Look up the British car industry, specifically the antics of "Red Robbo" at British Leyland. Carmaking is a viable industry in the UK and is doing well now that it is all foreign-owned with minimal union interference. There would probably still be coal mining in the UK if it were not for the NUM, we import coal now.
Then again this is specific to Britain, German unions are completely different, and I would be pro-union if ours were like the Germans.
While they certainly didn't play an innocent role in the demise (planned, expected or otherwise) of the coal mining industry, to lay blame squarely at the union's feet ignores the _other_ 800lb gorilla in the room. The mines would have and were becoming less economically viable.
But the Thatcher government made a point of starting the closures at the worst possible time, "effective immediately", and then made a point of pointedly ignoring the economic collapse of entire towns and districts whose lifeblood had been the coal mines. There were multiple towns of 20,000 working age people, 15,000+ of whom worked in the coal industry. And there was precisely nothing done to handle that collapse, and just as importantly to the union's handling - there was not even the hint of sympathy or compassion from the Thatcher government - everything was all about the "wicked" union "stealing" from the British people, and an infamous quote that "if miners don't like being out of work, they need to get on their bike and find more [work]". The problem with this is, even if the union had been stubborn, before, this attitude steeled their resolve to be just as hard-headed as Thatcher.
That is true, but the context at the time was the Winter Of Discontent. The unions had squandered all the goodwill the voters might otherwise have had.
Thatcher was voted in for one reason: that taxpaying voters had just experienced the Winter Of Discontent and wanted something doing about it once and for all. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of perspective but that's the context in which it happened.
At the time, the average ton of coal was costing double to extract than it was worth. Closing the loss making mines was inevitable but the viable mines could have remained open, and would have as there was still the demand for coal.
The Germans do this right, their unions want their workers to have fair share of the rewards and understand that the company must be profitable in the first place for that to happen. British union leaders simply play workers against management for their own gain, then leave both workers and management worse off, but workers get the worst of it.
Again, you're buying into nonsense anti-union propaganda.
I'm not buying into anything. I see Germany with strong unions and a strong industrial sector and I want that here. Just there is something in the British union movement that makes it destructive instead.
Of course, maybe you're not buying into the propaganda but actually purposefully spreading it. Or maybe my opinions are wrong, but I obviously don't believe that to be the case.
I'm afraid I can't be much more useful in my argument, I've met and discussed with many British trade union leaders and representatives, as well as many managers who didn't enjoy having to deal with unions and I have a very strong opinion that you're wrong without really having a thought about how to change your mind other than suggesting learning more about the subject. If you'd be interested I'd be happy to text a friend and ask if they have a recommendation for a single book to read about it, or maybe your mind is already made up.
It wasn't unions that killed them
For another example, Bombardier in Canada was a successful airplane manufacturer, and the demands of its unions gradually sapped its international competitiveness.
For yet another example, all the passenger rail services in the US went bankrupt after they were forced into collective bargaining with unions.
It's common sense that unions, backed by laws that give them an extra-contractual monopoly over who a company can negotiate with, are not good for industry.
If they were, shareholders would push for their companies to have their workforces unionized. The only reason the notion that unions are good for the economy has any traction is that there are millions of parties with a conflict of interest in this debate, who use their time to push these pro-union-monopoly talking points.
> For yet another example, all the passenger rail services in the US went bankrupt after they were forced into collective bargaining with unions.
Yeah, no. The railroad industry is famously boom-and-bust cycle, with virtually every major railroad overexpanding during boom years and going bankrupt in any economic downturn, this happening both before and after unionization. Passenger rail itself was killed not by union featherbedding but by competition with the automobile and airplane--and government regulation that prohibited railroads from being able to cull unprofitable routes (as you needed government permission to cut a route, which it was disinclined to give even after the railroads were in poor health.)
> For another example, Bombardier in Canada was a successful airplane manufacturer, and the demands of its unions gradually sapped its international competitiveness.
Bombardier's troubles (to my understanding) largely originated from its attempts to push up into larger aircraft, bringing it competition against the Boeing/Airbus duopoly, who did not look kindly to a new entrant and brought expensive cases against Bombardier, which forced Bombardier into a partnership to survive.
My sibling comment already tackles the US auto industry one, so I won't cover that.
This is just propaganda from the rent-seeking unions, to prevent people from taking their extra-contractual anti-free-market rights away.
>Passenger rail itself was killed not by union featherbedding but by competition with the automobile and airplane--and government regulation that prohibited railroads from being able to cull unprofitable route
The unions bled them dry by piling on ever increasing obligations on them. Maybe some services would have vanished due to the factors you mentioned, but not all of them.
There is a real risk of correlation being confounded with causation here, but analysis in the area is tricky at best.
GM ignoring Deming’s TQM while Japan wholeheartedly embraced this philosophy should be mentioned.
The rapid increase in oil prices and the big 3 ignoring the data and sticking with the “Americans want big gas guzzling cars” philosophy would also be mentioned.
This last one combined with the oil crisis is how Honda killed Harley Davidson, as well as how Toyota and VW killed the big 3. When the oil crisis hit the 15-mile per gallon american behemoths just became irrelevant.
Containerized shipping and a lack of import taxes also had far more to do with the USA losing its doninance.
We wanted cheaper, smaller, more reliable cars. The big 3 wanted to pretend like it was still 1955.