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Comment by piker | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: are there good examples of unionized companies that continue to innovate post unionization? Unionization seems at the surface like the end stage of disruptor where stakeholders begin jockeying for slices of a pie that now grows linearly.

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Naver (the dominant search engine in South Korea) seems innovative to me. They successfully launched e-commerce project in 2018, which became #1 in 2019 beating the incumbent (which is owned by eBay). It's as if Google launched Amazon competitor and won within a year.

Remember that correlation does not imply causation - even if it's true that innovative companies tend to not have unions, it might be (for example) because younger, smaller industries tend to be innovating faster and also haven't developed to the point of unionization yet.

It was actually a question somewhat about correlation. I.e., unionization is a symptom that signals the end stage, not something that causes it.

The entire economy of Germany

Compare that to the economy Germany could have had.

Is this the beginning of the end of Google?

What, they run out of money?

I don't think that's the kind of "end" they mean.

IBM and HP haven't run out of money either.

Haven't we been hearing about the beginning to the end for years now?

Yeah and they’ve killed off dozens of projects, profits and revenue are down, innovation is long out the window and the quality of their products has gone to hell.

I would also like to know.

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