Word: union
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...some ways symbolic of the resurgent German economy. For more than a decade, exorbitant labor costs, unbending union rules and an addiction to red tape--not to mention the high price of unification with East Germany--put Germany into an economic straitjacket. BMW went through its own rough patch in the 1990s after the disastrous acquisition of Britain's Rover Group, but its fortunes have changed markedly since it ditched Rover in 2000. Production has increased steadily, and profits are buoyant. Pretax earnings last year rose 25%, to $5.5 billion, despite the soaring cost of raw materials and the strong...
...also driven some hard bargains with its workforce. It began to back away from rigid German working hours in the late 1980s, when it opened a new plant in Regensburg to produce the 3-series. Its goal even then was to decouple the union-regulated workweek from the amount of time its factory was in operation. Management made flexible working hours a condition of its investment in the plant. The demand infuriated the powerful German autoworkers union, IG Metall, but the syndicate had little choice. "Without these restrictions we wouldn't have come up with these solutions...
...Winning union approval for even greater flexibility was easier in Leipzig. In part, that's because other German automakers, particularly Volkswagen, were threatening to move some of their production outside Germany altogether because of high costs. In the end, the union agreed to extend working hours without extra pay. That has been a boon to the whole industry--and the German economy. Reithofer acknowledges that the wage restraint "has been a fundamental contribution to making Germany competitive again...
...Nagasaki, Fumio Kyuma really should have known better. On June 30, Japan's defense minister gave a speech on World War II at a university outside of Tokyo, where he told students that Japan could have easily ended up divided like its wartime ally Germany had the Soviet Union decided to invade Tokyo's defenseless northern island of Hokkaido in the closing weeks of the war. What stopped the Russians, Kyuma argued, was the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "I understand that the bombings brought the war to its end," said Kyuma. "I think it was something that...
...wage. In Victoria Park, beneath a dour-faced statue of the British monarch, Falun Gong demonstrators jostled for space with activists urging an end to political pressure on RTHK, Hong Kong's public broadcaster. As the crowd moved steadily through the streets of Causeway Bay, a popular shopping district, union representatives brushed shoulders with nationalists bearing oversized posters of Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen and bright Taiwan flags. Groups of demonstrators broke up to make way for an oversized wooden float piloted by an elderly driver hawking traditional Chinese medicine for crow's feet...