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I lived and worked in Iceland for five years, and they have a virtually 100% unionization rate. It's handled at the industry level rather than individual compan
by deong 9y ago
I lived and worked in Iceland for five years, and they have a virtually 100% unionization rate. It's handled at the industry level rather than individual companies, but when you start a job, you are pretty much automatically enrolled in the union relevant for your work. A little money comes out of your paycheck, and the union is there in case you have problems.
The unions also provide other benefits. For example, most of them own summer houses that any member can reserve to go spend a weekend away. You rarely hear the average Icelander on either side of the worker/manager divide complain about them at all. Everyone more or less views them as beneficial.
Once or twice a year they make headlines when one group of workers or another feels aggrieved and it escalates to a brief strike in some small sector of the economy, but on the whole, I don't think many Icelanders would trade their system of employment for ours.
Like so many other areas, I think the problem is that we in the US are just so very much worse at running our society and country than most other comparable countries. Look at health care. No one liked the ACA; no will will like the AHCA or whatever the Republicans pass. The problem isn't that it's impossible to do a decent job at a health care system. The problem is that we specifically suck. Put us in charge of anything, and we'll turn it into something awful that doesn't work, but provides some brief period of outsized shareholder value.
- jacobsenscott 9y agoThe population of the US is 100x more than Iceland. There are a lot of well run small cities in the US. Iceland's policies would never scale up.
- Retra 9y agoWhy not?
- sqeaky 9y ago"It wouldn't scale up" is common conservative response to progressive or liberal comparisons that involve suggestions of doing it (anything) some other way. So while the EU plugs away making incremental improvements each year we keep jumping around in fits and spurts forward and backward. There is still a strong belief of American Exceptionalism even in fields where we are clearly inferior. Look at Healthcare Europe figured something out that we didn't and their is cheaper and better.
- Retra 9y agoWell, there could be legitimate reason that it couldn't scale up, but... "necessity is the mother of invention" and I don't feel it should be left at that. (Particularly on HN, where people seem to take inordinate pride in their ability to find ways of scaling things up.)
- delazeur 9y agoRight. If someone is going to make that argument, they should be expected to at least explain why something won't scale up.
- jacobsenscott 9y agoIceland is demographically homogenous (over 90% Icelandic), and 64% of their population lives in one city. It is fairly easy for that kind of grouping of people to reach agreement on things because they have a lot of common interests, and a shared history and culture. As you "scale up" in diversity, population, and geographic distribution the set of things people can agree on falls off dramatically.
- deong 9y agoI love how people like to explain things to me as though a wikipedia article presents something over actual knowledge and experience. Iceland has a very divisive political system at the moment. The ruling government has been a coalition of the Progressive and Independence parties, roughly the european versions of the social conservative and pro-business factions of the Republican party respectively. Though it should be said that no one in Iceland really touches quite how regressive American social conservatives are. And, of course, being (sort-of) Scandinavian, there's a massively strong Social Democrat/Pirate/Left-green contingent in the Reykjavik area that can't stand the agenda of the main ruling parties. Iceland doesn't function because they manage to get people to agree more than Americans do. There are something like 13 political parties in an average election, and they stand in bitter opposition to one another across a huge variety of issues. Iceland functions because they make their government function anyway. Nothing about being small makes it easier for two opposing parties to somehow figure out a way to get the damned bills paid. You could replace the entire American republic with Donald Trump and Barack Obama, and we'd get no more done than we do today, because the government isn't trying to solve problems. They're trying to preserve whatever problem is most plausibly the fault of the other party.
- kilotaras 9y ago"German autobahn system would never work in US, it has 2x population and 25x area". - Someone in 1955, shortly before Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956
- taway_1212 9y ago> The population of the US is 100x more than Iceland. Actually, it's 1000x.
- jacobsenscott 9y agoOops. Thanks for the correction.
- aeorgnoieang 9y agoComparing the US to Iceland is an extremely unfair comparison.
- losteric 9y agoThe US political system is inherently divisive, its no surprise we struggle with social cohesion required for a mature stable capitalist democracy. We need new political platforms focused on consensus-based policies. Not distinguishing our groups from "the other"
- puranjay 9y agoI'm always skeptical whenever someone parades a Scandinavian country as an example of anything. The nature of their economies (Norway's massive oil wealth, for example) and the size of their populations means that lessons from these countries are rarely applicable to the US, China, India or other large countries.