Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure Jern og Metall (Metallurgy union) would not have accepted competition at that workplace at that time. :) > I massively prefer the work-life balance and workers protections high union participation has created in Norway over the UK Sure, though it comes at a pretty significant cost in terms of efficiency and of the ability of the more productive part of the workforce to generate income for themselves. Over…
> Pretty sure Jern og Metall (Metallurgy union) would not have accepted competition at that workplace at that time. :) While there have at times been overzealous union people and I obviously can't know the conditions specifically at your dads old workplace, closed shops have typically been far more unusual in Norway than e.g. in the US, and the few attempts there have been have increasingly faced legal opposition and…
He. I suppose it's pretty common for expats to keep the mentality they had from their country of origin, and even romanticize it a bit.
I'll not quibble with you a bit, just bring my own anecdote:
About 15 years ago, I was called in to help an Accenture team that was about to fail a software project for Posten. When I arrived, the situation was kind of critical.
The Accenture project was led by an architect/PM from London, and staffed by a couple of devs (one of them lead dev) from Norway, and a larger number of devs in India.
Every afternoon around 15:45, all the devs would be gone, and it was just me and the architect from the UK remaining, trying to sort out all the issues in the code.
As we were working into the evening night after night, we got to know each other a bit. As it turned out, he felt like he was trapped in a hell hole, with a team that was not willing to put in any extra effort even though the project was about to fail. I kind of gave him the story that you gave me above.
But he insisted that live was MUCH better in London. Not only was Oslo dark and freezing cold (this was during the winter) and lacking the kind of cultural attractions of a city like London, for someone like him purchasing power was also much better.
While his peers in Oslo had to leave the office before 4pm every day to fetch the kids from daycare, in London he was able to keep a nanny to both provide more personalized care and also provide more flexibility to the parents. In Oslo, families that can afford that usually make significantly more than a software architect.
My point isn't that one system is better than the other, rather that the patriotism can go in both directions.
And for countries trying to be as agalitarian as Norway without the oil revenue, the downsides are even more pronounced, of course. Norway may be the closest to a social democratic Utopia one can get.