I am very naïve on this, but unions seems to always been portrayed as negative to business and I really don't understand this view.
Of course, if you are paying more money from getting the same amount of value from an employer, that is bad for business.
But this is not necessarily what can happen, giving more benefits, more stable schedule, better wages, more WLB means being more competitive in the labour market, it means retaining worker more easily. If the company is not wise enough to do it by itself, still it doesn't means that it cannot be a net positive for the company itself.
The whole idea of treating humans as leaking, opexed, robots will need to be fixed, but it can be done and it can bring benefits.
The issue employers have with unions is much less about wage bargaining an almost entirely about the duplicative work/labor unions tend to lead to. As a hypothetical, lets say you run a widget factory. Line workers at your widget factory spend 6 hour of their shift making widgets, and 2 hours of their shift packing widgets up after they have completed making their widgets. A union comes in and will say "we can have experts in widget making, and experts in packing, these are 2 jobs, people who make widgets do not have the expertise to pack, and people who pack do not have the expertise to make widgets. From now on, we will have 2 separate job roles, widget makers and widget packers, and a packer will never ever be able allowed to make widgets, and widget makes will never ever be allowed to pack widgets". The company, which used to have a staff of 8 people who did both tasks, will now need a staff of 8, 6 widget makers and 2 widget packers. Seems OK right? Well christmas comes around and there are too many widgets to be packed, last year all 8 people were packing widgets 8 hours per day around the christmas rush, and there wasn't much widget making to be done because after christmas is low on sales. The company needs to hire an additional 6 temporary widget packers to pack widget and the 6 widget makers will be either idle or working with reduced efficiency. This increases the companies expenses with no real value created.
The empirical evidence we have shows that unions consistently make these choices. There is a huge duplication of labor and responsibilities in construction unions, the trades, etc. The workers are trying to get the company to pay more money to labor, sometimes that means more increasing the pay per hour, sometimes that means increasing the total number of hours worked. I am pretty strongly in favor of germany style labor unions, sectoral barganing and labor codetermination. The caselaw and regulations around unionization in the US are bad and often lead to poor outcomes for workers and management.
If unions are good for both the company and the workers why don't companies eventually implement the petitions of unions by themselves without any external pressure?
You're making it seem like companies are too dumb to know what's best for them.
I'm in favor of unions but that there's no doubt they can be detrimental to companies and to some of the workers, who maybe prefer more risk and higher rewards.
It is a unique feature of the American landscape, this aversion to unions.
Deeply rooted in complicated history of labor in the US from what I understand.
Here in Eastern Europe labor unions were at a certain point the source of political power, both for the establishment under socialism, and for the opposition movements before/after the iron curtain dropped. So, here banning or fighting against unions is unthinkable - they are considered a “good” thing.
It’s hard to think about this labor/business tension when you realize that all thought on this subject is constantly being monitored, lobbied and influenced.
Of course, if you are paying more money from getting the same amount of value from an employer, that is bad for business.
But this is not necessarily what can happen, giving more benefits, more stable schedule, better wages, more WLB means being more competitive in the labour market, it means retaining worker more easily. If the company is not wise enough to do it by itself, still it doesn't means that it cannot be a net positive for the company itself.
The whole idea of treating humans as leaking, opexed, robots will need to be fixed, but it can be done and it can bring benefits.