Why Germany Has It So Good -- and Why America Is Going Down the Drain

[G_j]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/148501/why_germany_has_it_so_good_--_and_why_america_is_going_down_the_drain/

AlterNet / By Terrence McNally

Why Germany Has It So Good -- and Why America Is Going Down the Drain

Germans have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, and nursing care. Why the US pales in comparison.

October 14, 2010


While the bad news of the Euro crisis makes headlines in the US, we hear next to nothing about a quiet revolution in Europe. The European Union, 27 member nations with a half billion people, has become the largest, wealthiest trading bloc in the world, producing nearly a third of the world's economy -- nearly as large as the US and China combined. Europe has more Fortune 500 companies than either the US, China or Japan.

European nations spend far less than the United States for universal healthcare rated by the World Health Organization as the best in the world, even as U.S. health care is ranked 37th. Europe leads in confronting global climate change with renewable energy technologies, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the process. Europe is twice as energy efficient as the US and their ecological "footprint" (the amount of the earth's capacity that a population consumes) is about half that of the United States for the same standard of living.

Unemployment in the US is widespread and becoming chronic, but when Americans have jobs, we work much longer hours than our peers in Europe. Before the recession, Americans were working 1,804 hours per year versus 1,436 hours for Germans -- the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour weeks per year.

In his new book, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?, Thomas Geoghegan makes a strong case that European social democracies -- particularly Germany -- have some lessons and models that might make life a lot more livable. Germans have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, and nursing care. But you've heard the arguments for years about how those wussy Europeans can't compete in a global economy. You've heard that so many times, you might believe it. But like so many things, the media repeats endlessly, it's just not true.

..more..

[TwilightGardener]

1. Well, we don't want those things for everybody. We only want them for the deserving

who get paid enough to afford them.

[muntrv]

2. Germany also makes stuff in its own country, while US exports jobs.

[lib2DaBone]

3. Germany is a high tech.. high wage economy...

Their leaders have opted for a race to the top.. unlike our servant politicians and special interests.

Germany also outlawed the use of Derivatives in their banking system.

[Hannah Bell]

5. that may be, but the german banksters are world-class.

[hedgehog]

4. I work with folks from Switzerland and England. Some of them want to transfer

to the US because then they'd have more cash in their pockets. I look at the life style they'd be giving up, and I don't think they understand what it would cost to replicate even parts of that life style here. For example - one guy has only one car, which he leaves home for his wife most days while he takes 15 minutes to bicycle to work! So, is it better to be able to do that, or to own two cars and spend three hours a day commuting?

[ThomWV]

17. and ....

Not only spend three hours a day commuting but also spending $200 more a month on auto insurance, a hundred bucks a week on gas/oil/maintainance and in many places additional money to park the thing. Then there is the pollution and degradation of society caused by highways themselves.

[maxsolomon]

6. Defense spending is approx. 2% of GDP

ours is 4%.

[Statistical]

19. Which is why we should close our bases in Germany.

He have been subsidizing their national defense to the tune of trillions over the last 40 years.

[JackRiddler]

21. Who were "we" defending Germany against in the last 20 years?

Poland? Austria? France?

Inquiring minds want to know!

[Statistical]

22. Nobody.

Which is why we shouldn't be there.

The reality is Germany wants us there. It is in Germany best interst.

Trillions flow into their local economy. They spend less of defense and if anything happens (however remote) America has got their back. Not because we love Germany but because it would result in American casualties.

There is no reason for us to be in Germany but the Pentagon likes it and Germany certainly likes it so sadly I doubt it will change.

[JackRiddler]

23. "Germany" doesn't like it...

The German military establishment and Transatlanticist faction like it.

As for why they're still there, these bases have served as a staging area for Iraq and other wars.

[independent_voter]

26. we were defending the pentagon contractors from low defense spending nt

[DURHAM D]

7. The Marshall Plan?

:bounce:

[glitch]

8. Big part of laying the foundation.

One of the reasons Friedman's acolytes wanted Iraq to be their blank canvas was to prove the Keynesian Marshall Plan unworthy.

[Stevepol]

9. An interersting article in the March Harper's mag gives the low down.

The writer Thomas Geoghegan (same one mentioned in the above article) says that after WWII, the US (FDR's people), along with British Laborites, wanted to make sure that a fascist take-over would not happen again in Germany and designed some new requirements into the German system. There were three parts to the new system: (1) works councils, (2) co-determined boards, and (3) regional wage-setting institutions.

Works councils are counclls at the local business level. E.g., if you work as a clerk for Quik-Trip, a certain number of your fellows are required to be represented on the council that decides on who gets hired or fired, hours, etc. I think there must be an equal number of clerks (wage workers) and management folks, though the management gets one extra vote.

A co-determined board is the same thing as the works council except at the boards of larger business, maybe the home office of Quick-Trip where they make decisions bearing on the whole company. Again, an equal number of clerks and managers.

Here's what Geoghegan says about these two system requirements: "With works councils and co-determination, everything in the firm gets discussed, rather than the CEO going to the mountaintop without ever seeing a worker and deciding to pull the plug."

This doesn't guarantee that the company won't outsorce or stop a sale or pull up stakes and move, but it's much harder because on the boards and councils, people can cut deals. THEY CAN DISCUSS the policies of the company and demand to see reaasons, profit and loss statements, etc.

"In a German firm, the workers are . . . guardians, able to look at all of the financial records and planning documents as if they owned the place." And they can put pressure, fight for a better owner, etc. etc.

