Japan also has a very strong culture where workers are expected to work their asses off for their employer. Japanese auto makers also have bonus systems for employees that work harder, and even with all that Japanese workers make significantly less than UAW workers - especially when you add in vacation time, retirement packages and other benefits.
You’ll notice that the German cars are generally more expensive than their domestic counterparts. Also, German manufacturers make a lot of their cheaper cars in the U.S., and all located their plants in right-to-work states. If you read the article linked to the article above, you’ll see that they do that because they found the UAW’s rules to be non-productive. It’s not just about salary - it’s about work rules, benefits, and especially seniority rules that prevent the worst workers from being fired and which prevent the plant from operating at peak efficiency.
The big difference in the way German and Japanese unions work in those countries is that they are much more flexible than the UAW. They have performance bonuses, employee evaluations that lead to reward or punishment, etc.
In my opinion, this is one of the biggest drawbacks to what unions have been doing in North America. The big unions take an adversarial stance with management, and they agitate their workers with tales of management malfeasance in order to maintain their power. The result is they always have to show a ‘win’ whenever they go into negotiations. Once they got their salaries as high as was feasible, they shifted their tactics to negotiating for work rules that benefited the members at the expense of the company, and for retirement benefits that are more likely to be agreed to by short-sighted managers who won’t have to deal with the pain of the benefit for years or decades. This is especially true with the public unions, because they understand how politicians think.
And that’s a good thing. Do we really see the gold standard of American working life to be sitting at a bench making clothes by hand for minimum wage? On the other hand, garment manufacture is something the 3rd world can do, and allowing them to do so gives them a chance to start building an infrastructure and a middle class. It’s all good.
Most jobs like this weren’t killed due to outsourcing anyway. Automation and assembly line work eliminated them. The number of people employed on farms is a tiny fraction of what it used to be. As someone who did manual labor on a farm for years, I’m waving a tiny flag in support of the machines.
Except modern labor parties tend to just be mouthpieces for the unions, because that’s how they get their funding. Labor governments in Britain in the 60’s and 70’s encourages so much union power that it nearly wrecked their economy.
Big deal. When you have a major power imbalance, you find a way to turn it to your advantage. So if you can’t negotiate for wages directly, you negotiate for better retirement benefits work rules that allow you to claim more overtime, more vacation time, personal time, job security, whatever. In the end, it all comes down to increasing the cost of the worker to the public.
Here in Alberta, Nurses haven’t been able to get much in the way of raises for the past 5 years (although neither has anyone else in the recession). So instead, they negotiated for more sick days, more personal days, and rules that paid them more for shift work and overtime. Then many nurses translated that into pay by taking sick time or personal time during their normal shifts, then signing up for replacement shifts at time and a half or double time. They work the same hours as before, but for much more pay. You can always find a way if you have the power.
This shift to negotiating for complex, favorable work rules is perhaps the most destructive thing the unions are doing today. It’s killing flexibility, increasing management overhead, and making the system less efficient. Firing a nurse in Alberta is almost impossible, even in egregious cases. There are nurses who fight constantly with each other, who constantly call in sick, who show up to work late and leave early all the time, and who are very lax with patient care.
If a manager gives them a hard time about it, they file a grievance with the union, which triggers a complex series of hearings and meetings which generally result in the union agreeing to some sort of performance improvement plan, which of course the managers have to come up with and implement. As soon as it’s in place, the nurses’ record is swept clean. So they start the shenanigans all over again. And often, if the manager sticks to his or her guns and demands the nurse be removed from the unit, what will happen is that the nurse will be allowed to transfer to another unit, and no record of the previous infractions are allowed to be transmitted to the new unit so they won’t be ‘biased’. The nurse gets a completely fresh start.
Managers understand this, so they often don’t even bother. They just work around the dead wood. And they view internal transfers of nurses with suspicion, so they don’t often request them. Better the devil you know.
Also, the lax rules around sick time and personal time, coupled with the complex shift rules, means every day managers have to scramble to fill nursing positions because of all the sick calls. And they’re constantly blowing out their budgets with overtime pay. It’s hard to plan and budget when you have no idea what your nurses are going to cost you.