It is not semantics, because the statement that line level employees are banned from being on the board of directors is false. And that is important because the reason line level employees are not found on boards is that it rarely makes economic sense for a company's owners to put a line level employee on the board. And that is important because then the solution would have to be legislation.
So the conversation becomes, should the government(s) in the US force businesses to place line level employees on the board (if the line level employees want to be on the board), and under what parameters?
Your entire line of comments seems to miss the entire conversation.
In Germany, they do find it economically viable and important for line level employees to have direct representation on the company board. Talking about the CEO or other management classes being on the board is missing the conversation. Suggesting that because US companies don't believe in the economic value is missing the conversation. Suggesting that people are saying that this type of board composition is illegal is also missing the conversation. No one said it's illegal, but it's equally not a legal requirement either like it is in other places.
The conversation is that this composition doesn't exist, by and large, in the US, and people think it should. People seem to believe that it does have value to the business.
So yes, it does seem like you're creating semantic arguments because your points miss the conversation semantically.
Europe has sectoral bargaining (whole-industry unions) and codetermination (workers on boards) because they're running on newer legal systems than the US. It'd probably work here, but we have older corporate unions (per-company unions) which causes unions and management to fight each other more.
On the other hand, we do have higher productivity, but not having codetermination probably isn't the reason for that.
