[jdgoesmarching]

I can’t speak to how unions operate in Germany because your labor laws and norms aren’t the same as ours. Just the concept of codetermination whether or not it works as advertised would baffle the average US worker.

Many of your labor protections don’t exist here unless unions agitate for them, and I won’t even broach healthcare. In the US, unionized workers make more on average than non-union workers (link below).

Without a union, you have zero bartering power other than the threat of leaving which is what I argue above to be a very temporary power. Even then, job hopping is nowhere close to an ideal solution for a variety of reasons that I think HN readers are smart enough to fill in.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf

[jonp888]

True, I guess a lot of things I take for granted are only possible through union bargaining in the US.