Would not happen. Musk should have established the factory in EE where the local labor would bend over to him.
You can't have strong unions and labor regulations when you don't have your own captive world leading domestic industry like IKEA, Siemens, SAAB, Novo Nordisk, Bosch, Airbus, etc. Nobody would invest in your country.
The alternative for eastern Europeans always was to go to UK or Germany and be a fungible labour there.
Current strategy increased quality of life in EE countries. So far that in main cities in Poland housing prices are 4000-5000 USD per square meter.
And while it's better to be with work than without, living paycheck to paycheck in fear is not that great either, and doesn't exactly provide ways out. So sometimes we're left with just what solidarity we can arrange without legal representation, like the time entirety of one of my former workplaces left the job one day for what american management did to one of them.
Poles are entrepreneurial and forward thinking nation that will sooner or later become economically as prosperous as WE.
We on the other hand will always be discount version of Austria/Germany.
EE was basically bankrupt in the early 90's. How could they have caught up to join the wealthy innovation driven countries like UK, Netherlands, Germany and Nordics, on mere fractions of their education and research budgets and considering the massive social damage 45 years of communism has done to eradicate free thinking, innovation and entrepreneurship. Basically, post 1989, nobody had any idea how to run a business, how to do market research, marketing, sales, any of that, let alone build businesses that could challenge wealthy established players from the west, since none of that was taught in schools and universities during communism and now you have to catch up with over 45 years of lost progress over night.
It was just not possible at the time, so being cheap outsourcing labor was the only choice to get out of poverty.
That left those countries without any local champions or easy options to elevate themselves. I've said it many many times that it will take dozens of unicorns like UIPath in Romania to offset the loss of industries now dominated by DACH companies.
Romania would need to become another Singapore which is almost impossible.
There was surprisingly a lot of free thinking, innovation, even entrepreneurship. Not everything was as bad as it was painted, not everything was as good as it was sometimes shown.
One of the rare positive elements in all that chaos that some had pointed out and I agree was that the chaos at least ensured consumer goods were better represented and prevented oligarchic centralisation to the level that happened in some other countries.
EE is full of entitled elderly pensioners that control the narrative and are only interested in returning to the "good old times of communism" in one way or another.
Prosperity requires stepping out of your comfort zone and implement ideas that bring competitive advantage over your neighbors. These kind of ideas are lumped in the same category like LGBT rights, climate etc etc.
Because also the political and education system in communism couldn't create any visionary technocrats focused on innovation and exports.
It simply encouraged cronyism, lying, backstabbing, empire building, fiefdoms and thievery from the same zero-sum pie aka the local national economy.
Well educated and innovative workers from Taiwan or South Korea weren't sent to the gulags or political prisons for "free thinking" or for coming from the wrong family backgrounds.
World leading companies were moving to eastern Europe because it was cheap. Both land and labour.
In some cases comparable to china. It is an outsourcing hub, way to cut costs.
You get same skill (or even more) in Poland as you can get in Germany, but for half price and slightly less bureaucracy.
Maybe compared to the US, but not compared to France, Germany or Nordics.
>World leading companies were moving to eastern Europe because it was cheap. Both land and labour.
The "cheap-ness" of labor is also related on the availability and strength of unions, lack of bureaucracy and red tape, taxes, worker's rights and social benefits, not just on their local supply/demand and purchasing power.
Having had strong unions in EE that could strike on a whim and demand better conditions, wouldn't have made it very attractive to foreign investors despite the lower wages.
In fact, the constant strikes in the early to mid '90's is what kept foreign investors away from Romania causing it to fall behind most of its post comunist neighbors at the time.
Foreign investors are also looking for stability, not just cheap labor.
Lots of rules about overtime, work schedule, total working hours, vacations, sick leaves, payment, notice period in case of mass layoff.
Labour law is strong. But people are cheap - that's what attractive for international employers.
Minimum wage, costs of living in Germany is higher than in Poland. What is a minimal wage in Germany is a decent wage for factory worker in Poland.
Yes, it's the same in Romania, on paper, there are loads of rules and regulations to protect the workers, but those rules are broken all the time by employers, especially in low paying jobs, because low paid employees don't have the time and money to take those employers to court, and there are next to no unions.
And the labor laws are still weaker than what workers in for example France or Netherlands would get for the same job at the same company.
Then there's environmental regulations which are laughable in Romania compared to what they are in Germany. To open a dirty tire factory or a mine in Germany you'd get protests up your ass meaning you'd never start building, while in Romania everything gets rubberstamped quickly if you grease the right wheels, meaning the cost of doing business is much lower regardless of wages, as the environmental costs also factor in the total cost of doing business somewhere, not just wages.
Also in Poland labour law is covering mainly people on regular employment agreement. There are ways to get around and screw employees, but western factories and outsorcing vendors(like TCS, Capgemini) are not doing business that way.
On paper. In practice workers figure out pretty fast that if that big employes moves shop they're screwed for life. I don't know much about Poland, but somehow I don't think unions in Poland will be "no, we don't want Mercedes to open a factory here and tell us what to do" :)
The problem in EE is not the laws it's the local psyche.