> In practice though I'm skeptical.
> They really seemed to view workers vs mgmt as an adversarial zero sum game.
That doesn't really affect the feasibility or otherwise of running an ESOP as a union shop. On the contrary, I imagine that if you view the entire thing as zero-sum, you might be more prone to think about what is going to happen to your stock's value if you strike, or take steps that negatively effect efficiency.
If you're not thinking zero-sum, you can use some pretty handwavey logic for thinking the next bonus you demand doesn't really negatively effect people like your coworkers or the shareholders, since you're merely being compensated for your inherent greatness that will inevitably lead to the company's greater success, blah blah... congratulations, you appear to be in senior management.
> Meanwhile Toyota were developing their production system using the kaizen principle of bottom up continuous improvement. Unions played a huge role in making US autos uncompetitive against the Japanese brands for a long time.
It doesn't seem unfathomable to me that a unionized company could develop something like the Toyota Production System. The German companies tout having learned from Toyota, and I don't know how true that is, but the successful, modern German car companies are all unionized. (in the greater context, Tesla is still nonunion and didn't appear to pay any attention to TPS when they brought their production online, which is maybe interesting)