The regional wage-setting institutions are comobinations of union and management and other interested parties who try to make sure that wages are not out of line in any one area of the country. For example, one particular institution in one particular sector of the economy might try to make sure that wages at convenience stores like Quik-Trip are fairly level throughout the country, probably not an easy thing to do sometimes but worth the effort.

Obviously, listening to labor and allowing labor a say in one's business has not resulted in the deterioration of the German economy. Quite the contrary, Germany still has its industrial base and arguably has the best economy and overall welfare system in the world. When the working man is respected and given rights to take part in the control of the place where he works, as should be obvious but is not (at least not to Americans), the whole country benefits, not just the rich as in the US.

[BeFree]

10. Yep

Take care of the workers and they take care of you.

I am glad I work for someone who really cares about me.

[G_j]

15. & Dealing With an Aging Workforce

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9082258

Sept. 5, 2010

How BMW Deals With an Aging Workforce

Special Shoes and Bigger Type on Computer Screens Boosts Productivity on German Assembly Line by 7%

<snip>

BMW could force its aging workers to retire, or even fire them. But Mauermann said that's not the solution.

"That might be the simple way to solve the problem, but we have a social contract within Germany, or at the BMW group, where we say, that's not the solution we will look for - especially since we don't have enough younger people to replace , so it wouldn't work even if we wanted to," he said.

In what the Harvard Business Review called "an experiment defusing its demographic time bomb," BMW decided to look ahead.

Management have tinkered with one assembly line in one division of a huge auto plant, and turned it older overnight. They staffed it so that the average age of workers would be 47 - exactly what it's projected to be seven years from now.

They then asked the workers how to make things better.

When workers said their feet hurt, the company made them special shoes, and put in wooden floors. Some got a place to sit: a hairdresser's chair, modified for the assembly line.

[Mudoria]

25. Well that and building thousands of vehicles in South Carolina...

[seabeyond]

11. regulation, regulation, regulation. germany protects itself. nt

[opihimoimoi]

12. Smarter voting gets better leadership, decisions, results for the nations involved

in pursuing Happiness

ie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtSqrk6fIek&feature=related

Rieu DJ Otzie

[Jack Sprat]

13. Germany had it going on for a long time

Just watching Military Channel recently and saw where Churchill had visited Germany pre-war and was most impressed by Germany's social society for children and working adults alike, in education and the workplace. Seems to me it was pre WWI time period of Churchill's visit. He mused that England should adopt such progress for their own citizens because Germany was so advanced.

[applegrove]

14. And the neocons used Germany as an example of a liberal country that

was crashing in the 2000s.

[pampango]

16. "Since 2003, it's not China but Germany...has either led the world in export sales or been tied."

"Since 2003, it's not China but Germany, that colossus of European socialism, that has either led the world in export sales or at least been tied for first. Even as we in the United States fall more deeply into the clutches of our foreign creditors -- China foremost among them -- Germany has somehow managed to create a high-wage, unionized economy without shipping all its jobs abroad or creating a massive trade deficit, or any trade deficit at all. And even as the Germans outsell the United States, they manage to take six weeks of vacation every year. They're beating us with one hand tied behind their back."
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http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/100807-kinchen-columnsbookreview.html

"In Germany, Geoghegan finds the true "other"—an economic model with more bottom-up worker control than that of any other country in the world — and argues that, while we have to take Germany’s problems seriously, we also have to look seriously at how much it has achieved. Social democracy may let us live nicer lives; it also may be the only way to be globally competitive. His anecdotal book helps us understand why the European model, contrary to popular neoliberal wisdom, may thrive well into the twenty-first century without compromising its citizens' ease of living — and be the best example for the United States to follow.

OK, some facts about Germany, the largest economy by far in the European Union and the fourth largest in the world, measured by gross domestic product per person (GDP), with a thriving export-oriented manufacturing sector -- like the kind we used to have when we manufactured goods that were desired around the world.

Germany, with 83 million people and few natural resources, is the world's second largest exporter, with $1.170 trillion exported in 2009. You know who is the largest exporter and it ain't us. Hint: It begins with C and ends in A. and has more than 1.3 billion residents. Germany's service sector contributes about 70 percent of the total GDP of Germany, with industry another 29.1 percent and agriculture less than 1 percent. Most of the country's exports are in engineering, automobiles, machinery, metals and chemicals. Germany is the world's leading producer of wind turbines and solar power technology.

Geoghegan tells us that the average number of paid vacation days in the U.S. is 13, compared with Germany’s 35. New mothers in the U.S. get three months of unpaid job-protected leave and only if they work for a company of 50 or more employees, while Germany mandates four months’ paid leave and will pay parents 67% of their salary to stay home for up to 14 months to care for a newborn. U.S. life expectancy is 50th in the world, compared to Germany’s 32nd.

[Luciferous]

18. My husband and I have talked about moving to Germany

[crazylikafox]

27. Since my Grandparents were German citizens, I looked into it also.

Unfortunately, they have very strict immigration laws. They've created a good place to live & don't give it away easily. I think I read that you can be born in Germany & not necessarily be a Citizen. Citizenship rules are very strict.

[amborin]

20. Strong Unions! mitbestimmung = co-determination n/t

[txaslftist]

24. I suppose it would be economically convenient...

not to have to pay for your own national defense.

[wiggs]

28. IIRC, Germany has a new law which REQUIRES worker representation on corporate

boards over a certain size. A tremendously good idea...especially with our laws that supposedly state that corporations are given their licenses for the purpose of public benefit.

[G_j]

30. that would be essential for US workers

but I can't imagine it ever being done.

[Evasporque]

29. They also riegned in thier right wing substantially....nt