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Comment by hnburnsy | Hacker News Reader

A union in Germany is fighting Tesla over this same thing...

>. In 2026, Giga Berlin is the pilot site for the "Optimus" Gen-3 integration—humanoid robots performing repetitive tasks in the battery pack assembly area. IG Metall views this not as progress, but as a threat to job security.

https://www.teslaacessories.com/blogs/news/the-giga-berlin-s...

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I always found German unions pretty good.

I mean the union is correct in this case. Robots will replace jobs. A union’s job is to make sure there are jobs for people in the company they are already in.

Usually unions would speak the truth (“robots = jobs go away”) but pair this with some suggestions: eg trying to upskill the affected worker so that they can be moved to a different department).

While I was working in Germany I always felt better at a company with a strong union.

The main problem with unions in Germany is that they block companies from adapting to changes in the environment quickly. Companies become heavy behemoths and end up suffering from it, which ends up damaging their own employees as well.

I‘ve read this frequently, but I have yet to be convinced. The union presence seems to be more of a correlation than a causation to me.

Larger companies move slower, larger companies also tend to have a stronger union presence than SMBs

I can try convince you. In unionized companies one can’t fire employees from the 53rd birthday. That makes them similar to care home at the end. Young folks come and go and are minority at the end. Dynamics decrease not from the size, but from getting old. Since the salaries are more or less the same the oldtimers have maxed out bonuses. What do young guys get? Basically nothing since the bonus pool must be distributed equally in the company.

I like the concept of the union, but I think that IG Metall is not the good implementation of that. At least not for white collar workers.

Fundamentally the union should be getting the workers a fair deal for their labour (conditions and wages); once the union starts interfering with the technical aspects or blocking labour saving investment it quickly sours the whole arrangement.

It's not even about blocking investment, they just want to make sure the employees still have jobs. You can invest if you find something else to do with the employee.

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