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Comment by andrewzah | Hacker News Reader

It's almost as if electing actors/celebrities to potus isn't a great idea.

> The FAA had initially claimed that staffing levels would be restored within two years; however, it took closer to ten years before the overall staffing levels returned to normal.[1]

> Reagan's firing of the government employees encouraged large private employers, like Phelps Dodge (1983), Hormel (1985–86), and International Paper (1987), to hire striker replacements instead of negotiating in labor conflicts.[17] Comparatively, in 1970 there were over 380 major strikes or lockouts in the U.S., by 1980 the number had dropped to under 200, in 1999 it fell to 17, and in 2010 there were only 11.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...

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I think it's good someone stood up to them. I'm French, we have endemic transportation strikes here, and it will turn your nice city/country into a shithole. The government should do what it takes to maintain infrastructure, transportation, and public services. That is, in fact, the main purpose of the government IMO.

Doesn't really work out in Britain and the US who pretty much demolished the unions, it's actually worse.

The unions are not the cause of it being worse. You can even make the argument that they are one of the causes of things being worse. There is no reason to pay $200/hr to dig tunnels, but New York does. There is no reason to have 3 union employees on a train, automation can do most of their jobs better. These are two that I see transit advocates bring up in the US as to why our transit is so bad. (They are not the only reason, nor even the biggest, but they are factors hurting our transit)

No unions is the cause of it being worse. Unions doesn't mean it's good, but no unions means it's getting worse. The UK demolished unions and privatized public transport like the railways. It got so worse the government had to buy the tracks back to repair them because the owners didn't care despite fatal accidents.

You didn't prove anything. Owners not caring about maintenance doesn't mean unions are good.

It proves no unions is worse. Shitty service vs deadly service.

That is because the whole US system is broken. Put yourself in the shoes of those workers. You have no skills apart from the one you got from doing the same job for 20 years. No prospect for decent future employment. Shitty unemployment benefits. No job retraining offers.

Why do we not have these problems in e.g. Nordic countries? Because we are superior blonde Aryans? Because we have no black people? Because we are so "homogenous"? Yes... plenty of possible racist explanations.

But the much simpler reasons is that there is a system that takes care of people. E.g. a country like Denmark spends 10x as much as the US to retrain a laid off worker. Higher education is free. Vocational training and crafts are baked into the high school system. Unemployment benefits are generous and you get a lot of help to get a new job or retrain for another one.

Perhaps more importantly you don't have really narrow skilled jobs to begin with. E.g. in the US factories tend to hire people with almost no skills to do a very narrow job. In Nordic countries you go through extensive vocational training programs giving you a broad set of skills. When you work in factory you will be doing a much wider variety of tasks, thus blue collar workers retain a broader set of skills. This means when they are fired, they have a lot more options even without retraining to find other jobs.

The Anglo-Saxon approach utterly lacks long term thinking. It is all about slotting a guy into a task as quickly and cheaply as possible. Only problem is that if that is the only thing that guy can do and the only thing he has learned, he will hold onto that job for dear life.

Sorry, if this comes across as negative. I don't really want to diss America and brag about us being better. I just feel it is deeply unfair how low skilled simple workers always have to get all the blame in America. It is always their fault. There is never a will to look at the bigger picture. To see the structures that trap people. My purpose isn't to brag about Nordics but to try to stand up for the American blue collar worker. I think they deserve some more sympathy and understanding.

Note that US union workers tend to fight the idea that they should learn new skills so they can get a better job. Don't ask me why.

> The government should do what it takes

If you have the courage to imply it you should say it out loud: You feel the government should ruin the lives of strikers if them striking inconveniences you.

If the government fails to provide basic services the government and everyone working in it deserves to be replaced and have their 'life ruined'

"you" being the 67 millions citizens that are not train conductors but need to move around, yes.

This is too simplistic. You just go "unions bad," when really it is about the legal framework and system. France, Britain and the US all have very low unionization rate yet all had lots of problems with unions.

Meanwhile in Germanic countries: Germany, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark etc it has often for decades been close to 80-90% of the population in unions, yet society works. Why does nobody ever stop and ask why that is?

You can be a racist and suggest Brits, Americans or French are somehow inferior to Germanic people, or you can be open minded and start looking at the different legal frameworks and practices.

In the US the law explicitly states a company only exists to produce money to the share holders. In German law in contrast about companies it emphasizes that a company exist to serve multiple purposes of with generating value for shareholder is just one of them. In my native Norway, worker participation and influence in the workplace is baked into the constitution.

My country has had coal workers, road workers, electricians and other simple people as prime ministers. Sweden currently has a former welder as prime minister. The working class themselves have held the power and been able to shape union laws. They have made sure that workers have strong representation in companies. In Germanic countries workers can vote on something from 33% to 66% of all the board members. I don't know about France but I know it is 0% in the US and the UK. Workers have no power at companies. They are not part of decision making or long term planning.

That is the key difference. In Germanic countries workers are used to being given responsibility and take part in planning. This foster a stronger culture of cooperation: taking and giving. In Anglo-Saxon countries it is completely conflict driven. It cannot be anything else, because worker have no say in anything. They are treated as dumb monkeys to be bossed around.

And no offense but it does not seem to be much better in France. All all countries run be elites. The common folks never have a say. When Norwegian companies send people down to France to do various work, they often have to invent titles for them, because their French counterpart will refuse to work with them if they don't have a fancy enough title.

I remember an important technical demonstration being held up in France because a junior developer was present and the French refused to get a demonstration by a junior developer. It had to be someone with a fancier title. They preferred to waste the whole day waiting over letting the junior developer do a crucial demo.

Norwegian companies experienced the same taking over UK shipyards. Norwegian management invited the workers to participate to plan how to turn the shipyard around. The British workers thought it was a clever trick and refused to show up. Never in the decades they had worked there had management EVER asked their opinion on ANYTHING.

So don't just blame unions. An arrogant and elitist leadership culture both at companies and politically combined with a broken legal framework is a major source of these problems.

But I suppose it is always easier to kick the guy lying down than to hold those in power accountable.

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