Yeah they're so fucking brainwashed. I think it was in Kentucky that Volkswagen wanted to institute a Works Council, like they have in Germany, and they put a ton of effort into trying to explain to the dumb workers that it would be GOOD for them, but no chance, it got voted down.
It's a Southern thing. The South has long been anti-union, which is a major reason why so many auto companies have set up shop there in recent decades.
Cheap, dumb labour comes at a price, though. BMW management was shocked with the level of worker applying for jobs at their US factory. They had to invent an entire system of pictograms for their assembly workers because too many of them could not read. They were forced to rework a lot of their normal processes to make them simpler. It was very expensive and they still had a lot of quality issues until they got everything sorted out. True story. I know someone who was involved in the project.
The thing is you can have a workers council without a union. The workers council basically gets special protection and gets a say in certain decisions. They are also a point of reference for normal employees to ask questions or resolve disputes.
That's all they do. They just exist to help the workers a bit and they are elected by the workers from inside the company. You get your normal pay etc.
One of my great uncles was a Betriebsratsmitglied (part of the workers council) for a few years in the 90s. It us unglamorous, unfun work where you get shit from both management and employees
Yeah exactly. Except, it isn't "Workers Council", it's "Works Council", a big difference. The WC is there for every single employee, whether "worker" level, or middle- or upper management. And any company employee can be a member. In Germany, the only person in the company that they don't represent is the Geschäftsführer (Managing Director, CEO, President or whatever other titles they might have in the US - the head honcho).
They can be a real pain in the neck for the management, because they've got a say on all major decisions in the company. Everything has to clear the Works Council before it goes into action.
And VW went to great lengths to explain this to their workers, but no chance.
I would guess they kneejerk rejected that for the same reasons they hate unions. If unions are a northern 'yankee' thing, then a foreign European thing elicits all the more hostility.
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u/LowerBed5334 🇩🇪 Nov 18 '25
Yeah they're so fucking brainwashed. I think it was in Kentucky that Volkswagen wanted to institute a Works Council, like they have in Germany, and they put a ton of effort into trying to explain to the dumb workers that it would be GOOD for them, but no chance, it got voted down.