The engineers in Sweden are unionized. Under union rules the last person hired has to be the first person facing a layoff. This provides protection for older employees against age discrimination, forces the company to carefully select young employees with skills to meet immediate needs. Layoffs can be really punishing for a company especially if needed skills exist only in the newest employees. There are many instances where older employees are trained. Those older employees who love learning are the the company's most valuable resource. Those employees who aren't willing to grow their skills often choose retirement.
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Be careful what you wish for.... I was in a union IT shop many years ago and it was a mess.
50% of every day was consumed with taking breaks, traveling to/from break areas and the various union "meetings" (which were really debates on how far the Packers/Brewers/Bucks were going to go in the playoffs). You think that IT works takes too long now? Well, you can double or triple it in a union shop. I am not against better treatment of employees, but the union is not the way to go.
I was at Volvo for 14 months. Relations between unions and leadership seemed a lot better than in Dearborn.
I was told that this was not always the case and that it was worse in the 1970's and 1980's. Somehow they worked it out.
Unions turn into their own corporations. When you have a problem with your company the worst thing you can do is go out and ask for another problem. It is like if you have a problem with your wife, so you go out and get a girlfriend. You never solved the first problem and now you just have two problems. Same idea.
Unions are corrupt. Teamsters pension fund recently bailed out by the Biden administration. Why did it fail when markets are doing well? Why isn’t it left to the PBGC to handle? Sure, if PBGC is underfunded, and it is a collective insurance plan, then have the contributing companies up their contributions|premiums. The taxpayer should not be held responsible for a private pension funds failure. Why congress is not suing bIden admin on this is beyond me. BTW Mitch McConnell did the same for his constituents in coal mining unions for health care (maybe pension too if I recall correctly). Totally unwarranted and illegal. Those longtime union members would have been in Medicare by now.
Purchasing votes, plain and simple.
Bailing out private companies union pension and health’s care with federal taxpayer dollars is illegal.but both sides love it.
If the white collar force at FMC were a union, I would not have joined the company. I have avoided union jobs because I know how cr---y they are. I was offered a job once, but the pay had to be lower than other employees because I was the "new" guy. I mentioned that I had skills and experience nobody else has in that company, and they told me those were the union's rules. I laughed and went with another job that paid me what I wanted (and no union).
Unions were great at one point, and if leaders would be doing their jobs right, they could still be great for labor jobs. The problem is that unions are corrupted, and are a detriment to the company, and to the workers. One example of this happened in Ontario, Canada, around 2012-2013. I believe GM (cannot recall exactly) was in talk with the union (CAW) renegotiating a contract. The CAW was adamant to have their way, an increase in every aspect, while I was pointing to my wife that was a silly move: higher energy prices in the province, and the CAD-USD parity was making the Canadian workforce less competitive. Well, the company closed the plant and the workers were jobless, just because of the greed and blindness of the union.
Unions are going away. They are bleeding dry the companies, and in a globalized world, if the company is not competitive, it will go belly up. Sooner or later, all those unionized companies are going to be replaced by others, more competitive because they have no unions.
If the salary workers at ford dearborn wernt so errogant they would also unionize, its that simple.