At least in America, a good portion of it is a cultural difference. The EU tends to take worker protections more seriously without considering collateral damage (according to some). OTOH, America just does nothing because there’s an entire political party who’s big premise is “any and all regulation is bad regulation.”
Another way of saying 'The EU tends to take worker protections more seriously without considering collateral damage' is 'The US tends to take corporate protections more seriously without considering collateral damage'.
>> ...there’s an entire political party who’s big premise is “any and all regulation is bad regulation.”
In fact, since Clinton took the Democratic party in a Neo-liberal direction (and made Reagan's dream of NAFTA a reality, "reformed" welfare, and the Glass-Steagall deregulation) I'm under the impression we have two such parties.
There's a bipartisan consensus that working people should be screwed. Uber's c-suite is staffed by Democratic Party insiders and they just got Prop 22 passed, Democratic leaders just came out in support of a stimulus bill that indemnifies companies against COVID-related harms they place their employees in to keep making money. You can find no shortage of well-paid liberals on this site that will tell you that unions are the scourge of the earth, despite their political influence being responsible for just about everything that makes the EU a better place for workers.
I’m not denying that there are Democrats who support business over workers. All I said was that the Republican Party (in Congress) seems to believe that any and all is bad while Democrats believe in some or more (depending on how you feel).
It also doesn’t help that people want to label everyone so much to fit into just two categories. Feinstein (D-CA) is very pro-surveillance while some of the party (in congress) believes otherwise. Romney (R-UT) voted to convict Trump while every other Republican voted to acquit.
I’ll admit it is a bit hypocritical of me to lump all Republicans together, so I’ll clarify with: it’s where the party (in congress) seems to be heading (or already is). Obviously not all Republicans support that idea.
The beliefs of individual members of the Democratic Party are largely irrelevant compared to how they function collectively as a political body at both the state and national level. With that view, they've been definitively anti-worker since the Clinton era and have been shifting further and further right since Reagan's presidency.
The obstacle to change in this country is not the Republican party, but Democrats who use them as an excuse to mask their similar, steadfast allegiance to business interests at the expense of everyone besides white collar workers.
Basically every state that has a semblance of worker protections is led by Democrats. They aren’t perfect, but the problem isn’t mostly Democrats, who at the federal level can’t get anything done without support from Republicans, who are far from making worker protections any part of their initiatives.
It’s funny how federal government employees got paid parental leave though, but no legislation for non government employees was brought to the floor.
California is controlled top-to-bottom by Democrats and still has remarkably poor worker protections by the standard of any other developed country and is even worse when you compare things like the state of housing, poverty, and healthcare. They have tremendous latitude to make better conditions for workers and yet somehow this never pans out in California or other "blue" states. At what point do these excuses wear thin?
How is California supposed to do that if other states don't? Businesses would quickly move to other states if the tax difference became too high.
The only reason California can get away with the worker protections it has is because of its uniquely favorable weather, geography, productive land, and other resources.
No state can offer taxpayer funded healthcare, because then the people receiving more from healthcare than paying in will start to increase and the people paying in more than they receive will start to leave. It's the same problem for pretty much all other minimum standards of living, and the same one that exists between people in cheaper US states complaining about China and Mexico taking all their jobs.
What do worker protections have to do with taxes? Again, what is stopping California Democrats from putting into place similar workplace protections as exist in the EU? In Germany for example, it's illegal for worker's to be surveilled using spyware apps that are permitted for use by every business in California. Why are Democrats incapable of addressing this?
Housing and healthcare are more difficult problems, but ones that have, again, been solved in just about every other developed country, including many with smaller economies than that of California. Hypothetical capital flight is just another among a litany of excuses used to justify their failure.
Worker protections raise the cost of doing business. Is it hypothetical that manufacturing facilities relocated to China to be able to sell products at cheaper prices than their competitors?
Is it hypothetical that a business that a retail business offers their employees lavish benefits and sells commodity products will be put out of business by lower prices from Walmart/Target/Amazon/Best Buy/etc?
Both of the above examples have happened, and capital flight is real. A few countries with better safety nets, who don't have a comparable emigration situation like in the US, does not mean that one of the two parties in the US is not trying at least a little bit.
>Is it hypothetical that a business that a retail business offers their employees lavish benefits and sells commodity products will be put out of business by lower prices from Walmart/Target/Amazon/Best Buy/etc?
None of your examples are headquartered in California, nor would any of these companies stop operating in the most populous state in the US with its largest economy were worker protections put in place.
>Is it hypothetical that manufacturing facilities relocated to China to be able to sell products at cheaper prices than their competitors?
The hollowing out of the industrial core was a bipartisan decision made in the 1990s with full support of Democrats, so its a bit rich to say "if we don't let them treat people bad, they'll make it even worse than we already helped them make it." The same power that them globalize manufacturing can force its return to the U.S. Again, every other developed country with a strong industrial base engages in this kind of protectionism for strategic and national security reasons. Germany is again, here, a salient example.
>Does not mean that one of the two parties in the US is not trying at least a little bit.
You keep insisting this without providing evidence of its reality. What major worker protections have been advanced and put into law by Democrats since the Obama presidency?
> None of your examples are headquartered in California, nor would any of these companies stop operating in the most populous state in the US with its largest economy were worker protections put in place.
The argument isn’t that they would stop operating, but that they would experience less growth or maybe even contraction from people or businesses moving away due to higher costs (and taxes).
> The hollowing out of the industrial core was a bipartisan decision made in the 1990s with full support of Democrats, so its a bit rich to say "if we don't let them treat people bad, they'll make it even worse than we already helped them make it." The same power that them globalize manufacturing can force its return to the U.S. Again, every other developed country with a strong industrial base engages in this kind of protectionism for strategic and national security reasons. Germany is again, here, a salient example.
I didn’t write “if we don't let them treat people bad, they'll make it even worse than we already helped them make it that.” My example was intended to show that capital does go to wherever it’s cheapest, whether it be labor costs, lack of environmental regulations, etc.
> You keep insisting this without providing evidence of its reality. What major worker protections have been advanced and put into law by Democrats since the Obama presidency?
The proof is that the Democratic states on the west and northeast coasts and Illinois have passed laws requiring mandatory sick days, family leave acts, higher minimum wages, better unemployment benefits, etc. (including since Obama, even though that’s irrelevant).
Just because Democrats in the federal legislature have to play a different game doesn’t mean the state level ones aren’t able to get anything done.
Lest we get off track, if you go back to the beginning of this discussion, my contention is that Democrats have done a better job enacting legislation to protect workers, especially lower income workers, than Republicans. The proof is all the states that have better worker protections, did it with Democrat legislatures. What happens on the federal level may or may not matter, but Democrats haven’t had solid control of Congress for a long time, and with the little control they did, they managed to pass ACA, which is still at least something for poorer people, especially workers, and which Republicans continue to fight.
