Tom Geoghegan's right-- help bring German miracle here!...

Hi all...

Check out this uncommon common sense from long-time labor lawyer and progressive Tom Geoghegan (author op-ed pieces in the Times, Nation, etc.-- see TomGeoghegan.com):

[profile piece in current Utne magazine now out on the racks-- see for yourselves!]

"It's no accident that the social democracies- Sweden, France, and Germany, which kept on paying high wages- now have more industry than the United States or the UK. During the '70s, '80s, and '90s, the Anglo-Americans, the neoliberals, the Economist crowd, and the press generally would taunt the social democrats in Europe: 'You'd better break the unions.' That's the way to save your industry. Indeed, that's what the United States and the UK did: They smashed the unions, in the belief that they had to compete on cost. The result? They quickly ended up wrecking their industrial base. But Germany, Sweden, and France ignored the advice of the Anglo-Americans, the Financial Times elite, the banking industry: Contrary to what they were told to do, they did not wreck their unions. And it was the high labor cost that pushed those countries into making higher "value-added" things. Where is Germany competitive? It's in high-end, precision machinery, made by people with the highest skills. It's in engineering services."

So-- let us know if you're interested in helping us to bring Tom Geoghegan here to our area to discuss his new book on all this-- "Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?"(!)...

[just spoke with him on this week-- he's interested-- and comes to NYC from time to time and would take the train up to us to speak to an interested group-- if we can make sure a bunch of folks would come out!...(he'll be calling in soon to our WVKR 91.3 FM Fri. 5-6 pm show)...so-- let us know if you can help us host Tom G.!]

Fact: This winter Germany is experiencing the lowest unemployment rate (about 7%) in two decades.
[see: "German Unemployment at Lowest Level in Nearly Two Decades" Deutsche Welle Nov. 30th last year-- http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,6281721,00.html ]

Contrast this with most recent unemployment numbers from the U.S. Dept. of Labor-- 9.4% as of Jan. 7th press release this year.
[see: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm ]

We here in Dutchess, NYS, and U.S. are on slippery, sliding slope to nowheresville and economic rack 'n ruin unless we wake up in grass roots to tell Cuomo and too many other local politicians to stop attacking unions; FDR didn't get us out of the Depression with budget cuts, layoffs, and union-busting (see ABetterChoiceforNY.org)...

So-- herewith-- a few more censored facts re: German miracle (here's to those Rhinebeck-Rheinback exchanges...lol):

Germany-- whose economy did not implode over the past few years (unlike ours here in the U.S.)...

Germany-- with full pensions, health care, child care, university education, and good wages for all...
[while here in U.S. GOP, many Dems, media all convince us this is an impossible dream we can't have]

Germany-- with literally half its corporations' boards of directors elected by workers-- codetermination...

Germany-- with an economy that's been booming for many years now-- based on the strength of a deep middle class able to actually purchase goods and services to keep the economy turning around...

Germany-- with BMW, Daimler, Siemens, Bertelsmann, and many other large corporations, sm. biz too...

Fact: "Europe has the largest economy in the world-- almost a third of the world's economy. In fact, it's almost as large as the United States and China's economy combined. Europe has more Fortune 500 companies (179) than China (less than 39) and the United States (140) combined. It has more small businesses, that produce two-thirds of the jobs, compared to in the United States where small business produces about only half the jobs. However you want to measure it, the European economy is robust, and it's vibrant."
[see: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/12/europes_promise -- Feb. A. Goodman i-view w/S. Hill]

Fact: "In terms of taxes, it turns out Europeans don't pay any more than most Americans if we factor in the entire tax burden of federal, state, local, real estate, and social security taxes, as well as the out-of-pocket fees, deductibles, premiums, and tuition that Americans pay in addition to their taxes in order to receive the same level of workfare supports that Europeans have."
[see http://www.EuropesPromise.org ]

Fact: "Many of the things Europeans receive for their taxes-- health care, a university education, a decent retirement, child care, and parental leave, for example-- are hardly discretionary; they are necessary to enjoy a basic level of security and comfort. But Americans have to pay extra for those services and benefits. In short, when you sum up the total balance sheet you discover that many Americans pay out just as much as Europeans, but we receive a lot less for our money."
[see http://www.EuropesPromise.org ]

Fact: "In the United States, public spending on old age care is nearly 25 percent less per capita than in Europe, but private spending on old age care is nearly three times higher per capita, because Americans mostly self-finance their own senior care."

