Your statement isn't false but it isn't the norm. Unionized employees have much higher retention rates and that comes with better skill growth within an organization which generally leads to a more competitive entity. The modern market driven employment process causes massive long term inefficiencies while optimizing for short term valuation which can increase debt accessibility but generally lowers long term value. I think this is a wider discussion however and it'd be better to focus any examination of unions on the employee outcomes who are effectively the consumers of union.
Whether a company prospers or fails the employees working for that company will, in nearly all circumstances, have much better quality of employment while that company lasts. I'd argue that long term company health is supported by unionization but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
> I'd argue that long term company health is supported by unionization
This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
> but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
I've no idea what you mean by a cultural rejection - which culture are you talking about?
>It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
this is basically a tautology so it's a useless statement. Water for a human can bring them back to life, drown them, or tear their body apart. of course context, intent, and factors matter.
But in general, unions are good for a traditional company health: happy workers -> more productivity -> better products. Us being in this turmoil where we aren't fousing on better products doesn't change that.
You've dismissed what I said and then immediately fell victim to it. I don't think you can assume unions create happier workers, nor that happier workers create better products. Unions can also just make comfortable jobsworths. There is no guarantee of anything there.
This is one of those things that's hard to spot from an un-unionised standpoint. You have hard-working, driven workers who sometimes suffer unfairnesses that a union would solve. So unions look good, because your workers are hard-working and driven, and it's all upside.
A decade of unionisation might look very different. For example, the UK in the 1970s briefly moved to a 3 day working week[0] because of coal miner strikes that meant there wasn't enough power in the country. Not all examples are this extreme, partly because we learned from that experience, it's worth thinking of things more objectively, outside of the current context, and analysing the pros and cons of both positions.
> I've no idea what you mean by a cultural rejection - which culture are you talking about?
Eh, I grew up in the states and unions were heavily demonized there. I tend to couch my words quite defensively due to that - my apologies.
> This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
I agree that this isn't a guarantee, there are both bad unions and some good unions that do ill for what they perceive to be good reasons - however, generally speaking, increasing job security and tamping down on companies' instinct to turn to layoffs will usually benefit companies. My experience in the workforce is that larger companies use layoffs as a frequent tool for stock price manipulation when they're having a bad quarter to appear "lean" - and while the markets do respond positively to that it generally comes at the expense of long term company health.
This is definitely a case where both unions and companies can be in the wrong - but it seems that companies are much more often in the wrong. Long tenured employees are quite valuable and layoffs should be a tool used in the extremes to account for overgrowth and shouldn't be happening multiple times in the same decade unless a company is in severely poor health.
Whether a company prospers or fails the employees working for that company will, in nearly all circumstances, have much better quality of employment while that company lasts. I'd argue that long term company health is supported by unionization but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.