Comment by throwaway93135
10 hours ago
Imagine how high must those salaries be in union-prolific Euro nations, compared to the measly ones of those uncivilized Americans!
10 hours ago
Imagine how high must those salaries be in union-prolific Euro nations, compared to the measly ones of those uncivilized Americans!
Unions are not the primary mechanism between employers and workers for establishing fairer wages in many European countries. Unions are designed to level a power imbalance between an employer (typically a legal vehicle which aggregates the material self interest of various actors) and the employees who would otherwise have to act alone.
Myopically focusing on wages while ignoring the many other concerns about the distribution of power and legal rights is a common misunderstanding.
What a great excuse for stagnant wages.
Real wages (adjusted for inflation) were relatively flat from 2001 to the mid-2010s, especially for the bottom half of the wage distribution. Since then, there have been periods where real wages grew, but inflation often outpaced wage growth, particularly from April 2021 to early 2026. As of May 2026, real wages were still down 1.4% compared to January 2021, meaning that, after accounting for price increases, American workers are making less than they did five years ago.
Not every American citizen is having incomes like SWE in SV.
https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-grow...
Say more!
Hourly wages in Germany are not that different from the US. Depends a bit on how exactly to compare - nominal, PPP, net/gross, etc.: e.g., average nominal is about 10% higher in the US, real median is higher in Germnay, ...
>median is higher in Germnay
I cannot think of any standard by which this is true, certainly not by nominal or PPP income for either personal or household income.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
[2]https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
Table on page 10: https://www.boeckler.de/data/downloads/IMK/FMM%20Konferenz%2...
Not looking at households or disposable income here but at hourly wages.
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Overlooking that we are comparing the richest EU state to all 50 US states, doesn't that further the point that having unions is are at best uninfluential.
Far from the richest by capita, average income, PPP average income, mean/median household wealth, etc., which feels like what we're actually talking about here. A lot of countries in the EU/Europe that would make the US look far worse, no?
Either way, no, if unions don't reduce how much people make and provide stronger worker's rights, protection from corporate abuse, workplace safety, collective bargaining for things like holidays, you can think it doesn't change your take-home at all and pretty undeniably see the benefits. How many weeks of legally mandated paid time off do you get, and how many additional days do you get on top of that as a median worker in the US? :b
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No. (And comparing one country to another seems fine anyway.) Hard to make the case that unions in Germany have had no effects on wages, working time, etc.
Real wages are higher in every EU country with strong unions.