And I don't see how unions would be intrinsically incompatible with Tesla's mission or operations. There's no reason I know of to hold that it is an immutable fact that Tesla's workers are non-union -- so why shouldn't someone join Tesla and attempt to unionize.
German GDP per capita is about 45k, as compared to 65k per capita in the US. But that hides a lot. Germany's most productive city is Berlin. Berlin's GDP per capita is....45k. The US on the other hand has cities like San Francisco, with a GDP per capita of 98k, fully 2x that of Germany's best city.
That isn't an accident. Germany and most of Europe have no tech sector to speak of as a direct consequence of their labor and regulatory policies. The EU is a huge economic block, comparable in scale collectively to the US or China, and it has a highly educated population. And yet, it has near zero presence in the most important industry of the 21st century. That's a staggering indictment of their economic policy. 2nd and 3rd tier US cities have more tech than Europe does.
Tesla would never have gotten off the ground anywhere in the EU, and our climate change prospects would be a lot worse off for it. If we want to solve the major problems facing the world, it's going to require major innovation, and that isn't going to come from EU style market regulation.
Where did you get this from? Germany is actually the only country in the EU where GDP per capita is higher when the capital is excluded. Munich is at 80,000€, Frankfurt (Main) 95,000€, Hamburg 60,000€, Berlin 40,000€ [1].
Germany is highly federated, with large companies near or in small towns or cities that only exist because the company was founded there decades or centuries ago.
You are talking about tech but this is about Tesla. I don't get why people are still treating Tesla like a tech company. They are making cars that happen to have some driving assistance. By that metric VW, BMW, and Daimler are also tech companies, each way larger than Tesla by cars sold, people employed, and GDP impact. Tesla is as much tech as WeWork was tech.
1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_deutschen_St%C3%A4dt... (German)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_cities_by_GDP
> Germany is actually the only country in the EU where GDP per capita is higher when the capital is excluded. Munich is at 80,000€, Frankfurt (Main) 95,000€, Hamburg 60,000€, Berlin 40,000€ [1].
I was using the city with the highest absolute GDP. That's a fair point that Munich has a higher GDP per capita.
> You are talking about tech but this is about Tesla. I don't get why people are still treating Tesla like a tech company. They are making cars that happen to have some driving assistance. By that metric VW, BMW, and Daimler are also tech companies, each way larger than Tesla by cars sold, people employed, and GDP impact. Tesla is as much tech as WeWork was tech.
My point about tech isn't so much the nature of the business, as the presence of a well functioning startup scene. I think it would be very very difficult to start a new capital and labor intensive company like Tesla in Germany today, and the non-presence of tech is just symptomatic of the difficulty of starting new businesses.
Compare the largest companies by revenue in the US to Germany:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_German_compani...
Most of the German ones were founded in the first half of the 20th century, if not earlier (you have to be a little careful reading the list, a few say they were founded recently, but they were really just the mergers of old companies - there are a couple legitimately new ones though). In the US, there are tons of companies founded in the last few decades on the list. My argument is that the German economy is mostly sustaining itself on the back of its economic achievements prior to the institution of its modern labor policies. Economic dynamism has been hamstrung.
You make great points about Berlin and about GDP per capita.
It remains true that Europe doesn’t have nearly the number of startups that the United States does, and this is notable.
TL;DR: it’s complicated.
More generally, if you look at Europe there are actually far more startups. They generally have much lower valuations though, because there isn't as much capital going into VC.
And probably you should look at Sweden as it does better than the US on a per capita basis in terms of startups.
It's really not always about the money...
In Germany, there are a lot of so called 'hidden champions' - companies that are small but focus on some higher end, niche products, e.g. oil filters,special purpose ball bearings,etc. The same is the case in many other European countries. This stay small approach is hard understand from the US,or Chinese perspective,where if you don't make $1B in revenue, nobody's going to put you on a map.
Which is great, but manufacturing those products doesn't generate the kind of cashflow or global influence that US tech companies generate.
