I see your huge karma points and want to oppose. Unions will get better salaries for low performers and decrease salaries for high performers. So there will be 10% salary difference between a guy working 45 hours a week and a guy wo shows up in the office and has all day long coffee breaks. That’s how unions in Germany work. They don’t protect one from being fired. You just get a better package. In Bavaria you start with level 9 salary after university. Jump quickly to level 10, then to level 11 mid career and if you’re lucky to the level 12 which corresponds roughly to 120000€ before taxes. Doubling salary over whole career… I don’t know if that’s a good deal.

> Unions will get better salaries for low performers and decrease salaries for high performers.

As a worker, I simply don't care if other people are paid well as long as I get paid well. This mindset of "it is not enough for me to succeed, others must fail" is absurd.

Generally, employees do want people who are more productive to be rewarded more, but are rightfully cynical about employers' ability to judge who is producing.

> So there will be 10% salary difference between a guy working 45 hours a week and a guy wo shows up in the office and has all day long coffee breaks.

Almost nobody should be working 45 hours a week. Certainly no one in my field.

It's telling that your primary example of performance is "time spent at desk". This sort of terrible mismeasurement is why employees are cynical about employers' ability to judge who is producing.

> [Unions in Germany] don’t protect one from being fired.

That's probably because they learned from the mistakes of unions in the US. Having to work with incompetent or straight-up drunk coworkers because they can't be fired isn't a great experience.

> Doubling salary over whole career… I don’t know if that’s a good deal.

"Only" doubling salary because you started at a higher wage is a great deal. Union workers are paid more than nonunion at every stage of their career, but how much more disproportionately favors people early in their careers.

My advice is US specific (brutalist labor market), and there is little evidence pay is tied to performance quality [1]. Regardless, I understand your perspective and respect it. The situation in the US is so terrible, we can only go up (imho). I am, very reluctantly, pro union because there is no other option.

[1] https://hbr.org/2021/02/youre-not-paid-based-on-your-perform...

If you take off the union tinted glasses and read again, you see that these employees are exercising their agency to the fullest by moving to better paying jobs at other companies.

My glasses are tinted by reality and data.

1. Individual workers are leaving to better paying jobs 2. This is evidence that they have no agency and should be in a union

Is that a realistic take on the situation?