IIRC they had PTO days which were apportioned pretty generously, but they didn't have sick days broken out separately. This doesn't mean they had less time off in general than the prevailing compensation packages. It was a great talking point for the media. However, TBH having a 'here's a bunch of time off, do what you need to with it' is kinda better than 'here's some time off for you to vacation, but then this other amount is only usable if you're sick, and if you're not sick it's money left on the table.'
Nothing crazy about that. It's mostly European countries that have mandatory paid sick leave by law for everyone, as they fought for that right in the post-war times when the economy was booming and the world outside the west less safe from outsourcing, and importing cheap labor less easy, so the perfect storm giving labor most power over employers, something that's not gonna repeat again in the globalized world of today.
It was the temporal global exception, not the rule, as the worldwide norm was working people to death for most of history. Companies would gladly give their workers zero benefits if they could get away with it.
Compensation packages are just that - a package. Complaining about one individual component in isolation is disingenuous.
Unions sent a couple of the big car makers into bankruptcy. They've sent all kinds of companies into bankruptcy - the idea that anything they are suggesting is good by nature is about the same as suggesting communism is good by nature. Sounds pleasant, doesn't work.
> Unions sent a couple of the big car makers into bankruptcy.
It goes both ways, unfortunately. Industry in general couldn't exist without laborers, and it has a long history of brutal abuse and horrific, dangerous working conditions that killed and maimed many.
I think it's a cultural problem. We aren't far removed from a time when the general business model was to coercively work people to death to extract every penny of value from them, and that mindset hasn't completely been lost. Workers are callously discarded, not at the doorstep of bankruptcy, but at the first hint that profits might not grow as fast as they could.
Yup, it goes both ways. It's not a given that what a company is proposing is good or bad, and it's not a given that what a union is proposing is good or bad. And they negotiate and it is what it is.
Businesses that can't stay afloat without underpaying workers have a failing business model. Blaming unions for their eventual demise is foolish.
Communism and Capitalism are actually quite similar in a sense. Neither of them works well in their purest form, both lead to formation of an oligarchy (party elite,billionaires). Most livable countries in the world mix them in form of free market social democracy.
>Businesses that can't stay afloat without underpaying workers have a failing business model.
Yet companies have flourished under that model for decades/centuries. Employers and governments have plenty of levers to make sure workers have no choice but to work while being underpaid.