<story><title>Mercedes-Benz workforce to receive record profit-sharing bonus</title><url>https://group-media.mercedes-benz.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/Mercedes-Benz-strategy-pays-off-workforce-to-receive-record-profit-sharing-bonus.xhtml?oid=55064985</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NickC25</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;On top of that, Mercedes Benz has a corporate Supervisory Board with 1&amp;#x2F;2 of the members representing the employees.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely love that, and stuff like that would never be allowed to form here in the US.  Labor having an equal seat at the table should be seen as a good thing for the purposes of long-term sustainability, not a bad thing.  Can it have drawbacks?  Sure.  However, the flipside is that currently in most places, such as the US, Capital has &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; the seats at the table, or sometimes Labor will given a symbolic place at the proverbial kid&amp;#x27;s table, with no real ability to enact change or make their voices heard.  I applaud what Mercedes-Benz is doing here.</text></item><item><author>digdugdirk</author><text>&amp;quot;The company&amp;#x27;s management and General Works Council have jointly agreed to pay all eligible employees a special lump sum bonus of up to 7,300 euros, a figure that is even higher than the current maximum payment cap of 6,465 euros.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This General Works Council seems to be something like a separate &amp;quot;union within the company&amp;quot;, in addition to whatever union represents various workers within the organization. On top of that, Mercedes Benz has a corporate Supervisory Board with 1&amp;#x2F;2 of the members representing the employees.&lt;p&gt;Interesting how this structure has a headline like this one, vs the &amp;quot;&amp;gt;10k workers laid off from giant corporation with record profits for the past two years&amp;quot; headlines that seem to be popping up here daily.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aunche</author><text>For well developed industries, I agree that employee representation is a good thing.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, America&amp;#x27;s friendliness to capital has lead to funding companies that end up competing for software engineers. This is part of the reason why developer jobs in the US tend to pay twice as well as those in Europe.</text></comment>
<story><title>Mercedes-Benz workforce to receive record profit-sharing bonus</title><url>https://group-media.mercedes-benz.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/Mercedes-Benz-strategy-pays-off-workforce-to-receive-record-profit-sharing-bonus.xhtml?oid=55064985</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NickC25</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;On top of that, Mercedes Benz has a corporate Supervisory Board with 1&amp;#x2F;2 of the members representing the employees.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely love that, and stuff like that would never be allowed to form here in the US.  Labor having an equal seat at the table should be seen as a good thing for the purposes of long-term sustainability, not a bad thing.  Can it have drawbacks?  Sure.  However, the flipside is that currently in most places, such as the US, Capital has &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; the seats at the table, or sometimes Labor will given a symbolic place at the proverbial kid&amp;#x27;s table, with no real ability to enact change or make their voices heard.  I applaud what Mercedes-Benz is doing here.</text></item><item><author>digdugdirk</author><text>&amp;quot;The company&amp;#x27;s management and General Works Council have jointly agreed to pay all eligible employees a special lump sum bonus of up to 7,300 euros, a figure that is even higher than the current maximum payment cap of 6,465 euros.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This General Works Council seems to be something like a separate &amp;quot;union within the company&amp;quot;, in addition to whatever union represents various workers within the organization. On top of that, Mercedes Benz has a corporate Supervisory Board with 1&amp;#x2F;2 of the members representing the employees.&lt;p&gt;Interesting how this structure has a headline like this one, vs the &amp;quot;&amp;gt;10k workers laid off from giant corporation with record profits for the past two years&amp;quot; headlines that seem to be popping up here daily.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zackmorris</author><text>Allowed? We can choose not to work for companies that ban workers from their boards. Which is pretty much all of the big companies in the US.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s funny that we have a dozen different open source software licenses that are all some version of &amp;quot;how can we give this to you even freer&amp;quot; but we have no notion of what an equitable work contract looks like. Until that changes, things will never, ever, get better for workers.</text></comment>