alt Hacker NewsTo an extent. There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone. We saw this a couple years ago with Yellow Trucking.
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I think there's a false perception that unions negotiate against the companies best interest.
Unions negotiate for a bigger slice of the same pie against leadership, executives, and shareholders/owners.
They have the same incentives as those to see the pie grow, but band together to negotiate that their pie be bigger and those of the above smaller than what would have been otherwise.
Most of the time when it results in squeezing the company itself it's because leadership wasn't willing to share downsides.
And this is the primary reason for unions. When things go well, leadership is rarely willing to share upsides. When things go bad, leadership is often unwilling to share downsides. Workers join union to pressure leadership in sharing both upsides and downsides.
They got ... $700 million bailout from the government and put part of the blame on not being able to secure a $50 million benefits package?
Yellow was in massive debt due to poor management decisions and the union fought against a move that would have combined driver seniority lists from various companies they managed, which they suspected was going to be used to cut people's jobs .
The union did what it thought was best for all its members, and the company was in so much debt it couldn't figure out how to fulfill those needs another way.
This is not a "see unions are bad" example.
Yeah, it was the Unionization that did them, not the fact they were running a poorly-organized, filthy, low-morale operation…
There is always a chance that management's misguided choices impact the business too heavily and drive the company under or at least greatly decrease the value of their output.
Yes, because companies never go out of business or kill products for no reason under our glorious people's free market. Google, famously, never ends good products for no reason.
Since that harms the union members the it wouldn't make sense for them to do that intentionally.
I don't think workers are to blame when it the business who makes the deals both with the employees and other business.
If I make a series of bad deals running my company and my employees take up collection action to demand a reasonable market rate increase in pay my business didn't fail because of collective action. It failed because I failed as ab businessman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Corporation#cite_note-W...
If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.