[see http://www.EuropesPromise.org ]

Joel
444-0599/876-2488
joeltyner@earthlink.net

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From current issue of http://www.Utne.com (Utne Reader now out on magazine racks everywhere)...

January 02, 2011
It's the Unions, Jack
Why America's working class would fare better in a social democracy
by Thomas Geoghegan, from Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? - January-February 2011

Americans may believe that the United States is set up for the middle class, and Europe is set up for the bourgeois. Or let's put it this way: America is a great place to buy kitty litter at Walmart and relatively cheap gas. But it is not designed for me, a professional without a lot of money. That's who Europe is for: people like me.

OK, I'm a union-side lawyer, so Europe's really set up for people like my clients, or those who used to be my clients before the unions in America collapsed. Let's put my own self-interest aside: Where would my clients, who are not poor, who make $30,000 to $50,000 a year and yet keep coming up short, maybe by $100, $200 a month, really be better off?

That's easy: Europe. I can answer that as their lawyer, the way a doctor could answer about their health. The bottom two-thirds of America would be better off in Europe. I mean the people who have not had a raise (an hourly raise in real dollars) in maybe 40 years, and who do not even have a 401(k), nothing but Social Security, and either have no health insurance or pay deductibles of $2,000 or more. Sure, they'd be better off in Europe. When they're unemployed, they'd certainly be better off in Europe. Over there, even single men can get on welfare. And in much of Europe, contrary to what we hear, overall unemployment is no higher than it is here.

One of the ways Europe is set up for the bourgeois-including, perhaps, many readers of this magazine-is the very fact that it is also set up for people who make $50,000 or less. Since it's set up for these people, too, the bourgeois-me, maybe you-get the political cover to have it set up for them. What the people-in-the-unions get, people-from-the-good-schools also get. (And indeed, in Europe people-in-the-unions are often people-from-the-good-schools.) They get the six weeks of vacation each year and the pension like a golden parachute. And the higher up we are in terms of income, the more valuable these things are. In America, they don't tell us: Social democracy, or socialism, or whatever Europe has, pays off biggest for people in the upper middle class, those just below the top.

Take Zurich and Chicago. One looks good and the other, broken down. If America has such a famously high GDP per capita and Chicago is one of America's crown jewels, maybe there is something wrong with using GDP per capita as an index of social well-being. It's not that the numbers "lie" in any crude way, but past a certain point, maybe these numbers mislead us as to where we're better off. For to look at the numbers, who would guess that Zurich looks gloriously like Zurich all over, and that Chicago looks glorious in Lincoln Park, dumpy west of Pulaski Avenue, and gulag-like by 26th and California? But forget the look of the place. It's also the way of life.

The numbers say, on paper, that I have a better way of life in Chicago. But are these numbers right? It may be that, past a certain level, an increase in GDP per capita pushes my living standard down. I don't mean this in a spiritual sense-I mean it in a cold, neutral, out-of-pocket sense. Example: If I make more by working longer, I might subcontract out more of my life and incur other "costs," like losing a trip to Zurich, which may be of far more value than the extra income. Or another example: If I get a raise, I might be worse off. I might widen the gap in income with others around me. Who cares? Well, by doing this, I might be spreading poverty, which, like everything, is relative. I might make my public space more of a hellhole than before.

People at the libertarian Cato Institute love to scoff: "Oh, our poor in America are so well off in GDP per capita." Go ahead. Argue. I'll let you win. But I dare the Cato types, when the argument is over, to go outside and walk around some Chicago neighborhoods.

In other words, the further ahead we get, the more our standard of living drops. Let's say, as a European, I work 1,500 hours a year. Now, let's put me at 1,800 or even 2,300 hours, like many Americans. While I've moved to higher GDP per capita, I don't have six weeks off; a perfect cup of coffee to sip at some place other than the office; a city to inhale like a bank of violets.

In 2005 the real hourly wage for production workers in America was approximately 8 percent lower than it was in 1973, while our national output (productivity) per hour is 55 percent higher. So it's dubious whether most Americans have gained even a penny in purchasing power since 1989. And even skewed by all this U.S-type inequality, we understate what Europeans at the "middling" level are able to get for free: publicly provided goods like education, health care, cities like banks of violets. Even apart from the grotesque U.S. social inequality, the net purchasing power disparity after we toss in the public goods is not so great.

