Limited work weeks (40 hrs). Monday thru Friday as business days. Paid vacations. Family and medical leave. Breaks. Paid holidays. Sick leave.
It’s a shame there’s been a massive push from corporations pushing anti-union propaganda. We have been complacent.
We need unions to make our voice heard. Both in the mega corps and local/state/federal governments.
At least unions can still exist inside the standard model of employment which everything else is built around. In a "benevolent" tech company that actually treats its people well, I have trouble seeing unions as the ideal vehicle for balancing fairness with innovation. Of course there is inherent exploitation in any employment relationship within the standard model. I would love to see an example of it working in tech though, because I can imagine a union that is equally as interested in the success of the business and prioritizes sustainable growth on top of enforcing equitable treatment as a backstop.
There has to be some combination of legal structures that can somehow represent all interests fairly without adding friction. That is unions, or unions plus other things.
For example, employee ownership trusts could in theory be very aggressive and help smooth out the continuum between periodic bargaining and striking as the main/only leverage. Similar to a share purchase plan or RSU with a pool that has a majority of voting power, or at least equal to founders and investors with all the usual tie-breakers and dilution protections.
If I remember correctly some countries (Germany?) also have legislation requiring a certain amount of employee representation on corporate boards, but I don't know if that actually makes a big difference.
Edit-there have been long periods where seemingly nothing can possibly change. Then enough backlash is raised against another side (even the status quo) and things change.
Unions in my country (Netherlands) do not protect the individual. You do not get hired via a union (free job from a "friend") nor does the union protect you from getting fired. The union is only there to protect collective interests. For example, a massive degradation in contract terms for all workers.
In the Netherlands, strikes are extremely rare because of a unique system called the "Polder Model", it's a triangle of government, employers and unions coming to yearly wide sweeping agreements on things like taxes, pensions, employment and termination terms, the like.
It has provided an extreme degree of stability for decades in a row. Simply put, it's a system that suppresses extremes. Nobody really wins or loses.
I have to admit though that this once well working system is largely hollowed out by now. Under the pressures of globalization, power has shifted slowly but surely towards the government-employers pair.
It seems worldwide the working class (and to a large degree the middle class) has been abandoned by both politics and employers.
The point was that while Europe, as a rule, does lean towards more labour regulation than the US, the specifics vary so much that this is about the only useful generalization you make about it. The rest heavily depends on the country, and even geographical proximity doesn’t really play into it. (But you would know all about that, I expect.)
Case in point, Germany did not have a minimum wage...AT ALL...until 2015. In the Netherlands, there's an entire class of workers on "zero hours" contracts, which give said workers none of the traditional protections.
Protections that even in the best of cases, an indefinite work contract situation, are strongly hollowed out by now.
https://www.history.com/news/5-famous-company-towns
“In the case of less well-intentioned towns, matters get only worse. In some locations, companies would compensate workers with a scrip—a monetary substitute that was valid only at stores owned by that same company” Source: https://explorethearchive.com/company-towns?amp=1
We have them; it's why education and policing is so fucked.