Why was that? Unionized engineers in Germany (like in the automotive industry) are the highest paid and get the most benefits. Why would they be against it, given that if you don't enjoy red tape, you probably won't work at SAP to begin with?
I was only an intern. The food was good, but the work was boring.
German law says that union representatives can get an almost equal say in company matters. SAP had a vote, most people were against union representation, but by German law any nine (9!) employees in favour in the whole company is enough. So SAP got some people from IG Metal (ostensibly a metal workers union!) on their board.
Most of my coworkers saw the union representatives as busy-bodies who were interested in political power rather than real work. People had higher opinions of management than of them.
To get a bit more general:
It does help that programmers are broadly in wide demand, and can mostly get a new job at a drop off a hat. So instead of forming a cartel and `fighting' for their rights, they can just vote with their feet.
Same as what people do to make sure they get quality groceries: go shop at a different venue. If unemployment ever gets low enough, the general population would be elevated into a similar exalted position for their jobs.
> [...] given that if you don't enjoy red tape, you probably won't work at SAP to begin with?
It's a decent company. If you can put up with Java, they are OK to work for.
(That doesn't mean that I enjoy using their products. In that regard they are the opposite of the video game industry: I'd rather play a computer game, but I'd also rather work for SAP than finish a game in a death march.)
Electrical and mechanical engineers are in high demand too, and afaik they don't complain too much about their strong unions. And I know SAP is a decent company.
Anyway the comparison with the situation in the US is a bit pointless. More than unions, they need basic workers' rights.
The US has enough poisonous unions. (The German and Scandinavian ones tend to be more bearable on the whole.)
The US has a lot of problems, but what makes you think they need more workers' rights? A saner tax system would be a good start---so that eg health insurance and employment can decouple. (Right now, their employer provided health insurance is subsidized, so individuals are rationally stuck with that model.)
Besides health insurance: retirement pensions, short-term/long-term disability/incapacity, unemployment benefits, reasonable notice periods and severance pay, parental leave, ... all these things are a given in Germany and in most 1st world countries.
All those benefits have to be paid for. (And the US does have quite a lot of people on long term disability benefits.)
Restrictions on firing just make companies less likely to hire.
People can negotiate reasonable notice periods, and parental leave, severance pay etc, if they rather want that than more money every month. (But that negotiation / demand only works if the economy is humming along fine. So that is way more important.)
Germany and the US could both become more like Singapore. That would be a step forward.
I find it a very weird streak in Germany that they have a lot of mandatory `insurance' that mixes up some actual insurance aspects with welfare and redistribution. I think it would be cleaner to separate these two aspects.
(And Germans do have quite a high appetite for redistribution via their taxation and benefit systems, and vote accordingly. Nothing wrong with that preference in a democracy.)
I am more sympathetic to the nordic countries that marry their social safety nets with reasonable free economies.
And I'd really like to see a country try and rely on Land Value Taxes instead of taxing labour and capital. An LVT can raise an enormous amount of revenue without any deadweight losses to the economy. So you could run a lavish welfare state, and have a dynamic economy without a large wedge between gross and net pay for workers.
Henry George in America was a major proponent of these. In Germany Silvio Gesell wrote some interesting books a hundred years ago.
> People can negotiate reasonable notice periods, and parental leave, severance pay etc, if they rather want that than more money every month. (But that negotiation / demand only works if the economy is humming along fine. So that is way more important.)
Vulnerable workers aren't in a position to negotiate anything.
Yes, hence my qualification that it's important the economy be booming.
Alas, government protection doesn't help that much: just like you see greedy landlords in the US haze people who are paying below market rates in rent controlled apartments, you see bosses quietly make people's lives hell in some jobs in Germany.