It's no accident that the social democracies-Sweden, France, and Germany, which kept on paying high wages-now have more industry than the United States or the UK. During the '70s, '80s, and '90s, the Anglo-Americans, the neoliberals, the Economist crowd, and the press generally would taunt the social democrats in Europe: "You'd better break the unions." That's the way to save your industry.

Indeed, that's what the United States and the UK did: They smashed the unions, in the belief that they had to compete on cost. The result? They quickly ended up wrecking their industrial base. But Germany, Sweden, and France ignored the advice of the Anglo-Americans, the Financial Times elite, the banking industry: Contrary to what they were told to do, they did not wreck their unions.

And it was the high labor cost that pushed those countries into making higher "value-added" things. Where is Germany competitive? It's in high-end, precision machinery, made by people with the highest skills. It's in engineering services. People look at Germany and say, "What about the German unemployment?" But no one in the United States ever says, "What about the German labor shortages?"
Even in 2008, precisely because of "globalization," Germany had a serious shortage of people able to fill high-skill, high-paying jobs, especially engineers. In the United States, engineers complain that they can't find work; many of them end up in sales. In the union-free, lower-cost United States, we don't create the kind of jobs engineers can do. Germany's problem? It has too many such jobs. It's our whole globalization thesis turned upside down.

That leads to a seeming paradox: Higher labor costs can make a country more, not less, competitive. In many ways, the United States and the UK got out of manufacturing because their labor costs were too low. I have spent my life watching plants close in Milwaukee and Waukegan, where skilled labor was paid $26 an hour, only to reopen in Georgia and North Carolina, where it was paid $8 an hour. While we're still fighting over severance two years later, we get the news: The company is bankrupt. The products it makes so cheaply are now crap.

In the United States, our elite, scoffing, says that there is just not enough labor-market flexibility in a country like Germany to allow it to adapt to globalization as we do. But it's precisely because of our flexibility that we can't compete. What the laws manage to do in Germany is to keep people together and to hold onto their skills in groups. Co-determination and works councils-in other words, worker control-keep people in groups, rubbing elbows with each other, and all this rubbing of elbows helps build up human capital.

Indeed, this is now a fashionable idea among some economists. Think of all the buzz about the "knowledge" economy, which, in the world of academic economists, is an inquiry into how knowledge drives economic growth. David Warsh in his 2006 book Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations introduces us to economists trying determine the relationship between group collaboration and economic growth.
German worker control contributes to a group interaction that over time not only builds up but also protects a certain amount of human capital, especially in engineering and quality control. This kind of knowledge is not just individual but also group knowledge. It's the kind of group knowledge that our efficient, "flexible" labor markets so readily break up and disperse.
It's our flexible labor markets that make it so hard for the United States and the UK to compete. We spend vastly more on basic research than the Germans do-U.S. companies are unrivaled. We spend far more on higher education. But with our flexible labor markets, we're unable to capitalize on this research and education. Sometimes we try the Japanese model of work, but we never try the German, because we don't want to cede any real control to workers. Supposedly it's a great mystery why Germans keep investing in manufacturing and even prospering, despite claims that the German education system is broken (OK, it needs help) and that they aren't spending enough on research (OK, they aren't). But they're doing something right. What is distinctive about Germany is the privileged position the worker has within the firm.

And we must look to that privileged position of the worker to explain how our own middle-class way of life can survive. Putting more money into education is a waste of effort. Putting more money into basic research is a waste of effort. We already spend enough. In fact, we have every factor of production going for us: We have more land, more labor, more capital, and higher levels of formal education. But with our flexible labor markets, we cannot develop the human capital or knowledge we need to wean ourselves away from turning out crap.

The answer to the problems of our country is education, but not the kind we're pursuing, that is, jamming more kids into college or even teaching practical skills; instead, it's teaching them how, politically, to cut themselves a better deal. As long as that's going on, it's impossible to write off the European or, more specifically, the German model.

Just as the answer to the problems of democracy is usually more democracy, so the answer to the problems of a social democracy is usually more social democracy.

Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Geoghegan. This work originally appeared in Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life, published by The New Press and reprinted here with permission. We spotted the excerpt in the pages of In These Times (Aug. 2010).

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Recall this one, too, from http://www.newheadnews.com/harpersGeoghegan/index.html ...

