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Are unemployment benefits better in germany? If they are you’d expect it to be higher than the US, as in the US workers might run out of the social support network sooner and be forced to take any job just to eat and shelter.

They are.

What I was taught in macroeconomics in this topic (excuse me if I get something wrong, it’s been a few years)

In general it’s very expected unemployment to „generally“ be higher in Germany.

Because it’s harder to fire people here, people also get hired somewhat slower. However in the flip side it’s also expected that during harsh economic times people will be fired less because of how „hard“ it is to hire people.

So it’s a trade-off.

Also there programs like „Kurzarbeit“ rough translation would be „Shortened Work“.

Where you get 60%-85% of your salary (after tax) without work or with way less ours, if the employer has no work/less work (like covid period). It’s payed mostly by the state. Up to 12 month. Regulations are strict.

Prevents layoffs and helps starting the upturn of production like automobile industry, where it takes months or half a year to start ramping up production.

Kurzarbeit is funded by unemployment insurance, which you pay when you have a job. It is correct though that during covid, the funds ran a bit empty and the government had to fill it up again with unrelated tax money (afaik)

My mistake. You are correct.

I guess unemployment benefits are better in pretty much every other western country compared to the US, so: Yes.

If you become unemployed, depending on your age, and how long you have worked etc, you get between 12 and 24 months about 60% of your previous salary before dropping into social security.

There are various programs to get people back into jobs depending on what caused their unemployment - help on re-settling in case the loss of job being caused by your profession no longer being asked for in the region you live in, training to move to a different profession, help if your job loss is related to health issues (for example burn-out).

The system is optimized into trying to find out the cause of job losses, and work to counter that.

The 5% unemployed are mostly cases which are impossible to solve due to someone being too old to be re-trained and/or not willing or being able to move to where the jobs are.

Right now the job market in Germany is mostly defined by a shortage of labor in various areas, which is why there is a strong desire to make sure that immigrants are allowed to enter the work-force quicker. For example trains no longer run in any way reliably in Germany due to a massive shortage on workers in that industry.

I'm not sure if this is factored into your unemployment numbers, but in the USA its very common for all adults to need to work in order to make ends meet.

Whereas in a stronger economy with employment laws protecting employees it'd be much more possible for a family to live comfortably off a single income, making for a lot more "unemployed" adults.

Unemployment specifically refers to people who are looking for work - people who aren't seeking work don't count as unemployed in statistics.

>> live comfortably off a single income, making for a lot more "unemployed" adults.

Unemployment stats explicitly only count those looking for work, so this actually misrepresents the other way; it doesn't include those people who have given up but given a choice would be working.

I don't think it's that clear cut. Another interpretation is that someone could afford to be "looking for work" for longer while supported by their partner's income. People would be able to afford to shop around for a better job, which would leave more people in the "looking for work" pool for when a good opportunity comes around. They would be less desperate to accept the first offer they get.

We shouldn't rush to judgement of what this policy represents or misrepresents based on just-so stories informed by a different society.

I think the point the GP was trying to make was that when you see official unemployment numbers from the US government, those numbers are derived from the number of people actively seeking unemployment benefits (which includes job training, job placement, and payments). Those numbers don't include anyone who doesn't officially apply for benefits, which would naturally exclude all sorts of people who are not employed.

I know that is how it is defined in the US. Does the same apply for Germany?

Odd then that the USA has a much lower labor force participation rate than Germany.

Because Germany has "make-work" policies; if you want a job, you can get one repaving roads, cleaning up trash, or otherwise maintaining public infrastructure. My American uncle sneered at this "work for the boys" attitude, but as a lifelong US resident, I can't help but envy that solution.

The comment I'm replying to claimed fewer people _want_ jobs in a system such as Germany's.

You should read about Germany’s ridiculously high unemployment numbers of the early 2000s and how Schroeder got rid of it by basically getting rid of bunch of labor protections. All to say there are two sides to this coin

However, the party he was affiliated with, the social-democratic party, these days believes that this was the biggest mistake they have ever made.

This is because it turned out that punishing people for not having a job might motivate some to take on jobs that are below their qualification, but that it does not solve the actual underlying issue - having people qualified for the jobs there are, in the regions those jobs are in.

Due to this, even under the rule of the conservative christian-democratic party, things then moved into the opposite direction again, with the organization that is supposed to bring people into jobs getting reformed massively. We now have lots of excellent programs that are focused on re-training people and help fix the causes of them having lost their jobs.

Now back to Agenda 2030

What is this "free market" you describe? Am I free to occupy any building I like, or does your "free" market include a concept of a "property" and entire government bureaucracies and men with guns to enforce such concepts? Does your "free market" make a distinction between "I expect this property to still be mine tomorrow" and "I expect this job to still be mine tomorrow"?

Does you "free market" allow for individuals to "organize" as a "corporation" and does the "corporation" provide legal immunities for civil liabilities and personal debts (that "personal property" concept).

If so does your "free market" allow for other individuals to "organize" as a "union" - and does that "union" provide various legal guarantees and immunities etc.

"Free market" people love the corporation but hate the union. One is a legal fiction for rich people and one is a legal fiction for poor people.

Go watch a few Milton Friedman videos and you’ll have answers to those questions, though you may not like the answers.

A lobotomy works just as well.

>Free market" people love the corporation but hate the union. One is a legal fiction for rich people and one is a legal fiction for poor people.

Neither should have special legal privileges beyond those guaranteed to individuals.

This would go a long way to resolving the issues with both.

