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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the labor culture in Germany relative to the rest of the EU is not mentioned at all. Germany is one of the strongest nations to be an industrial worker and has various laws that are pretty unique to the nation, such as co-determination, I believe this has acted as a defense vs. outsourcing (and when they do outsource, they go to high cost places such as the US) and has kept it's manufacturing base strong.

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There is strong pragmatic cooperation between manufacturers. You get free samples and if some parts don't meet specifications there is a shared effort from both supplier and consumer to fix the problem in the process instead of suing each other. Would be too expensive without real results anyway.

Hours worked are pretty low compared to other European states even if you factor in a large part time component. I don't think increasing hours would increase productivity anymore.

There is also a darker side of course with a lot of minimum wage jobs or people working long hours while still being dependent on the state. Even for employees of the same company the income can be quite unequal. Compare development or engineering with production or logistics for example.

Yes and no. German companies are outsourcing like crazy, but they have the whole central/eastern european countries as outsourcing destinations. Low wages, high level of education, short distances, EU membership make them really attractive.

A lot of very basic, work-intensive or energy-intensive work has left Germany over the last 30y, but the companies make a killing of value-added manufacturing.

Also, not least due to unification, till a couple of years ago, German wages were very stagnant, so it wasn't that great a country for industrial workers, paywise.

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