Harper's Magazine
March 2010 p. 7-9
NOTEBOOK
Consider the Germans
By Thomas Geoghegan
Come on: is the West really in such decline? Yes, we can sit here on our island continent and gloom about the rise of China, as our elite now like to do. Or we can go out into the world and start competing like the Europeans. For here's a strange fact: 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. Sure, China just pulled slightly ahead of Germany, but that's mostly because the euro has soared, making German goods even more expensive, and world trade has slumped. Meanwhile, the dollar is dropping, and we still can't compete with either nation. 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.

Why is Germany beating us? It's tempting to say it's because we beat them. After all, we helped put a major component of the German model in place, which is the role that German workers have in running their firms. After World War II, we had a problem: Who would keep watch over all the German businessmen who had supported Hitler? We couldn't put them all in jail. Back in that New Deal era, we and our allies were quite willing to put workers on the boards to keep an eye on businessmen. Still, the idea of works councils was not invented by Americans. In fact, it had its origins in Weimar Germany. And now Germany is the country, out of all countries, including Communist China, in which workers have the greatest amount of control over (dare I say it) the means of production.

Okay, it's not that much control. But it's enough to make the German system a rival form of capitalism. And because German workers are at the table when the big decisions are made, and elect people who still watch and sometimes check the businessmen, they have been able to hang on to their manufacturing sector. They have kept a tool-making, engineering culture, which our own entrepreneurs, dreamily buried in their Ayn Rand novels, have gutted. And now, thanks in large part to these smart structural decisions, Germany is not only competitive, it's rich. Although it's unlikely that even the most liberal of American politicians would ever use a phrase like "worker control"-much less describe people who work as "workers"-it might still be worth at least considering what would be involved in emulating the German model.

Let me here cart out the big three building blocks of German social democracy: the works council, the co-determined board, and Germany's regional wage-setting institutions. If I were teaching a class, I'd put these up on the blackboard and talk about them at the beginning of every class. "What do I mean by the German model? I'd like to see hands." No one knows. So I give the answer: "It's the works council, the co-determined board, and the wagesetting institutions."

Everyone in class groans. Whatever does that mean?

Well, the works council is simple in theory, though hard for an American to take in. Let's say you work at the Barnes & Noble at the corner of Clybourn and Webster avenues in Chicago. You may be just a clerk, no degree. (In Germany, you'd have a certificate in bookstore clerking, but in the United States there's no need.) Still, you could be elected to a works council at this store. That means you help manage the place. You help decide when to open and close the store. You help decide who gets what shift. On layoffs and other issues, the employer must reach an agreement with the works council. So you may ultimately decide whether Ms. X is to be laid off or fired. How did you get into this kind of "management"? Barnes & Noble had no say in it. You were elected by your fellow workers. You went out and campaigned: "Elect me."

The result is that there are thousands of clerks and engineers in Germany who now are (or a few years ago were) elected officials, with real power over other people. They are responsible for other people. They are responsible for running the firm. They make up a powerful leadership class that represents the kind of people-low-income, low-education-who don't have much of a voice in the affairs of other industrialized countries.

If that's a works council, what's a co-determined board? These apply mostly to the largest companies, those with more than 2,000 employees. We now leave behind the bookstore at Clybourn and Webster and try to imagine all of Barnes & Noble, the whole company. Way at the top, in the boardroom, where you expect to bump into Robert Rubin, the clerks get to elect half the board: not a fifth, not a third, but half-the same number of voting directors that the hedge funds get to elect.

Of course there's a catch! Under German law, if the directors elected by the clerks and the directors elected by the shareholders are deadlocked, then the chairman can break the tie. And who picks the chairman? Ultimately, just the shareholders. So capitalism wins by one vote, provided the stockholders, the bankers, and the kids from Goldman Sachs all vote in a single bloc. But the clerks still have a lot of clout. If the shareholders are divided on whether "A" or "B" should be the next CEO, the clerks get to pick the king. "A" is CEO but he owes his job to the clerks. By the way, the clerks have all this power without owning any shares! In this stakeholder model, they need only act on their interests as "the workers."

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. "Wait," people say to me. "You mean co-determination keeps jobs from going abroad?" No, they can't stop a sale.