By definition unions have local monopolies and can't be attacked. In a well-run truly free economy, corporations don't have that.

my view of the power distributions and their results

  * company town, one company enslaving all workers <=== bad

  * town with many companies, competing for workers. incentivizes all to good behavior <=== good

  * town with many companies, each with a union that locks down behavior and can't be attacked <=== somewhat bad, blocks change, can be taken over by corrupt unions, but can also give benefits. as in your comment, though, people become extremely dogmatic about this and it becomes rational to be "union forever right or wrong" rather than actually thinking about the best way to organize things. i.e. police unions being insanely defensive and stubborn, and not enforcing any quality controls on cops. 

  * one/zero companies, one national union - i.e. CCP. When put into place, doesn't work, and when not well-controlled devolves to basically worker enslavement. Most of the history of modern China, and lots of historical USSR were like this.  At other times they simulated stage 2 where there was competition on both worker and employer sides, and they had good results (80s-90s)

To your point about house ownership being protected by law, but job ownership not being, I think it's a matter of contracts. Selling someone and helping them own it forever is fairly trivial since it's independent (the house can decay and nobody has to pay for it, water may run out etc). But providing a job forever is another story since it clearly requires continued input of a certain quality from the worker, as well as an assumption about stability of the company, part of the economy. So it's quite easy to enforce property ownership since there are basically no guarantees (air quality, noise, availability of food, etc etc may all die out but the person still owns the land). But for a job there's no way that anyone can ensure that it will always be profitable or useful to pay a person (who ages) to do a thing.

> By definition unions have local monopolies and can't be attacked.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “local monopolies”, so this comment may be a bit off base: My Norwegian employer (<1000 employees) deals with four different unions and a bunch of un-unionized people. (All with no problem)

Ah thanks. My basic knowledge of the US was that most workplaces have a single union, and that in many cases membership is very high. IE police, teachers, doctors, lawyers, auto workers. But looking it up now it's not as clear. Yes the case you mention of multiple unions and also individuals seems possibly more balanced! Thanks.

I'd like to see a comparative analysis of how the legal and social infrastructure for unions differs in outcomes between all the different ways it has been done across countries, industries, and time.

For example, the current UAW strike seems very damaging. They're attacking the very nature of the auto companies and saying they don't even have the right to make money or try to profit, and demanding huge wage increases and further union expansion to include the battery plant.

Meanwhile the companies are losing 30k+ per EV sold and are only about 10% of Tesla's size, and Tesla has something like an 18% profit margin even after price reductions.

The unions might win locally but put the companies out of business in five or ten years by slowing them down. So, this structure of a single union led by a guy who's already independently wealthy and old and for whom the long term survival of the union doesn't matter monetarily, and the fact that the companies simply have to deal with him, and for electoral reasons both Biden and Trump showed up on the picket lines... I would quit if I were an exec there. Feels like they'll be driven out of business and bailed out either publicly or secretly within ten years. Market tracking this: https://manifold.markets/Ernie/will-ford-gm-or-stellantis-be...

> In a well-run truly free economy

Either the economy is truly free, or it is "well-run" aka state managed.

Pick one. It can only be truly free without any state intervention.

A believe people in the US are so Anti-Union because the way Unions are designed by law is completely broken.

I remember well that we once had a booth at a trade show in Las Vegas. It was strictly forbidden for us to take our exhibits to our booths ourselves, because the process of "take something onto the exhibition floors" was union-protected. So we had to wait half an hour to get a task done that would have taken myself 30 seconds.

I believe that unions are needed, and am strictly pro-Union.

I believe that Unions serve the goal of being a counter-weight when a huge employer has lots of negotiation power.

But what I have seen in the US - and to a certain extend in Germany, too - is that certain UNIONS have grown to big, powerful and bureaucratic, and have become a huge force of power themselves, no longer serving the workers, but being self-serving mostly, and bringing employers to the brink of collapse.

In Germany we have two competing unions for rail workers. One is huge, corrupt and self-serving, and no where connected to the actual pain points rail workers have. But luckily there is second, much smaller rail Union, where the Union boss used to be a train driver and still is very much in touch of the base, and therefore does not pick fights with employers "because they can", but to actually work on pain points the workers have. Which is really important because Germany has a huge shortage on rail workers, and urgently needs to attract new labor in that sector. It's a bit weird that the rail companies are not working on fixing the shortages in labor, and the government isn't either, but that it's a union that is fighting for making life of the customers bearable again.

Back to the US: I believe the whole discussion of being pro-Union or pro-free-market is a red herring. The unions themselves need to be reformed and strengthened, but in a way that they serve society. In general I believe unions should be smaller and leaner organizations.

I'd rather have less jobs, with better benefits / pay.

By this do you mean that you would rather be unemployed than employed with less benefits, or that you would rather other people be unemployed while you get good benefits?

I think a more generous way to put it would be, they'd rather unemployed people get good benefits than have to work a back-breaking job with a wage that isn't better than said benefits.

Unemployment rate in Germany is about 5%, so comparable.

As with many labor protection laws, it is a mixed bag. Basically the regulation I have mentioned tries to separate the cases of "true asset deal" vs. "fake asset deal". That works most of the times, but sometimes an asset deal that was supposed to serve a genuinely good cause (one business trying to sell off a technology to another) to later got flagged as a transfer of business by courts, causing companies to go bankrupt, with ALL jobs being lost.

Being an employer myself, I once got bitten with wrongly getting flagged when trying to rescue the technology my shareholders had financially run into the ground, but a higher court later corrected that and decided that the motivation of the asset deal had been proper.