Curious how many people here praising these hidden champions has worked for or wishes to work for one. I worked for a couple and it was eye-opening on never doing it again and avoiding them like the plague since they provide no high paying jobs and generate nearly no innovation as they simply survive on having cornered a niche market where neither US nor Chinese companies bother to compete because either the margins or volumes are too low and the decades-long relations with their customers are more valued in those businesses rather than cheaper price or better products.
By your logic everybody should just try to become a tech mega corp and use VC until they set the latest trend or die.
There is a lot of arrogance here on HN.
Except that's not what I said. I said, competing in a market making widgets is not as desirable for a modern country/economy/company/employee vs one that exports software and innovation, like the US, as manufacturing, more often than not turns into a race to the bottom of reducing costs and I don't want to work in such an industry anymore since I saw how the sausage is made and I have goals in life that are not compatible with working in manufacturing.
>There is a lot of arrogance here on HN. >Somebody has to make air filters, lighting, brake pads, ropes, etc., you know?
Would you like to be this 'somebody' working in a factory making oil-filters or would you rather be in a a high demand, high paying job?
This is what's funny to me about the HN crowd. Saying they won't take jobs in Embedded Software/Hardware or the Video-Games industry because WLB is poor and it "pays peanuts" but at the same time preaching that 'someone' should work making stuff in factories, where salaries and WLB is actually poor. Not them of course, but 'someone' should do it.
Nice straw man you set up there. A company can make these things by building machines to do it. Funny thing: European companies are really good at making machines to do such things.
Did you have any experience in this sector or it just an amrchair argument from an ivory tower of an white collar worker? Because I have first hand experience and factories, even in Europe still need quiet a few personnel.
And not all industries are automated, just ask people working in the meat packing industry or in Amazon warehouses, how their jobs are. Yes, in Europe.
This reminds me about the time we wanted better safety gear to our milling machine and boss basically told us that if we focus on safety too much, we might aswell shut the shop down.
Sure, I work with the risk of injuring myself, so that you can make 10x my income.
I think it's more complex than you state. The EU is indeed one economic block, but the tech industry is quite varied within that block. Amsterdam has a relatively small but growing tech scene and the Dutch gov has been entrepreneur friendly for as long as I've been here. I just saw in the news a couple of days ago:
"Dutch cleantech startup Sympower raises €5.2 million to boost the European energy transition".
Berlin has quite a lot of fintech startups. I know because I worked with one. Yes the red tape and German regs are a PITA and slow things down. But I don't think unions or regulations are the only reason we have less tech startups here. It's also a lack of drive and vision within the population, a cultural thing.
So what about a food delivery company with €1.238 billion (2019) in revenue per year? Good or bad?
For comparison Deliveroo is £476 million (2018) and DoorDash is $2.886 billion (2020)
That company was founded in Berlin (Delivery Hero).
> it has near zero presence in the most important industry of the 21st century
I guess most people never heard about them, because they target the local/European market. But they exist
If I have to choose between having one of the two relevant industrial robot companies in the world (Kuka, the other would be Yaskawa, also not from the US or China), the market leader in automation systems, pneumatic systems, etc. (Festo) and "companies making money by systematic privacy violations" (Hello Facebook, Google et. al.) I know which I'd rather have. And which industry is more important.
I think the EU is doing just fine here. But thanks for the concern.
That can’t be both true. If the average is 45k, there must be higher ones, unless GDP per capita is a flat 45k across all its cities.
U.S. unions are much more adversarial, seeing themselves as the enemy of management. In fact it is illegal for a member of management to be in a union in the U.S.
In Germany, unions hold board seats and see themselves more as partners, invested in the overall success of the business. The principle of codetermination means that union members can be in management. In Germany, unions are much closer to trade organizations or professional organizations, rather than the worker-management divide in the U.S.
In terms of politics, it's hard to be cognitively captured by the whole "greedy corporations oppressing workers" meme when you are sitting on the board and realize that your livelihood depends on the business doing well.
Similarly, German CEOs do not have the astronomical executive pay that US CEOs have. They are much more down to earth.
Germany is a nation that has had social insurance since Bismarck, primarily to contain a vigorous and violent left wing movement during the Kulturkampf of the late 19th Century. German unions are often quite conservative with respect to the culture wars and are hostile to that movement, which has its base more in the universitites and eco-groups than in the heavily unionized shop floors and production lines.
