Apropos of nothing, one observation I’ve heard people who used to be involved in labour negotiations here in Iceland is “people with American brain worms don’t know how to negotiate with unions”
(Paraphrasing, since the original is always in Icelandic.)
This is noticable in that you can guess with reasonable certainty, which company is run by an executive trained in the US just by how badly they are handling union contract negotiations
Americans only seem to understand eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation - anything less than an outright 100% win and metaphorically stamping on the unions' testicles is a loss to them. This is why they are completely useless at negotiating with unions!
The Germans are much more sensible. There, the unions are not regarded as enemies, but rather as partners with whom the company can have a productive dialogue.
