I did an internship in Germany. It was an international office with workers from all over Europe and they all spoke English. One day they told me that I needed to attend their union meeting. Just by being in this internship I was in their union. Management was excluded from the meeting, but workers had to attend as part of their job duties. The law in Germany says that every company has to organize a union and pay the workers to attend the union meetings. The workers are supposed to discuss how they can do their job safer or better. Sometimes they come up with ideas that they can just implement without involving management, sometimes they have to present the idea to management for approval, sometimes they complain about pay and threaten to strike, and sometimes they have no ideas and nothing to say but they still have to meet. Doesn't matter how happy you are with your boss in Germany. The boss has to organize you into a labor union, give you a time and place to meet during working hours, and leave you alone to do it.

Germany also has "trade unions" that connect workers with similar job duties across multiple employers, but these unions are not as important as they are here, in part because the workers already have a union, why would they want two?

Anyways, it seems like a good system. There is a benefit to unions beyond just better wages. We can't have that here, though. Our union laws are the opposite of Germany. Where Germany requires the employer to organize a union, the US forbids employers from organizing unions. All unions in the US have to be from the outside, which makes them inherently hostile and needing to tax their own workers to fund themselves.

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