They can't stop outsourcing. But they can cut deals. "Conditions-that is my motto," is how one worker-director put it in an issue of my favorite German magazine, Mitbestimmung. In the United States, people don't even know the plant is closing until management calls a meeting and ushers everyone out under armed guard. But in a German firm, the workers are Cato-like guardians, able to look at all of the financial records and planning documents as if they owned the place. If a company wants to start a plant abroad, the workers can pressure the board to plow some money back into a German plant or provide a ten-year employment guarantee. Or they can fight to get a better owner. It's not just the arguing: it's the fact that they can be in the boardroom watching, or in the back room rifling through the files. Doesn't your own behavior change when you think Cato is watching you? Well, it's true for managers too. That's why there is still a manufacturing sector in Germany.

Given the influence of the works council and a co-determined board, what remains for Germany's many powerful unions? They do the bargaining over wages and pensions but at a macro level, with a federation of all the big bookstores, not just Barnes & Noble but Borders as well. This is the German model of regional or multi-employer bargaining. We negotiated wages this way in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, but no more. I doubt many Americans under forty even know what I mean by regional wage-setting institutions, and yet they are probably the single most important way in which Germany is "socialist."

This system is much in decline even in Germany, but it still has a huge egalitarian effect. The goal, never quite reached, is that every Barnes & Noble, every Borders, everywhere in the covered area, pays the same wage for the same type of work. Wages are not set person by person or shop by shop.

They're the same, everywhere, as much as possible. The result, from an American perspective, is a shocking transparency: in Germany the ideal is that everyone knows what everyone else is making. By contrast, who knows what Barnes & Noble pays in Chicago, or Borders in Joliet? In the German system, people can find out what other people are getting, and their unions in turn can demand the same.

The private export sector is the most unionized part of the German economy (even more than the public sector). And it is understood to be the vanguard, the industry on the front lines of the global economy. So if the engineers at ThyssenKrupp get a 3 percent raise, then certainly the clerks should get a 3 percent raise. Soon everyone in Germany is getting 3 percent! In a complicated and limited way, the whole country can have a voice, if not a vote, in what takehome pay they receive. Unification with low-wage East Germany has made this leveling tougher, but people in Germany can still actually talk about "wage policy" and "wage objectives." There's a national conversation, unknown here, as to how much everybody should get.
All my life as a labor lawyer I have read the same thing in The Economist, about the United States and its wonderful labor-market flexibility. What they mean is: Unlike the Germans, U.S. working people are completely powerless. But it's precisely because of our labor-market flexibility that we can't compete. Our workers have been flexed right out of their high-wage, high-skill jobs and into low-wage, low-skill jobs. That's bad for the workers, of course, and it's also bad for the economy. The German model-with worker control built into the very structure of the firm-keeps bosses and workers in groups, rubbing elbows with each other, and sometimes just elbowing. It creates a group interaction that over time builds and protects what economists like to call human capital, especially in engineering and quality control. It's precisely this kind of valuable capital that our atomizing "flexible" labor markets are so good at breaking up and dispersing.

Yes, there's much to like about the U.S. model. In global competition, the United States has almost every comparative advantage over Germany. We spend vastly more on basic research than the Germans do. We have much more land, more labor, more capital, much higher levels of formal education. But with our flexible labor markets we cannot develop human capital or knowledge to wean ourselves away from turning out crap and leaving the high-skill manufacturing to the Europeans. The one great comparative advantage of Germany is that it is a social democracy. Germany has its problems, and I take them seriously. But I'm also sure that German companies will lead the next industrial revolution, the "green" one, while we in the United States will merely watch.

If you ask most Democrats and their think-tank minions how to help our powerless middle class, they have no answer except to send even more of them to college, where with luck they get out being only $50,000 or so in debt. As for the high school graduates who make up the base of the party, we effectively tell them: You're finished. There's no role for high school graduates in our version of the global economy. In Germany, these same high school graduates could be sitting on a corporate board. Skeptical readers will say: Oh, but that's Europe, it's socialism, something like that is not possible here. I think it's quite possible.

I now have stopped underlining and re-reading Wolfgang Streeck's great 1996 essay, "German Capitalism: Does It Exist? Can It Survive?" Still, I recall his central, disheartening point that the German model, with its works councils and the rest, was simply too hard to replicate in other countries. In the end, global capitalism would force Germany itself into our simpler, top-down Anglo-American model.

