Why do they prefer spending time and money in anti-union law firms instead of investing in their workers? Also why are labor rights up to discussion in these times?
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It is not a question of labour rights. It’s a question of labour costs. Unionized shops cost the owners more, both directly (wages) and indirectly (admin, benefits).
Most employers will do a cost benefit analysis with respect to the cost of the Union organizing their staff, versus payment to a firm that will keep the organizing efforts at bay, and proceed accordingly.
It is interesting that, in my country, the only sector where Unionism is flourishing is in the public sector. It used to be that government employment was a trade off . . . you made a little less money than the private sector in exchange for benefits that were good, but job security that was GREAT. These days, they still have great job security, but now wages and benefits are FAR better than what is to be had in the private sector. It’s completely unsustainable.
In many cases it may cost less to commission a small private company for a short period of time to union bust and break up unions even for a large fee temporarily, as opposed to having to long-term increase employee wages.
In addition to that, ceding more ground to the union gives employees more control over how the business is run overall. The company wants to be the one holding the pursestrings, rather than lending some of that say over to employees, because the company’s interests are in raising capital for their shareholders. The employees interests are in having money for basic needs of life, as well as having more employees so they aren’t doing more labor for the same pay. The interests of both groups are in conflict, so employees do not want to allow the union to have more say, so it is in the interest of the company to do whatever they can to limit union/employee power.
Because it costs a lot less.
Look at it this way, a while back where I work, we worked 8.5 hours a day, and had an unpaid lunch. As the economy started to tank, right before the 2008 recession, after a couple of expensive attempts to upgrade our facility they needed to make some cost cutting measures.
One of the things they did was cut our hours from getting a full 8 hour a day paycheck to having us only work 8 hours with an unpaid 30 minute lunch. So we were only getting 7.5 hours a day of pay.
That 30 minutes a day that they no longer were paying us saved them over 1 million dollars a year in payroll for our a bit over 1.1k employee factory.
It’s simply much more cost effective to pay a small amount now than it is to greatly increase your payroll costs.
Lots of answers saying “it’s cheaper in the long run” and that’s true, but not the whole story.
Publicly traded companies are not owned by the people who run them. They are owned by *the shareholders*. These shareholders have rights protected by law. They have rights to protect their profits, and can determine company policy based on those rights. This is what “Capitalism” (with a big ‘C’) means.
Unions forming and striking and winning encourages *other* businesses and industries to do so as well. If one big strike wins significant concessions from a strike, others will follow. This could cost the shareholders across their entire investment portfolio.
This is why it’s worthwhile to hire anti-union firms, even if the cost is more than conceding to the workers. If they don’t nip the problem in the bud, it could have a domino effect and lose them millions.
It’s not just money. It’s about who makes decisions at the company. A labor union is like another HR department, but external. It can be difficult to run a company with another layer of management.
Because an anti union firm won’t take the business to a place it fails like a union can and does. Look at yellow trucking company. The union demands got more and more taxing until it got to the point that their customers abandoned them and the company died.
Not all unions are healthy, and often lead a company away from viability.
Its not just cost.
Union IS NOT JUST a wage negotiator.
Think about as owning a house, the tenant comes and goes, you can choose to raise / lower rent, but you can also do alot of other things, like reducing the number of tenants.
But with Union, suddenly all the tenant banded together, if you piss one off, they all stop paying rent, and they even makes new tenants stop paying rent. and there’s nothing you can do to fix this situation except dealing with their demands.
If I was a employee, I would want to unionized. If I was a business owner, I would employ every god damn method there is to bust unions.
This is not a struggle for wages, but to gain / lose control.
Did you know the one thing Karl Marx hated the most was unions? They allow capitalism to be sustainable. Capitalist also hate unions because it allows employees actual power
It is cheaper.
Hiring a bunch of Pinkertons to beat workers up who complain or hiring a PR firm to make anti-union tweets or similar tactics cost money, but not as much as paying workers what they want and deserve.
Even if it costs more at the moment, the cost of paying your workers a living wage adds up over months and years.
Also ant-union actions can be localized. You only have to spend money where things look worst, while once you have a union in place that will spread to the entire workforce. It will even spread to competitors and thus on occasions entire industries will band together to stamp out workers rights and employers will act in solidarity with one another against a common enemy: the workers.
Rather on factory making a loss due to not giving workers what they want than an entire industry making slightly less profit. the rich will take care of their own.
It’s nowhere near 1:1.
In addition to the labor cost being enormously expensive (ratcheting up) vs the value of the labor (going down because of protectionism), and forced inefficiencies in the labor chain, if a company has to constantly worry about carrying finances and payroll through strikes, they have to constantly run fat and decrease investment to keep cash on hand.
That’s bad for the economy, bad for the company.
Think about it this way – would any business rather pay off a mafia protection scheme if the mafia is constantly asking for more money and threatening to destroy the business if you don’t pay them off, or would the business rather donate to the police to try to get law enforcement better resources to cut that out?
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