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Comment by _bent | Hacker News Reader

this doesn't happen because the union is very much interested in keeping the company afloat

The union is interested in keeping the union afloat. If the union sees no other opportunity it can become interested in keeping the company float, but you have not made the case for your statement to be a truism.

Consider an actors union — actor unions have famously walked away from companies without much regard for the longevity of the company they walked away from on numerous occasions. They know in that line of work there is always another company looking to hire them, so there isn't a whole lot of incentive to care about individual companies.

It does happen just like bloated management also makes a company less flexible even though managers don't want the company to fail.

They wouldn't intentionally push it to fail, but they could easily push it very close to failing and then something else pushes it over the edge, happens time and time again.

Do you have some recent examples?

I was under the impression that in recent times unions had been mostly disbanded, with any remaining being in government that can't fail like a business can. You might have a fair point that we've started seeing a return of them in the last few years (article being an example of such), but it seems much too soon to see them rise up to have the power spoken of in this thread. That only happens as the union becomes more and more comfortable pushing back.

Am I misinformed — that unions have actually been popular in the private sector over the past long while in order to trigger what you speak of recently?

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