But it turns out, at least in the European Union, that other countries are now keen on experimenting with co-determination and works councils.
"Co-determination is our biggest export," a former official in the German government told me. As it spreads through Europe, we may come to understand the German model as not just a rival but a better form of capitalism. It only takes a change in law. Maybe we'll decide one day, simply out of patriotism, that we have no other choice.
Is it likely? No. Is it possible? Yes. At any rate, it's just nonsense that "Europe's way" and "our way" can never be the same. We may have messed up our part in globalization, but we still have time to fix things. It may be even easier in this wired world to exercise our greatest privilege as Americans-to astonish ourselves by being American and making a European idea of democracy our own.

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Fact: "According to a Federal Reserve study, the wealthiest 10 percent of people in the United States now owns 70 percent of the wealth, and the wealthiest 1 percent owns more than the bottom 95 percent, compared with Germany, where the top 10 percent owns 44 percent of the wealth.
[see: "Richest 2% Hold Half the World's Assets" by Chris Giles (Financial Times 12/6/06):
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1206-01.htm ]
Fact: "The ratio of CEO pay to average manufacturing employee pay is 475:1 in the United States, compared with 24:1 in Britain, 15:1 in France, and 13:1 in Sweden; even in nonmanufacturing sectors in the United States, the average CEO earns more in one day than the average worker earns all year."
[see http://www.EuropesPromise.org ]

Fact: "While the top income-tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, the numbers are a bit misleading. 'People coming from the U.S. to the Netherlands focus on that difference, and on that 52 percent,' said Constanze Woelfle, an American accountant based in the Netherlands whose clients are mostly American expats. 'But consider that the Dutch rate includes social security, which in the U.S. is an additional 6.2 percent. Then in the U.S. you have state and local taxes, and much higher real estate taxes. If you were to add all those up, you would get close to the 52 percent.'"
[see: "Going Dutch" by Russell Shorto (NYTimes magazine 4/29/09):
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/magazine/03european-t.html ]

Fact: "Much more than America, Europe is based on real "family values", and unlike America it is not timid or stingy about spending its wealth to support those values. Indeed, Europe spends at least 25 percent more per capita than the U.S. on workfare supports, and three times more on families, according to OECD figures."
[see http://www.EuropesPromise.org ]

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These three are from Amy Goodman's Feb. 12th interview with Steven Hill on Democracy Now:

Fact: "Childcare for two children in the United States is about $12,000 per year for a family in the United States. In Europe, you're paying a thousand to maybe $2,000 per year for that same childcare."
[see: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/12/europes_promise ]

Fact: "Europeans have lowered their ecological footprint to half that of the United States, even though they have the same standard of living. The average American uses twice as much carbon, twice as much electricity as your average European, and over four times as much carbon as someone from China or India. Europe is really leading the way is on its use of environmental technologies, green technologies, green design, conservation technologies and renewable technologies, that are being implemented in a much more widespread fashion in Europe."
[see: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/12/europes_promise ]

Fact: "Germany was the first to develop a practice known as co-determination to put some regulations around corporate power, where the- you know, every corporation has a board of directors, but in Germany 50 percent of those board members are elected by the workers. In Sweden a third of the board members are elected by the workers. It would be as if Wal-Mart were required by law to allow its workers to elect 50 percent of its board of directors. It's almost unimaginable from the American point of view. And yet, here you have major economies in Europe that actually do this on a fairly regular basis, and yet most Americans have never even heard about this."
[see: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/12/europes_promise ]

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From http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,6281721,00.html ...

Labor Market | November 30, 2010
German unemployment at lowest level in nearly two decades

German exporters are powering growth and jobs

German workers continue to benefit from an upswing in growth, as the number of those without a job dropped again in November, while across the eurozone, unemployment inched up.

Germany is bucking the trend in Europe, as the number of jobless in the country dropped by 14,000 compared to October and 284,000 compared to the same month in 2009.

There are now 2.93 million people out of work in Germany, the lowest figure since 1991. The unemployment rate remained steady at seven percent. In the former East, it stands at 10.7 percent, in western Germany it is at six percent.

"The labor market is profiting from the strong economy," Frank Weise, chairman of the German Federal Labor Office said on Tuesday.

While the coming months might see another rise in unemployment due to the winter weather, experts agree that it will just be a seasonal blip.

"The labor market is on fire," Unicredit economist Andreas Rees told the news agency Reuters. He pointed out that many jobs are being created by temp agencies at the moment, but that he expected more vacancies for long-term jobs in the near future.

