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Comment by hjanssen | Hacker News Reader

There are several countries with strong unions and a tradition of unions taking part in company matters, a good example would be my place, Germany. I have never seen a union "screwing over" a company, but many times have I seen complains that the unions screwed the company over from people that directly or indirectly profit from weak or no unions.

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Its amazing how people endlessly talk about Germany but ignore all the other cases where Union are far less positive. How about we talk about how Venezuela Union bosses. How about the US car workers union being an endless pit of corruption.

Switzerland is next to Germany, and has almost no union and there is not so much difference in overall standard of living and how workers are treated.

The idea that Unions are this universal good and talking negative about them is simply being anti-worker pro-capitalist exploitation is a tiered talking point.

In Switzerland many professions have a GAV (initiated by unions) with strong worker protection.

AFAIK, Denmark doesn't even have a minimum wage, it's just that pretty much every sector and niche of the economy has unions so it is de facto enforced via union <-> sector negotiations. Unions are great, and people who are against them fall in one of three categories:

- business owner

- absolute free market fetishists

- one bad experience cherry pickers

My current workplace is one such case of union killing a theoretically profitable company so I really am speaking from experience - the only reason the workplace still exists today is because after it went bankrupt it was bought out by an outsider who discarded the union part. Ironically it turned out to be for the best for both the company as a whole and the actual workers.

Just because you don't hear of it - or don't want to hear of it - doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Just because you saw it is no reason to state that unions will become bad actors.

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