> All they get in return is a salary that is above industry average.
I've always wondered if that's actually true. Typically, unions form around well established businesses that are already dominating their market where the employees can clearly see the amount of money being made hand over fist.
This works great for employees whenever things are going great but cripples the company from adapting when things are going poorly. Hostess was a decent example of that.
In other words, Unions basically seem to form to take advantage of a good situation so when they're able to extract higher salaries from the company it's because they are already at very successful companies.
That would seem to imbalance the sample data because you'd need to compare them to all of the other non-unionized equivalently successful companies for a real comparison rather than the entire industry including small players.
Hostess is a really bad example for why unions are bad. Hostess suffered from several non-union related problems such as repeatedly selling off profitable assets, failure to update their product line to keep up with trends, and repeated raises for management while the company continued to decline [0]. I can't find a relevant article to site right now but iirc the unions had already made significant concessions previously (I think it was during Hostess' previous bankruptcy). Hostess failed for many reasons and mismanagement was at least as big a problem as labour costs.
>This works great for employees whenever things are going great but cripples the company from adapting when things are going poorly. Hostess was a decent example of that.
Hostess was a prime example of management making a slew of terrible decisions and then trying to foist the results of their failure on to the workers while giving themselves fat bonuses.
Towards the end the deal they were offered was so shit that they didn't care that striking made the company go under. And why should they? If the company goes under they just go and get another job.
The private equity firm that got in on that deal with a view to union busting for profit got everything it deserved when they lost their money.
I've always wondered if that's actually true. Typically, unions form around well established businesses that are already dominating their market where the employees can clearly see the amount of money being made hand over fist.
This works great for employees whenever things are going great but cripples the company from adapting when things are going poorly. Hostess was a decent example of that.
In other words, Unions basically seem to form to take advantage of a good situation so when they're able to extract higher salaries from the company it's because they are already at very successful companies.
That would seem to imbalance the sample data because you'd need to compare them to all of the other non-unionized equivalently successful companies for a real comparison rather than the entire industry including small players.