People complain that unions are corrupt, which of course some are and to different degrees. That's also true of managers and anyone else with political power.
That's only because the supply/demand situation of tech laborers gives us bargaining power at the moment. It won't last forever.
Tech is unique in the job market in that it's much easier to move up the value chain relative to other types of jobs. There is very much a tech underclass of easily-replaced workers. As time goes on, more and more of these sectors become commodified. IT workers used to be really highly paid, now they're replaceable. PHP was once in high demand, now it's only a little better than being a IT worker.
The question here is whether there will always be a sector for tech workers to move to where they can easily leverage themselves a seat at the table. I find it hard to believe that it'll suddenly go away anytime soon.
I suspect the workers would not have liked it. They preferred cash to illiquid equity in a questionable company, and received it.
However, if there was a basic income in this country, I think workers in a situation could indeed make that choice. If it was $10 basic wage + $10 equity OR + $10 wage now there's something to discuss because that's a more interesting trade off.
(((edit to clarify based on comments: yes I meant a $10 basic income + either ( $10 equity or $10 wage )
I didn't even comment on the parts of the story that actually made me unhappy, which was the ridiculous debt financing deal, the blatant union crushing, skipping out on pension commitments, and ultimately laying off 90% of the original work force in order to "extract value" from a mediocre junk food company which is just going to end up in bankruptcy again when they're done with it.
200M * 2000/hours per year * $10 hour = 4 trillion dollars a year.
For comparisons sake the current federal budget is about 3.8T.
A more reasonable assumption might be $5 UBI + $10 wages = the proposed $15/hr affordable living wage.
And yeah, you'd pretty much have to tax the rich and the corporations more and stop spending so much on the military to get there. But money was invented by people, I feel like generally more of it should be in the hands of the average citizen. Sure, I want a Scrooge McDuck money vault as much as anyone, but I will argue that wealth inequalities around the globe cause real harm, and a bit more wage/equity/reward flexibility in the way corporations pay non-tech workers might be an improvement.
I agree that Hostess probably didn't offer equity. However, if it did, do you think more than a tiny number of workers would have chosen equity over cash?
Workers don't get upside if the stock does well for the same reason they don't get downside when the stock tanks. They are more risk averse and have a stronger desire for liquidity; as a result they are paid cash which satisfies their preferences.
Out of all the things that make you unhappy, which things do you think wouldn't have happened if private equity allowed Hostess to die? From what I can tell, 100% of the workers would have been laid off, the pension still would have gone bankrupt and the union would no longer exist.
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100
That's the largest employee owned companies in America. There's a disproportionate number of grocery stores.