Monday, December 26, 2011

Germans Know Something Walker Does Not

That something is that the unions are not the enemy:
There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”
But then again, Walker isn't interested in what's best for the state, just what's the most profitable for his campaign donors.

6 comments:

  1. Great post, thanks.

    What I found most interesting was that FORBES went with it.

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  2. Brilliant.

    Perfect model. A real winner.

    Prosperity for everyone.

    Capper, you never cease to amaze.

    Germany's past can be our future.

    So awesome.

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  3. I guess Germany is ahead of us in this way.

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  4. You betray your Republican nature by your Freudian slip. Only the right wants to go back to Germany's past. The rest of us want to move to the future. And that future doesn't include haters like yourself. Sorry.

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  5. Since 11:23 is such a student of history, he might find this tidbit interesting:

    "After the end of the World War II, the Occupation Forces (GHQ) and the government considered that the liberalization of trade union movement was one of the essential factors for the emancipation and democratization of post-war Japan.
    In 1946, the Trade Union Law and the Labor Relations Adjustment Law were enacted. Thus, numbers of unions were formed under the GHQ's instructions.
    The post war democratization period in Japan gave company-unit labor union a major role to play in Japanese labor union organization."

    That basically says that the US Army thought unions were so important to the preservation of democracy that they made damn sure they would flourish in postwar Japan.

    The development of unions in German happened more organically after WWII, but it's important to remember that German labor stability is largely a result of unions being able to draft constitutional rights into the writing of Germany's principle legal document.

    So far as I know, and to be perfectly honest this isn't a subject and know too much about, there has not been much of an effort to have labor unions and/or collective bargaining rights enshrined in a Constitutional amendment. I've always thought this was mistake.

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  6. Companies just create better products if the people who are creating them have a voice and that is what unions provide, so in that sense Germany is way ahead of the US, overall is what I meant. (11:39)

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