Bucking the trend

With its robust growth, Germany is once again the powerhouse of Europe. The European Commission forecast growth of 2.2 percent in 2011 for Europe's biggest economy and 3.7 percent for 2010.

The closely-watched IFO business sentiment index reached its highest level since reunification in November, reflecting an upbeat mood among German firms. Retailers have also reported a strong start to the holiday shopping season, indicating that traditionally cautious German consumers are willing to spend.

Germany's Federal Labor Agency predicts a drop in the number of people out of work to 2.7 million during 2011.

Author: Nicole Goebel (Reuters, dpa)
Editor: Chuck Penfold

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Recall, too-- from http://www.michaelmoore.com/books-films/facts/sicko ...

FACTS IN MIKE'S FILMS: SICKO

The productivity rate per hour in France is higher than in America.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, France has a higher labor productivity (GDP per hour worked) than the United States. "OECD in Figures 2005, 2005/Supplement 1 at 84.
http://213.253.134.29/oecd/pdfs/browseit/0105061E.PDF

"Britain has yet to catch up with its rivals on productivity. Gordon Brown, the chancellor, has long wished to close Britain's productivity gap with other countries. It is proving a long haul. In 2004, output per hour worked was 19% higher in France, 15% higher in America and 5% higher in Germany than it was in Britain." "Poor show; International comparisons," The Economist, January 21, 2006.

Like Canadians and Brits, the French live longer than we do.
The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report's human development index states the life expectancy in the United States is 77.5, the United Kingdom is 78.5, France is 79.6, and Canada is 80.2. Human Development Report 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2006 at 283.
http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf

Canadians live three years longer than we do.
The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report's human development index states the life expectancy in the United States is 77.5, and the life expectancy in Canada is 80.2. Human Development Report 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2006 at 283.
http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf

Canadian "wait times" not nearly as long as some try to allege.
According to Statistics Canada, the official government statistical agency, "In 2005, the median waiting time was about 4 weeks for specialist visits, 4 weeks for non-emergency surgery, and 3 weeks for diagnostic tests. Nationally, median waiting times remained stable between 2003 and 2005 - but there were some differences at the provincial level for selected specialized services.? 70 to 80 percent of Canadians find their waiting times acceptable" "Access to health care services in Canada, Waiting times for specialized services (January to December 2005)," Statistics Canada
http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/82-575-XIE/82-575-XIE2006002.htm

A recent study of emergency care in Ontario found that overall, "50% of patients triaged as CTAS I [most acute] were seen by a physician within 6 minutes and 86% were seen within 30 minutes of arriving at the [Emergency Department]. In contrast, the 50% of patients triaged as CTAS IV or V who were seen most quickly waited an hour or less, while 1 in 10 waited three hours or more. Understanding Emergency Department Wait Times: How Long Do People Spend in Emergency Departments in Ontario? Canadian Institute for Health Information, January 2007.
http://www.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=reports_wait_times_bulletins_e

"Gerard Anderson, a Johns Hopkins health policy professor who has spent his career examining the world's healthcare, said there are delays, but not as many as conservatives state. In Canada, the United Kingdom and France, 'three percent of hospital discharges had delays in treatment,' Anderson told The Miami Herald. 'That's a relatively small number, and they're all elective surgeries, such as hip and knee replacement.' John Dorschner, "'Sicko' film is set to spark debate; Reformers are gearing up for 'Sicko,' the first major movie to examine America's often maligned healthcare system," Miami Herald, June 29, 2007.
Drugs in England only cost $10.
For much of 2006, the standard charge for a prescription was £6.65. "The cost of an NHS prescription in England is to rise by 15p to £6.65 from the start of April." "Prescription charge to rise 15p," BBC News, March 13 2006.