Yet at the same time, Germany has had no minimum wage until 2015. The US had a minimum wage since 1938. This, too, is because historically German businesses adopted a much more cooperative relationship to workers.
So even though it's true that Germany has high rates of unionization and an innovative economy, that does not mean that unions in the US would lead to the same outcomes. German and US unions are different beasts.
Union shop or not, employers in the US are more adversarial, primarily serving the interests of shareholders and will usually not voluntarily give workers a seat at the table. Of course the American unions have to be different as the environment is less cooperative than Germany
UAW is the union trying to organize Tesla's plant.
I should also note that almost all Japanese auto companies in the US are non-union and it's been that way for many decades.
If the narrative that unions hinder business growth was true, you have to provide with some mechanism for which that would be the case. An easy one is that businesses have to spend more per workers and hence cannot afford bigger investment. This sounds right, but it is anything but. If that were the case you wouldn’t see Volvo factories still operating in Sweden.
What is it precisely that unions in America are doing which is not a national law in Europe, and European unions aren’t doing which causes businesses “to wither and stagnate for the gain of a privileged few”?
You seem to be replying as though I’m saying he’s not wealthy? Obviously he’s extremely wealthy by any definition. But most ultra-wealthy people are a LOT more diversified in their portfolio than Musk is. Someone with a diverse portfolio stands more chance of being able to functionally realise their wealth—if, say, they wanted to donate a large chunk of it to some charitable cause.
An argument could be made that Buffet is far and away the richest person (in terms of realisable wealth) due to his highly diverse holdings.
The unions complaints were only that they were gonna get left holding the bag when things got bad while the c suite floated off with full pockets..and they were right.
Ford sold about 900,000 F150 in 2019 alone. That's not even counting 250s and higher.
And these trucks and SUVs are WILDLY profitable!
And they are made with union labor...
I just don't get it since "the uaw people literally avoid any kind of work"
How do they build millions of trucks and SUVs then?
American workers do enjoy a better standard of living than European workers.
And they were wildly profitable, and successful, one of the largest and most successful businesses in the entire world!
Toyota also has a large unionized workforce in many places!
They've also been wildly successful for many decades!
I'm really not getting this "wither and stagnate" argument.
Unless you mean if Tesla is unionized maybe in 60 years they will be disrupted by a new upstart firm.
Well...ok but that has nothing at all to do with unions.
It seemed to me they were just going to join the UAW.
There are two assembly plants within a few miles of where I grew up in the US. Both Japanese car companies, to this day they aren’t union and they are doing fine. There have been a few dustups from the UAW over the years, but they were never successful in flipping the workforce.
I think the threat of unionizing might help keep Tesla more invested in avoiding the type of environment that would foster broad support of organizing within the company.
Employers work with unions here. It's not antagonistic like in the US. I don't know where it went wrong but to me it's very much like the antagonism between drivers and cyclists in the US: cyclists and drivers hate each other there and both sides frequently try to provoke the other (Critical Mass is the most obnoxious thing I've ever experienced and I'm not even a driver). There's none of that here. We have a lot of public infrastructure to support cyclists here but even in cities with relatively poor cycling infra like Berlin that antagonism is missing.
If I had to guess it's that there's a culture of seeing-only-from-your-side of things in the States: you're black, I'm white, you're male, I'm female, you're an elite, I'm blue-collar and you'll never know how it feels to be me. And because you'll never know, you are my enemy.
What a wrongheaded way of approaching the world.
The reality of things isn't generally dramatic and hyperbolic, like you make out. Managers weren't looking for opportunities to screw people, and I wasn't looking for opportunities to make it harder to do business. They wanted to get on with their day, and I wanted to help my coworkers have good jobs. Evil? Come on.
Unions advocate for workers, not management. It's normal for management to not want unions.
Nobody is forcing you to work a union job. You're free to apply and work wherever you want.
Also, is there any evidence that collective action returns a sustainably larger slice of corporate revenues?
As for how to choose, I'm not sure.
