Germany, and yes if I go to southern countries, Portugal my home country, alongside the other ones, there is a certain flexibility between the law, unions, and what actually happens at the construction site, unless someone does a complaint to the respective goverment authority responsible for checking worker conditions.

I can also add that Scadinavian countries, and UK tend to be similar to Germany.

Naturally all of them have black sheeps that ignore good work conditions if they can manage to, that is why work inspections are also a thing.

Al

I mean what happens is skilled workers from poorer countries (Croatia in my case) move to richer EU countries, then we have nobody to perform construction - and now we have issued work Visas for 5% of the population basically. And you see newspaper stories of these people basically being treated like slave labor (crammed in small apartments, completely dependent on the visa provider, often abused). Just a few days ago there was another story about an immigrant worker being raped by her employer - also an immigrant that was just done serving his previous rape sentence. And plenty of stories of these people not being paid for months, documents being held, etc.

The unions have no standing because theres nobody left to be a part of the union - most people already left for Germany/Switzerland/etc. So Germany is just riding on the EU migration for now - but considering population dynamics - that's a short wave.

I wish NYC could suck out cheaper construction labour from the likes of Missisippi, maybe Second Avenue Subway could actually be built on time and on budget in that case. Right now, expensive local labour has the city by the balls