Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted against organizing under the United Auto Workers (UAW). This happened despite the fact that Volkswagen was fully supportive of this, and gave the UAW free rein to campaign as they liked.

In retaliation, it is Volkswagen that is making threats against the workers, in the form of threatening to not build or expand in any state in the South unless the workers were already under the heel of the UAW. Why? Because in Germany, unions are legally mandated to not only force themselves on companies, but actually sit on its board of directors under the concept of “co-determination.” Volkswagen’s supervisory board has fully half of its members being representatives of their labor union.

The state of affairs in Germany is closer to a corporatist model whereof the government mandates the arrangement of both labor and capital as it wishes to guarantee “fairness” is not the state of affairs in a nominally free market system in the United States. In Germany, the unions are fully integrated on a cooperative basis; in the United States, the unions are antagonistic against businesses, even when the businesses give in to the unions demands.

Volkswagen would rue the day they have such power to a union that has already demonstrated a willingness to kill-off its source of employment, and leave cities devastated.



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