> Work somewhere else.
You could equally say to any workers at Tesla who want to establish a union. Work somewhere else.
That’s over four million percent more than the median employee’s total compensation. But he’d rather union bust than be a slightly less rich centibillionaire.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/business/highest-pa...
Great, so bring a union in. Maybe median wages will briefly jump 10% or so in response to threats. Within five years the median wage probably won't be any higher. Probably lower if union action rattles investor confidence and Tesla's access to capital shrinks, leading to less future investment, in turn leading to less profit and fewer jobs at the company.
With all this talk of bringing in a bloated Detroit union bureaucracy into Fremont, you might as well plead with Tesla to focus less on US manufacturing over the next decade. Yay, everyone wins!
This discussion clearly isn’t going anywhere, so I’m ducking out. Have a nice day!
I guess Tesla broke the law in this case, but I do not really agree with the ruling and the law. Musk should be allowed to present the possible downsides.
We've tried this. People died over it. We enacted laws to prevent it from happening, so that labor can stand on equal ground with capital.
Economies without property rights in capital do not. They may have other (and even more significant) problems, but they don't have that one.
I was referring to historical low tech, small community societies, not any places integrated enough with the modern global economic to have “givedirectly recipient stories”. But, that aside:
> Almost everyone uses their money to invest in their home, livestock, or children's education
Neither a home nor children's education is capital. Livestock is, but plenty of historical societies didn't feature private ownership of livestock (though it's probably one of the oldest forms of private capital.)
No, there aren't. There are plenty of countries built on Leninist (and it's descendants, including Maoist) ideology, which advertise themselves as being Marxist as well, but Leninism sharply deviates from Marxism on a number of key points largely because Marxism is grounded in the necessity of starting with mature capitalism, and Lenin wanted a shortcut for the USSR (and later movements following Lenin likewise sought to bypass, rather than develope through and from, mature capitalism.)
Also, recognition of the existence of the conflict within capitalism that Marx’s proposals sought to address isn't the same thing as advocating Marxism.
What is undisputable is that these are three different things:
1. Recognizing the conflict between labor and capital as a real and significant factor in capitalist society, and
2. Advocating Marxism, and
3. Advocating Leninism.
The societies in which Marxism has been most broadly applied are the developed “capitalist” societies, which have generally evolved from what Marx described as capitalism to what has been called (among other things) as “the modern mixed economy”, by adopting both elements of programs of various (in many cases, Marxist) critics of capitalism, or compromise positions.
There are also societies, which never were mature capitalist societies, that have tried to bypass mature capitalism and apply the Leninist course. Advocates laissez-faire capitalism like to point to these as a broad argument against socialism, while advocates of non-Leninist socialism tend to point to them as as arguments against the Leninism as a useful approach to socialism, whether or not they accept it as a genuine socialism.
Nah, the real conflict, if any, is labor and capital vs land.
But as capital has matured, capital as a class has effectively subsumed the landed class, largely by driving land into fee-simple ownership.
Henry George wrote his analysis not under feudalism, but in the US.
See eg https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/07/22/piketty-... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Marx's ideas were fundamentally negative in nature. He was opposed to things, and had sharp and perceptive critiques of capitalism, but he didn't really present an alternative. To the extent that he did articulate a vision, it doesn't really seem like, e.g. Sweden would really fit the bill, though.
It's at least as fair as it is to call Leninism Marxist.
> Marx didn't really advocate anything in particular in terms of economic organization.
Yes, he did.
> Leninism was able to fill the void in the way that it did.
Leninism didn't fill a void, it made deliberate changes to apply to very different conditions those addresses by Marx’s writing (which addressed mature capitalist societies and where he saw that they should go next to resolve problems he saw as inherent to their system.)
> but he didn't really present an alternative.
Yes, he did, though Marx was very big on path dependency, so his recommendations were more specific when directed at more specific conditions. Capital is pretty pure critique of the then-status-quo, The Communist Manifesto has a fairly broad program, but narrower and less-well-known works like the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, Programme of the French Workers Party have quite specific policy proposals.
> Capital is pretty pure critique of the then-status-quo
Yep.
