Or, even easier, just pay your workers well, give them decent benefits, and do union busting to prevent them from forming in your company. Why outsource treating workers well to a bureaucratic middleman when you can just treat workers well yourself? (keep in mind this is for small businesses, not mega-corporations)
> Otherwise, substituting some compensation with part-ownership makes it so that the interests of big unions align more with the interests of other stakeholders.
Wouldn't that corrupt union leadership over time?
Never going to happen, there will always be a point where the company will try to minimize worker salaries as far as it can get away with.
>Wouldn't that corrupt union leadership over time?
No, you would pay employees using profits in part, and implicate them into the decision-making process. That way the incentives of union-leadership, workers, and stakeholders align. You can also push for union structures that minimize the power of union leadership and instead give it to the rank and file. Basically, making your company a bit more into a worker-coop fixes the issue.
I disagree. Not every company is public, first of all. So not every company is beholden to shareholders who demand endless growth at any cost. There are lots of private companies that are content with the size they are at, and with the revenue they are generating and aren't tempted to start squeezing their employees.
I think the point is that whether it is a "nice employer" or a union, the company will be less competitive. This strikes me as a tragedy of the commons which would have to be resolved by legislation to force all market participants to offer the same benefits. (Of course, the difficulty then are participants putside of your legal system, but taroffs could hopefully capture this detail.)
In this scenario, there is no loss in competitiveness. The union bargains for pay when there is profit, and when there is no profit it bargains for capital. At the limit, when the workers own the company entirely, then their own self-interest will be to reduce their salary in order to protect their equity. In this sense, their salaries will fall in line with what they would earn in another company, or slightly higher, but they will have massively more assets and equity than if they didn't have a union.
Of course, in reality, if there was no growth there would be bigger problems, but you get the gist.
I really fail to see how unions in this scenario make the company less competitive, or create worse conditions for the workers than without the union.