A family dispute led to the founding of Sabian Cymbals in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1981. The products of both companies are considered amongst the best by percussionists.
Based on various interviews about the history of Zildjian & Sabian brothers splitting up, the Sabian Canada factory was originally a Zildjian 2nd site purposely placed outside of the USA.
The brothers felt the Zildjian Canada factory solved 2 problems:
1) contingency factory that wasn't affected by unionizing labor in Boston MA.
2) easier (cheaper?) export logistics to Europe market from Canada. Don't remember the exact details.
Deep link to Robert Zildjian interview talking in "polite language" about the union labor unrest as one motivation for creating the Canada factory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv30TRytOk4&t=13m28s
Another interview talked about the Europe market but I can't find that video.
That Sabian interview always stuck with me because it isn't just the big companies like Amazon, Tesla, Starbucks, etc avoiding unionization. It's also the small family companies like Zildjian that worked around unions. Another video somewhere had the other Zildjian brother (Armand) talk about the unions but he wasn't as polite.
EDIT to add another interview from Paul Francis (podcast mp3) about Zildjian opening the Canada factory in 1968 in response to the Teamsters unionization efforts in the USA. Relevant section starts at 45m20s : https://www.discussionsinpercussion.com/home/2020/2/5/162-pa...
Employers dont like instability, period. They want continuous, headache-free production. Unions can cause instability. (Whether it's justified or not is a separate matter.) So...
Of course, unions in the US are an extremely weird beast, and for all the good that some of them do, there are or were many that simply took the dues and bought nice houses for the leadership. When anti-union legislators started poking about in the 1970s there were plenty of workers all too happy to give the union the middle finger, based on their own experiences of being ignored, mistreated, or horrified by the local union. (That's not to imply that the legislators had workers' interests at heart, of course.)
It isn’t just in the US that there are weird beasts. In Australia, there is this union called the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association (SDA). They are the main union for retail and fast food employees. The employers like them because they are rather moderate and keen to reach “understandings”, plus they will fight hard to keep more radical unions off their turf. Employers would even encourage their employees to join it. For many years they were controlled by socially conservative Roman Catholics, who used the union as a political and financial base to oppose same-sex marriage, abortion, IVF, etc, despite the fact those most of their members (who skew younger and the clear majority of whom aren’t Catholic) didn’t share those views and didn’t realise their union dues were paying for views they probably didn’t share. It is only in the last decade or so that the tension between the leadership and the membership over social issues got to the point that the leadership realised they had to move to neutrality or risk losing control of the union, so they did what they had to do
Which is an interesting perspective in its own way, as for example when Volkswagen came to the US, they demanded that employees unionize as they felt it would allow greater stability by having content employees and a single entity to negotiate with.
Unions cause cost and bargaining.
If all you want is simplicity, stability and throwing money at the problem, instead of dealing with each of your employee's individual asks and try to gauge what's the most common complaint, you deal with a single entity.
Now I'm sure the US have a ton more baggage regarding unions, but we'd then come down to feelings and history, more than arguable reasons.
I skooped this article randomly, but I see it as common knowledge that as long as the mob is powerful enough, anyone with money and enough to lose will either be pray or collaborating with mobs:
https://deadlinedetroit.com/articles/9488/henry_ford_s_gangs...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
No clean hands, frankly.
Every union is different, though. Learn your history!
Each union is different. Not all of them have the above. However many unions are in areas where the business cycles affect them, some years there is more demand for their work than others and when there is a down year they can't provide stability for all members. When times are tight companies first stop building new buildings and so anyone in construction will have years of low demand.
Employers don't like to pay their employees more than the bare minimum, period. Whether that is out of greed or "just economics" is in the eyes of the beholder.
It's surprising to you that no businesses of any size like unions? It's like finding out mice don't like cats regardless of size.
Most unions think their job is to fight management though and so are full of anti-management propaganda and so workers who are well treated convince themselves they need to stick it to the evil management. Thus ensuring management and the union cannot get along.
Don't read the above as saying that management is all good. Only that unions often needless make things worse.
Which are these companies?
But like all matters of taste that's arguable, and someone will probably come along and argue it. That's my impression of how drummers view the brands though.
Zildjian
Sabian (started by Robert Zildjian)
Meinl (German)
Paiste (Swiss)