Maybe it’s worth reiterating that the unions and legal frameworks didn’t just happen “because unions.” And unions weren’t always (never were) guiltless entities. It was always a fight. The past is full of incidents to be horrified and emboldened by learning.
Edit-there have been long periods where seemingly nothing can possibly change. Then enough backlash is raised against another side (even the status quo) and things change.
There's different types of unions, those in Europe tend to be different from the unions the US used to have (and perhaps still have).
Unions in my country (Netherlands) do not protect the individual. You do not get hired via a union (free job from a "friend") nor does the union protect you from getting fired. The union is only there to protect collective interests. For example, a massive degradation in contract terms for all workers.
In the Netherlands, strikes are extremely rare because of a unique system called the "Polder Model", it's a triangle of government, employers and unions coming to yearly wide sweeping agreements on things like taxes, pensions, employment and termination terms, the like.
It has provided an extreme degree of stability for decades in a row. Simply put, it's a system that suppresses extremes. Nobody really wins or loses.
I have to admit though that this once well working system is largely hollowed out by now. Under the pressures of globalization, power has shifted slowly but surely towards the government-employers pair.
It seems worldwide the working class (and to a large degree the middle class) has been abandoned by both politics and employers.
“In the case of less well-intentioned towns, matters get only worse. In some locations, companies would compensate workers with a scrip—a monetary substitute that was valid only at stores owned by that same company”
Source: https://explorethearchive.com/company-towns?amp=1
I actually respect he French attitude and willingness to stand up for their rights and way of life. We can endlessly debate whether they take it too far but in the backdrop of the rest of the world doing fuck all, I see it as a positive.
Sure, I didn’t actually expect an off-hand remark like that to be taken as a serious comment on the French labour situation. (It’s... complicated, seems to have no good solutions, and I have mixed feelings about it given that France is one of the few places in Western Europe that has actual, genuine socialists rather than social democrats, but yes, the fact that there does seem to be a serious discussion going on, with a decent range of options and real power to enact them, makes up for a lot of my gripes about the quality of the arguments used.)
The point was that while Europe, as a rule, does lean towards more labour regulation than the US, the specifics vary so much that this is about the only useful generalization you make about it. The rest heavily depends on the country, and even geographical proximity doesn’t really play into it. (But you would know all about that, I expect.)
True, it's complicated, but I can offer the counter generalization that the US view on European worker protection is dramatically overstated.
Case in point, Germany did not have a minimum wage...AT ALL...until 2015. In the Netherlands, there's an entire class of workers on "zero hours" contracts, which give said workers none of the traditional protections.
Protections that even in the best of cases, an indefinite work contract situation, are strongly hollowed out by now.
