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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The main reason the car industry couldn't hack it is because of quality issues. There was this joke sticker for the back of your Jaguar or Rolls: "The parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture".

I worked a lot on classic Mini's, Metros and Maxi's. The degree to which body work had been patched and bent to match it to the corresponding chassis was quite amazing. Rumor had it the Leyland factory had a guy with a very large hammer standing at the end of the line to 'adjust' the doors if they didn't close properly. I totally believe it. I've seen almost new subframes that were Swiss cheese from rust and/or with very bad welding.

That said, there are few cars that are more fun to drive than a souped up Classic Mini, and even fewer that would be as lethal in an accident.

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Cars like Jaguar and Land Rover have famously bad electrical systems. But just saying quality issues doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country, and its the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to, there has to be a deeper reason. I don’t know it unions were the whole story, as really only Germany or Germanic countries have ever had great quality control for cars in Europe, but there must be some systemic reason.

There are lots of manufacturers in the UK right now who have fantastic quality. Rolls Royce aero engines. Lots of pharmaceuticals. Airbus wings and landing gear. Lots of cars as well. Medical devices. The list is endless.

The UK manufacturing sector was worth $279 billion in the last year.

https://www.makeuk.org/insights/reports/uk-manufacturing-fac...

That's all true. But the list could have been a lot longer. The UK had a lot more industry than it does today and there definitely were quality issues. At the same time: competition that wasn't even on the horizon back then (for instance: Korea) became a major factor and at some point you need the scale. For the UK driving on the left side of the road made that all of their exports had to be made for domestic or foreign use, foreign manufacturers often chose to simply not field a model in the UK, so that was an extra cost.

It's funny, I've a complete love/hate relationship with cars from the UK. I love them, love the looks, love to drive them. But I hate the unreliability that was part and parcel of it and I hated even more to buy a spare part and then to find out that it subtly didn't fit because of some defect in body geometry with as a result that it looked like crap (fenders... subframes... don't get me started on that one, I can bore you to death about the kind of crap they sold).

The Metro could have been what the 206 was for Peugeot, instead they made fairly nice design in the most cheap and unsafe way possible. In comparison the 206 was a little tank.

This is an under-appreciated point: the UK manufacturing sector is highly successful, but only where it doesn't employ large armies of workers, and is instead either automated or very small volume/large margin.

News coverage of this is, as expected, completely dire.

> Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country

There's a culture in industries. As you said, look at Germany. Look at the culture in SV - it would be hard to open a development business of any size that ran completely against the SV engineering culture.

> the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to

That is almost literally ancient history. Nearly Medieval history. :)

> I don’t know it unions were the whole story

Looking at the two countries with the best reputations for quality, a lack of union and labor projection may be the problem: Germany has very strong unions; in many cases, they get a seat on the board of directors. Japan treats its labor very well - often lifetime jobs, famously Toyota empowers assembly line workers to stop the entire line themselves - and has low labor market liquidity (but my info on Japan could be out of date).

"That is almost literally ancient history. Nearly Medieval history".

What absolute rubbish.

Rolls Royce is one of the leading aero engine makers today. They make the engines for the 787 and the A350, and many other planes.

TBF, the industrial revolution started 250 years ago and the Merlin ceased production 75 years ago and has almost literally nothing in common with the Trent - not design, metallurgy, thermodynamic cycle, fuel...

Calling the referenced achievements ancient history isn't an unreasonable take, despite current successes.

Quality issues are inevitable if the unions see their role as preventing anyone from getting fired.

Which, it should be noted, is not a common goal among unions.

I’m a union metalworker in the US shipbuilding industry— our products are expensive, but in very high demand domestically and internationally. That’s true for various reasons, but in no small part because our quality is exceptional, and people regularly get fired for compromising it. Some unions do seem to strive to protect incompetence at all costs, but none of the ones I worked for in any industry ever defended it. I have a feeling the cases where they do are heavily influenced by shakedowns and corruption rather than being genuinely that tribal. Some police unions probably fall on both sides of that spectrum.

A union is functionally a business which sells labor. It's usually structured so that sales are indirect, with their customers paying the workers directly, but that's just accounting.

There's no fundamental reason that a union should seek to prevent anyone from ever getting fired, anymore than any other business would see to prevent any of their employees from being fired. Likewise, there's no fundamental reason that unions should be bad for the businesses that hire their members. A prosperous client is good for business.

Some unions are badly run and hurt themselves. Americans especially tend to assume all unions are this way, partly because of some high-profile examples, partly because of a culture of individualism and association of unions with communism, and partly because of propaganda. But they definitely do not have to be like that.

How can union rules get crafted to keep the company in business, fire incompetence, and breed innovation, rather than self-perpetuation?

Typically you incorporate union representatives onto boards of companies, make the members shareholders etc. You tie incentive structures together.

Even so, I'm a reject your framing to a certain degree. Employees, and by extension labor unions, typically want to see the company they work at succeed. Labor always pays the price, e.g. forgoing wages during a strike.

And even when a deal is struck, employees often put the interest of the company ahead of their own, e.g. trading away already agreed upon wage increases in a labor contract in order to keep the company solvent.

Are there examples of both situations? Of course! I've seen both first hand, but it certainly isn't completely one or the other. Some companies have a good relationship with their unions, others are very antagonistic.

Well, how do you craft corporate rules to prevent companies from extracting value out of their labor without being abusive, under-compensating people, discriminating, valuing nepotism over competence, exposing employees to unreasonable risk, etc? Most people take pride in their work, care about what they do, want to see the company they work for succeed, want to see competence rewarded, hate having to repeatedly clean up other people’s mistakes and will respect a company that treats them well for doing so. The company has leverage and the union has leverage and they work together. If the union has all the leverage and the company has none and the people in charge of the union are greedy jerks, well then that’s a problem. If the workers have no leverage and the people in charge of the company are greedy jerks, that’s also a problem— but it’s a far more common problem because it’s much easier for companies to get leverage than workers.

Look at the case of the boring company having workers spraying caustic chemicals in enclosed spaces with no PPE and laboring in ankle deep water in heavy work boots which abrade skin even when it’s dry. If a company can’t afford to stay in business without treating their workers humanely then they can’t afford to stay in business. But we all know from the rather well known CEO that lack of capital isn’t the problem.

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