> The Communist Manifesto has a fairly broad program
The Communist Manifesto doesn't do much policy proposing. Workers owning the means of production is about as far as it goes, and to the extent that that his Marx's proposal...that isn't realized anywhere in Europe.
> but narrower and less-well-known works like the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ou...
These are both pretty short and vague, but they are policy proposals. However, they are both pretty clearly not an articulation of his vision for the post-revolution society he describes in The Communist Manifesto. They are pragmatic demands for political parties to make of their governments.
Let's compare. The Communist Manifesto:
> In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
Demands of the communist party in Germany:
> 15. Introduction of strongly progressive taxes and abolition of taxes on consumption.
So, here's the fundamental issue: When Marx is specific, he's mild. His specific ideas are totally bland, and not at all unique to him. He would be a footnote of history if his specific ideas were all he said. When we refer to "Marxism", we refer to the actually novel idea: Abolition of private property. But of course, it is here that he is vague. He gives no indication of how a society without private property might actually function. And it is into exactly that void that Leninism stepped. It did so because it had no choice.
Lenin understood that they didn't have a revolution to institute a minimum wage. They had a revolution to abolish private property. But Marx had no clue how to manage such a society, and as it turns out, neither did Lenin.
This is simply not true, except in the most pedantic and disingenuous sense.
There were violent strikes by some groups of unionized workers, that broke the law, and that resulted in some deaths, if that's what you're referring to. There is absolutely no reason this thuggery should have been rewarded by giving the strikers what they demanded, which was the abrogation of the company owners' private property and contracting rights.
As it happened, US industry, and with it US wages, grew much faster before society gave into the unions, when the US was still a free market where people had a sacred right to freely contract.
Unless you're also happy about shooting people starting a union or striking, you should read this article to learn why this is a really bad idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
Mostly I wanted to give a bit more historic context. Japan is arguably a more productive economy and a better place to live than India, and Pseudoerasmus suggests that this is at least partly because labour was not able to mount as effective a defense as in India.
To belabour that point: Fred says at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPINA156NRUG that the labour share of GDP in India is something above 50%.
Japan is also something above 50%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPJPA156NRUG
India's GDP per capita is about 1.9k USD. The number for Japan is about 40k USD.
So even in the hypothetical world where Indian labour would somehow be so strong it would capture 100% of GDP, that would still be only about 10% of what Japanese workers get.
Now, of course, any nuanced argument will take into account that labour suppression wasn't the only difference between Japan and India.
But the important thing is that this shifts the context of the argument: instead of a knee-jerk attitude of 'unions are obviously good for workers in the long run', we have some more explaining to do.
(With sufficient mental gymnastics, you might stil be able to argue that unions and strong labour in general is good for standard of living. But at least now you have to engage in that gymnastics.)
That's their prerogative.
Also FWIW Musk clarified that he was talking about the fact that no UAW employees have stock options at any other company.
Not sure what the laws are. There might be laws saying that you can't discriminate against people in unions, so in order not to hand stock options to unionized employees, they might have to withhold stock options from all employees?
(No clue, just speculating.)
I mean yes. And then a union could strike. At which point elon would have a decision to make: is proving a dumb point worth his business?
> Also FWIW Musk clarified
Presumably on lawyers advice.
> no UAW employees have stock options at any other company.
But that,as others have explained, isn't relevant. Nothing stops the Tesla union from maintaining those perks, and options aren't valuable at most auto companies anyway, so aiming for different perks is superior.
When a direct relationship exists between the parties, this is a possibility. When there is a third party dictating what happens, this is much less realistic.
> [...] because otherwise they could be demanding something more valuable?
Like twice as many stock options? I'm a bit confused. Stock options are fungible. You can make granting of stock options worth arbitrary many dollars, by eg increasing the volume or lowering the strike price etc.
Just because one company is partially unionized that does not mean that all workers who wish to be part of a union try to work at that company. Maybe the working conditions changed (for the worse), or maybe the worker doesn’t want to move to another state just to work for a company that is unionized. Either way, it’s not like there’s a 1 company quota in every industry that can be unionized and then bam problem solved.