[yzhengyu]

You should know that you are barking up the wrong tree. Both Japan and Germany are both famous for having labour friendly environments. The latter should be lauded for moving its manufacturing into the 21st century, with unions and SMEs playing a huge part in ensuring this happens.

Unions are just organisations. In the Nordics and many other European countries, unions proactively work alongside employers to ensure that the workforce remains highly productive, etc.

[seanmcdirmid]

That unions work with businesses to ensure harmony and productivity is the idea behind the CPC-run "unions" in China (I'm a mandatory member, yeh). I believe that unions should be somewhat antagonistic to keep the labor market a bit dynamic (so progress can be made); too much harmony is a big warning sign in many societies.

Speaking of such, Japan was big into factory robotics up until the mid-90s, when they took a break to take advantage of China coming online and the cheap labor that came with that. Its crazy how China set robotics back by about 10 or so years. With Chinese labor becoming more expensive, I'm sure we'll see more progress; not to mention domestic bots, in-the-field bots, and drones.

However, this is a good question: how to deal with surplus labor that gets displaced by robots? We might want to move more slowly for the sake of social stability, that 50% savings meant some guy might be out of a job. I'm not a Luddite, but we should definitely think carefully about the best way to proceed.

[dctoedt]

> this is a good question: how to deal with surplus labor that gets displaced by robots? We might want to move more slowly for the sake of social stability

I doubt the answer is to move slowly. But you've put your finger on a very real problem that needs to be addressed. To use a household analogy, innovators can be like cooks who produce wonderful meals but don't give much thought to the resulting mess in the kitchen.

[yzhengyu]

Well, I am in total agreement with you, since I come from a country (Singapore) where the unions are so "completely in harmony" with employers that they might as well not exist.