Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't replace one untrustworthy, poorly managed organization with another. It just means involving a second untrustworthy, poorly managed organization with its own goals in my contract negotiations. Some might say that unions are better, but that has not been true historically in the US - they have a long history of corruption, power-grabbing, leadership with incentives that aren't aligned with the best interest…
> Europe has a totally different union model that is interesting and seems to work better, but it isn't really an option in the US. Can you say more about what prevents a union in that model from being formed in the US?
TL;DR, the prevailing theory is that it's cultural.
> SUEDEKUM: Culturally, there is a sense [that] you have to be flexible when circumstances change, when new challenges arise. This is deeply embedded in the German approach of doing things.
> MARIN: That is part of a cultural thing: people trust each other.
> This culture, Marin says, also manifests itself in management style. Her research has shown that German C.E.O.’s are more willing to grant decision-making power to lower management. And that, she argues, improves quality. Because those are the managers who have the best sense of what customers want. This requires C.E.O.’s to have quite a bit of faith in their managers.
> You may be surprised to learn that German workers willingly accept a wage lower than the one their union negotiated. But they’d learned from history. Specifically, from their own history at the end of the Cold War.