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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>VW, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche all German engineered and manufactured by heavily unionized workforces!

Sure, but for each of those there are 10-100 other smaller companies in automotive or other industries that don't have unions, and some German companies have stirred up quite a few scandals of not following the employment laws or abusing their workforce, which coincidentally was mostly immigrants.

Cherry picking the big, wealthy car brands to represent the manufacturing industry is like cherry picking FAANG for representing the software dev industry.

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SO OP gets to claim based on his anecdotal experience that unions are awful and full of lazy people.

But pointing out there are wildly successful unions filled with hardworking people is "cherry picking"?

I didn't say unions are not successful, I said that workplaces like VW or Porsche are not the norm in Germany. They're like Germany's FAANG; very successful, but not the norm for every industry employee there since they don't all enjoy such good conditions.

I have yet to hear people in Europe being upset that they are unionized.

I had a friend from France getting his undergraduate degree in the US Marvel at how much learning we were getting done, since we didnt spend half of every semester on strike.

There are good and bad unions everywhere, but I think the closed-shop restrictions in the US that force you to join a particular union as a condition of employment exacerbates the worst qualities of them here.

Again, I didn't say unions are bad, I said they're not the norm for every employee in europe

Um, some unemployed rioters and burning cars in France every single weekend would beg to differ with you.

I don't know why you claim that smaller companies in the automotive sector in Germany don't have ununionzed workforces, but the IG Metall has a »Organisationsgrad« in this sector (how many of the workers are union members) above 90 percent (see https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/gewerkschaften-die-u...).

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