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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I find it hilarious that my biggest culture shock with Europe is how unionized industries can strike and actually cause a noticeable inconvenience.

I'm always like "WHAT!? How is this possible? Why didn't the bus/train/airline just declare bankruptcy, ending the jobs of 20,000 people at once, and do an IPO without unionized workers a year later!?"

and then I have to laugh it off because thats just so American of me. our unions just have people walking in a circle for up to a few months, in one city against a multinational corporation, and barely anything occurs except some inspiration for your new moon drum circle.

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Because when you cut hundreds or thousands of jobs, it will have a devastating impact in the community, not only for those directly affected, but also for those that will compete with them for available jobs. I find it hilarious that an american doesn't find it obvious, given the abundance of american examples on this.

America is a much larger more cohesive market, which means specific communities have no affect on the national company which has expanded to other countries as well.

The individual nations in Europe are the size of individual American states, and can only be compared when talking about the European Single Market as a whole, which is new and filled with the vestiges of national companies that are just getting around to expanding into their neighboring countries.

The American experience has been removed from communities for a very long time that corporate apathy is the expected experience.

If the bus company did what you suggest a lot of European people would boycott the new one.

You can boycott it as long as you don't need to get to the next town over. When you do, and every other company has done the same shit in the past, you become inured to it.

Could you share an example case of that IPO scenerio you mention?

A union overplayed their hand with Hostess over wage stuff not knowing Hostess’ financial prospects and the company declared bankruptcy in the middle of the worker strike. The company assets and factories were sold off and the buyers kept the brand name and IPO’d and it trades under TWNK. No union workers lol.

At least this would not be possible. If you declare bancruptcy the company will be put under a outside CEO who tries to save the company. Is it different in the US?

Depends on the circumstance

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