I can repeat as long as one needs. I work in Germany. Every big company is unionized. And guess what!? Bosses told, that 20% of the company will be laid off and it was ok for all union members. Packages were offered in few rounds. Home office forbidden. I didn’t got package, I left for a company with liberal home office ruling. Unions are beautiful cosmetics. When layoff happens it happens just like that.
Even for non-unionised people, labour protection laws in Germany are completely incomparable to the US:
1. Mandatory notice periods (3 months is customary, mimumum 1 month)
2. "Social selection", i.e. you're not allowed to lay off a pregnant person etc. unless you have demonstrated that there were no other people you could have let go instead
3. There needs to be cause. Downsizing can still mean you get laid off, but you can't just fire a team or an individual because you don't like them etc.
Of course, if you left a company because you didn't agree to their rules instead of being laid off, none of these protections apply to you - why would they?
Yeah, employees are kinda unfirable which has good sides and bad sides. People don't have to worry about their existencr, but that also means you don't need to do more than the bare minimum. Which many do, and in some way it's a comfortable lifestyle. OTOH you won't find any German companies paying close to what Netflix pays.
The law is incredibly clear on these things, lawyers can't help you. The only thing they can do is confuse people who don't actually know the law and their legal rights - that does sometimes happen, but I'd say a small company is just as likely to do so.
> Results show that the impact of unionization is not significant except for (1) establishments that operate in the non-manufacturing sector; and (2) establishments operating in industries that have major collective bargaining agreements which contain moderate employment security provisions. Under those conditions, unionization decreases layoff rates; otherwise, unionization has no effect on layoff rates.
Point number 2 in particular strikes me as circular - unions did not impact layoff rates except in industries where the unions protected against layoffs.
This understanding of unions is as common as it is wrong. A union allows workers to negotiate contracts, meaning workers can have a say in how performance is assessed and how things like bonuses are handed out.
I am in a non-union workspace. There's no transparency on how bonuses or stock refreshers are handed out. A union contract could codify it.
The owner class wants workers to think unions will hurt our earnings because when workers are structurally unable to shape company policy the bosses can do whatever they want...and what they want is to maximize profits. (Like Elon Musk said: You don't need a union, I'll put in an soft serve machine for you.)
It's the main building block of any broader solution. You need to have large, pro-worker organizations in play in order to fight for large scale change, whether that's in a figurative sense in the courts and legislature, or in a literal sense, in the streets of Krakow or Barcelona.