These are all things, but they're things in other countries, too. France has strong unions and subcontractors and bureaucrats and all of that. And yet it costs less there.
On a recent episode of the Ezra Klein show, Jerusalem Demsas argued that part of the problem is that the bureaucrats in the US are too constrained in their powers, so e.g. when weighing an infrastructure project against wildlife protection laws, it's not a bureaucratic organisation making a final decision on how to proceed with minimal impact, but it's private organised interest groups litigating without any limits on re-litigation, and a ruling that does not necessarily weigh the public interest of having projects proceeding towards completion.
I think it's a mistake to think of european unions and american unions as "the same thing". Relationships with unions in the US seem much more adversarial than there, on average.
As you say, there are politics, labor relations, etc. in europe too - I wonder if they are just better at cooperating on this sort of project for some reason?
US unions are that way as a consequence of racism. No, really. There was a US union that wasn’t doing its duty to represent African-American members. So it goes all the way to the USSC and the gist is that unions have to represent every member or be decertified.
In contrast, in a country like Germany, the union and management can agree that Hans is a fuckup and it’s in everyone’s best interest that he finds a new job.
> Relationships with unions in the US seem much more adversarial than there, on average.
Depends. You have "red" unions, which tend to be more aggressive, have revolutionary ideologies, and see bosses as enemies to perpetually keep at bay.
Then "yellow" unions tend to be more centrist, conciliatory and, arguably, somewhat toothless.
Which kind of union is more present varies from sector to sector.
But in any case, if you've ever seen a CGT propaganda poster, you'll never be under any impression that these guys are feeling "cooperative" with management / the government.
What? This could only be so naively said by someone who has never lived in a heavily prop labor socialist country like France. Les grèves are terribly adversarial and a near constant aspect of labor negotiations.
The only way they could be considered better, in the way you imply, is that the unions are considered something to negotiate with instead of something to destroy.
Defeat, not destroy. Unions aren't destroyed in the US today and they're not sought out to be destroyed, no large government agencies or corporation is hunting them. In the Jimmy Hoffa days certainly there were some powerful people inside and outside of government that wanted the Teamsters destroyed.
The corporations aim to defeat them in the sense of keeping them voted down / out of the operations. John Deere for example recently came back with a rather lame offer for wage increases, the union went on strike, Deere capitulated and gave them a more fair wage hike, the union accepted; Deere didn't attempt to destroy the union.
Kellogs and their union haven't been able to agree to terms. Kellogs didn't attempt to destroy the union, they didn't send assassins or thugs to kill or rough up the union leadership. They replaced the union members with temporary labor and resumed limited operations. And that's entirely fair, the union can strike and refuse to work, the company can replace them.
Amazon didn't destroy the union in Alabama, that battle will continue; Amazon - at least temporarily - defeated them.
Germany is more cooperative yes. But their "workers council" concept is very strict. We've had several times we couldn't implement a global change in the multinational I work for because some workers council in a 10-man office in some German village didn't agree.
In Holland we used to have good union representation that really worked together with government and employers. The "polder model" it was called. However since we've had many neoliberal governments this concept has been hollowed out and the unions are now run as companies by the same kind of people so they no longer really represent the workers. They're just corporate puppets now. It's gone completely the other way from France or Germany. When it did work it was pretty good though. There was a decent balance between workers rights and efficiency and there was no need for many strikes.
French bureaucracy has the expertise in house to do high level planning rather than having a subcontractor do it. They're also a lot more insulated than US bureaucracies from the vagaries of political turnover. And they're more often dealing with laws written ahead of time rather than things that can't be decided without a court decision.
My broad impression is that in the EU and the US, a given project is a "meal" that all the interests involved will take a cut out of.
But in the EU or elsewhere, the "cut" the interests will take is just financial, the project will be designed for cost-efficiency by competent architects and engineers and it's just that the different interests will be paid off with money to make things happen.
In the US, the spread-out state and administrative structure results in a situation where each interest gets it's cut through its ability to make some small change or demand some particular process. A lot of this involves a lot of adversarial relations, some of them intended to stop corruption but which actually result inefficiency and corruption (complex bidding processes legal repercussions for failure to adhere to bid etc. etc.).
California spending $3 billion planning ("planning") a high speed rail system is good example. A lot of that involved buying land whose value had inflated.
> [...] and bureaucrats and all of that.
On a recent episode of the Ezra Klein show, Jerusalem Demsas argued that part of the problem is that the bureaucrats in the US are too constrained in their powers, so e.g. when weighing an infrastructure project against wildlife protection laws, it's not a bureaucratic organisation making a final decision on how to proceed with minimal impact, but it's private organised interest groups litigating without any limits on re-litigation, and a ruling that does not necessarily weigh the public interest of having projects proceeding towards completion.