I think unions and companies have closer working relationships in Germany and Scandinavia, partly because they start from more similar ideological perspectives.

I think unions and companies have closer working relationships in Germany and Scandinavia, partly because they start from more similar ideological perspectives. Scandinavian business in particular isn't nearly as hardline market-oriented; they're market-oriented of course, but tend to still use vaguely socialist rhetoric internally, care a lot about projecting a view that they take care of their workers, want to maintain good relations with their unions and avoid conflict, etc. Unions, in the other direction, are also less confrontational, and tend to use back channels and meetings rather than activist measures. The economies overall are sort of run on a general corporatist-consensus model (in the old sense of the word "corporatism"). If that model works badly it could produce corruption and smoky backroom deals, but when run well, I think it tends to produce more commonsense consensus solutions, versus the very legalistic solutions that the American industry-union standoff produces, where everything has to be precisely specified because neither side trusts the other. One interesting feature is that much of Scandinavia is both more socialist and more marketized than the US. For example, the Danish public-transit system is heavily state-funded, but operated by private contractors, not public-sector employees. The idea seems to be to maintain a high level of public services paid for by taxes, but to actually operate those services via market-based bidding.