Watson died and control of the company passed to his son.

I like this note from the end of the Network World article, where they ask a Harvard Business School professor if there's anything similar going on in the contemporary tech world:

> "I don't think there is a Microsoft company song other than 'Get to the bank as fast as possible so you can deposit the check,' " Tedlow adds.

How can you be a grown adult having to work at a minimum wage job, see this and not die inside?

Its still easier to fire employees in Germany than in France from what I understand. Germany also has also averaged roughly half the yearly population growth rate as compared to France for the last several decades (even dipping into the negatives for several years). So the supply of labor is more constrained.

Not that I think employment rate means much (look at japan's very low employment rate compare to their economic growth since 1989, its very low [2.4% now]), but their unemployment rate for April came in at 4.9%, whereas in the US was at 3.6%.

https://data.oecd.org/chart/5A9X is the harmonized unemployment rate for Germany and the USA, which they define as:

"Harmonised unemployment rates define the unemployed as people of working age who are without work, are available for work, and have taken specific steps to find work. The uniform application of this definition results in estimates of unemployment rates that are more internationally comparable than estimates based on national definitions of unemployment. This indicator is measured in numbers of unemployed people as a percentage of the labour force and it is seasonally adjusted. The labour force is defined as the total number of unemployed people plus those in civilian employment." (https://data.oecd.org/unemp/harmonised-unemployment-rate-hur...)

I'm just reporting what the German statistical office reports (https://m.investing.com/economic-calendar/german-unemploymen...).

Besides, harmonized or not, doesn't explain the economic weakness in Germany over the past decade compared to the US.

What's the point of the economic strength of the US, if the results of that strength disproportionately go to the so-called elites and building war machines? Healthcare, homelessness, massive inequality are perennial awkward topics for an allegedly rich country like the US.

If anything, the US should scale back profits and rebuild its social supports structures, the same structures which were torn down in the name of profit.

I was speaking to relative economic strength, It's not that I think the US employment rate means much either: without government debt financing deficits, US gdp would be in contraction (like nearly other OECD economy).

>If anything, the US should scale back profits and rebuild its social supports structures, the same structures which were torn down in the name of profit.

All of this sounds like more debt, which if we learned (we haven't) anything from 2008, will not solve the problems, just exacerbate it more when it blows up (again).

Funny as I remember it 2008 was all about bailing out the banks, that is giving money to the rich, not rebuilding social structures. It seems increasing debt is always fine if it goes to the elites (via tax breaks or bailouts), while it's the bogeyman idf it actually going to help people that need it. You know that the US during the golden age of the 50s and 60s had a marginal tax rate of 90%?

I also recall 2008 about programs like cash for clunkers, nationalization of fannie mae and freddie mac (and the eventual roll out of their 3% down mortgages with no income restrictions). You know that during the US during the 50s and 60's the labor force primarily benefited one subclass of people where the rest were marginalized?

> I'm just reporting what the German statistical office reports

... which is meaningless when you compare it to the official US statistics (as you did) because they count things differently. The harmonization helps make the numbers comparable in the first place.

Fair, still doesn't change the rather meaninglessness of the numbers in the first place.

Don’t German companies penalize you for quitting sometimes?

Germany essentially leveraging the poor countries in the EU to subsidize their economy may also have something to do with their low unemployment rate.

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