This is wrong.
This is like saying that the whole relationship of employer/employee is inherently hostile because the employer can threaten wages/livelihood as negotiation leverage.
Unions are kind of like HR that serves the employees
Unions almost never negotiate in the long-term interest of a business, they're collectively overly-short-term-focused cash/productivity drags on a business. If unions were truly long-term focused they'd be negotiating things like employee equity, but you almost never see that. Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.
> Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.
Do you have any source for this? It seems hard to believe but I haven't been able to find any studies yet. The best I've found so far says unionization has no impact on business survival: https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/unionbf.pdf.
I'm also skeptical that you could really study this effectively, since non-unionized employees tend to benefit when unions are formed elsewhere in their industry. You'd need to compare a group of companies that unionized against a group of similar companies in the same time and place that didn't unionize and also were completely unaffected by the mass unionization of the first population.
That’s a lot of hand waving around an assertion conspicuously missing any supporting logic or data. Do you have any citations? Say, for example, a study comparing the actions of unions versus senior management over time? It’s not hard to find examples of unions accepting cuts to help the future of a business during a bad economic downturn, or executives focused on juicing the share price before they sell, so I think something rigorous would be better than trading vague generalities.
Also I'm not sure what "supporting logic" is, I presented my logic and you can disagree with it if you want (usually using different logic, which you haven't presented), but there's no such thing as "supporting logic".
That’s paywalled but the abstract is talking about stock market pricing, not the health of the company. Lower equity would make intuitive sense if workers have better compensation, but that doesn’t mean the business is less competitive or likely to survive.
> I don't think you understand what the price of a stock means ...
Well, the context here was your assertion that unions don’t act in the “long-term interest of a business”. Now, most people understand that share prices are bets on the future value, but also that it’s not a direct relationship because there’s an inherent tension between long-term and short-term interests. That plays out in questions about how much or whether to pay dividends (which has seen a big multigenerational shift in investor preferences), and whether a move which raises share prices is a long-term detriment.
We’ve seen a lot of the latter discussed here lately with tech companies doing broad layoffs to satisfy activist investors, despite research suggesting that companies making unforced layoffs tend to underperform over the long term.