From April 1 2007 to present, the charge is £6.85. "There are many unacceptable inequities and anomalies in the present system. Although around four out of five prescriptions are exempt (see below for list of exempt categories), the price of a prescription (£6.85 from 1 April 2007) often hits those who cannot afford such charges. There are many people with chronic conditions who are not exempt and those on low incomes find it very difficult to pay. This causes a disproportionate levy on a limited section of the population." British Medical Association, "Funding - Prescription Changes," March 2007.
http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/FundingPrescriptionCharges

In a study of older Americans and Brits, the Brits had less of almost every major disease. Even the poorest Brit can expect to live longer than the richest American.
"The US population in late middle age is less healthy than the equivalent British population for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, myocardial infarction, stroke, lung disease, and cancer. Within each country, there exists a pronounced negative socioeconomic status (SES) gradient with self-reported disease so that health disparities are largest at the bottom of the education or income variants of the SES hierarchy. This conclusion is generally robust to control for a standard set of behavioral risk factors, including smoking, overweight, obesity, and alcohol drinking, which explain very little of these health differences? Level differences between countries are sufficiently large that individuals in the top of the education and income strata in the United States have comparable rates of diabetes and heart disease as those in the bottom of the income and education strata in England." (See also Table 1 - for example, prevalence of diabetes among high-income Americans is 8.2 per thousand, while it's 7.3 among low-income Brits.) Banks, Marmot et al., "Disease and Disadvantage in the United States and in England," Journal of the American Medical Association, 2006;295:2037-2045.

A baby born in El Salvador has a better chance of surviving than a baby born in Detroit.
According to the United Nations Statistics Division, Population and Vital Statistics Report, the rate of infant deaths per thousand in El Salvador is 10.5. "Table 3, Live births, deaths, and infant deaths, latest available year, June 15, 2007."
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/vitstats/serATab3.pdf

According to the Michigan Department of Community Health, the rate of infant deaths for Detroit is 15.9 per thousand. "Number of Infant Deaths, Live Births and Infant Death Rates for Selected Cities of Residence, 2005 and 2001 - 2005 Average," Michigan Department of Community Health Web Site,
http://www.mdch.state.mi.us/pha/osr/InDxMain/Tab4.asp

French policy on childcare and household assistance for new parents.
According to the French-American Foundation comprehensive review of child care, "For non-working parents or parents who work part-time, haltes garderies (drop-in centers) provide part-time, occasional, and drop-in care. Haltes garderies are also subsidized (by municipality and the National Family Allowance Fund), with parents paying a portion of the costs based on a sliding scale (parents pay an average of $1 per hour). ? For working parents [there are] licensed family day care providers (assistants maternelles), licensed babysitters at home (social security costs and salaries subsidized by the National Family Allowance Fund)." Peer, Shanny., "The French Early Education System," French-American Foundation, November 13, 2003.,
http://www.eoionline.org/ELC/Presentations/Peer4.pdf

There is a company in France, SOS Medecins, which will perform doctor house calls at any time.
SOS Medecins has an English website, viewable here:
http://www.sosmedecins-france.fr/en/smf_en_present.htm.
In the U.S., health care costs run nearly $7,000 per person. But in Cuba, they spend around $251 per person.
United States health spending per capita is $6,697 per person according to Catlin, A, C. Cowan, S. Heffler, et al, "National Health Spending in 2005." Health Affairs 26:1 (2006). As with the number of uninsured, the number continues to increase and is projected to be $7,092 per capita in 2006, $7,498 per capita in 2007 and reaching $12,782 by 2016, according the Department of Health and Human Services Center for Medicare and Medicaid Expenditures, National Health Expenditures Projections 2006-2016,
http://www.cms.hhs.gov/NationalHealthExpendData/downloads/proj2006.pdf

The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report says Cuba spends $251 per capita on health care. (Human Development Report 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2006.
http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/indicators/52.html)
In Cuba, access to health care is universal.
"Cuban dissatisfaction with their personal lives does not mean they are negative about the revolutionary government's achievements in health care and education. A near unanimous 96 percent of respondents say that health care in Cuba is accessible to everyone. Gallup polls in other Latin American cities have found that on average only 42 percent believe health care is accessible." Gallup/ Consultoría Interdisciplinaria en Desarrollo, "Cubans Show Little Satisfaction with Opportunities and Individual Freedom Rare Independent Survey Finds Large Majorities Are Still Proud of Island's Health Care and Education," January 10, 2007.
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brlatinamericara/300.php?nid=&id=&pnt=300&lb=brla

Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate and a longer average lifespan than the United States.
The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report's human development index states the life expectancy in the United States is 77.5, and is 77.6 in Cuba. Human Development Report 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2006 at 283.
http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf

The United States is ranked #37 as a health system by the World Health Organization.
* "The U. S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance, the report finds." "World Health Organization Assesses The World's Health Systems," Press Release, WHO/44, June 21, 2000.
http://www.who.int/inf-pr-2000/en/pr2000-44.html