Suggesting businesses are the frail side of the equation is absurd. If you ever talk to anyone stressed out by being unemployed, by applying for jobs, by worrying about leaving a terrible job but staying because of risk and transaction costs, this would be quite obvious. So strong is the business side, that business in many industries can afford to be quite terrible to their workers for a long long time.

Regarding your other point, unions can also increase salaries by getting workers a larger piece of the pie. Not sure why you left out this obvious aspect of any negotiation?

Thats because you are looking at the businesses that survive, not the ones that die off. 8/10 businesses fail in 5~10 year range.

The fact that you havent seen people stressed out for their business running into the ground is entirely due to not talking to people that have businesses that can be run into the ground.

> Regarding your other point, unions can also increase salaries by getting workers a larger piece of the pie. Not sure why you left out this obvious aspect of any negotiation?

Because that is a labor theory of value proposition. The pie does not work that way: the moment a businesses loses its competitive returns due to higher demands, it will stop investing capital unto itself and remain stagnant, while the capital goes to areas where it does not have such restrictions.

Companies compete with each other fiercely, and a company that has workers that cant unionize will very much welcome such problems on their competitors!

Competition among companies is not so tough, because many employees can't easily move cities or countries to find another job, but companies can (and do) always import workers from all over the world, or outsource projects.

When it is tough, companies collude so that they can keep salaries down (see Google & co).

Negotiating as part of a group is not about supply and demand, it's about reaching a fair agreement between a specific company and a specific group of workers. Nobody cares about supply and demand on the market, most people would rather have a stable place to work and get decent raises if the company is doing well, instead of all the profits going to the management and shareholders.

I'll have to ask for a more objective criteria to say competition is not tough. Businsses are very hard to bring about to profitability and sustainability. And they are vulnerable to market wages and capital returns just like any worker.

I agree that there is a different flexibility of labor and capital, but unions do not make labor and capital more flexible or inflexible. If anything, it makes labor inflexible and affects capital in the short term.

> Negotiating as part of a group is not about supply and demand, it's about reaching a fair agreement between a specific company and a specific group of workers. Nobody cares about supply and demand on the market, most people would rather have a stable place to work and get decent raises if the company is doing well, instead of all the profits going to the management and shareholders.

That sounds all good and well, but the union's interests are not its worker's interest. Its another organization that can feed of workers. Unless they make the pie bigger, they eat a generous slice, and if the company goes bust they will not eat at all. Unions have strong incentives to work in tandem with the company than with the worker.

Start-ups are very hard to bring to profitability and sustainability. An existing business, once off the ground can usually live for a long time unless the management team really screws up or their market gets disrupted. Even in these cases they can drastically reduce their costs by firing personnel and limp along to better times.

There are also huge conglomerates which gobble up smaller brands, e.g. Kraft Heinz, Time Warner, Alphabet, 3M, etc. They couldn't give a fuck about fragility.

Established businesses are in no way fragile. It's so ridiculous having to read this type of defensive argument.

Employees are a bunch of peons for the big corps, but they shouldn't try to organise because it will be somehow worse for them, right. Any type of group dynamic will not perfectly represent the interests of the group, and yet there are very successful unions out there even in the US, where capital had an long and bloody history trying to suppress them.

There are more employees in small businesses than in big ones..

Also management and corporate are employees as well.

You are conflating startups vs small businesses. And small businesses are mostly irrelevant in unionization discussions. Employees rarely bother to unionize at a small business because the more equal balance of power and the closer human relationships between employee and employer yield more reasonable outcomes.

You're conflating two different things. It's obvious in the case of a monopsony, like a company town. Employees can raise productivity all they want, but they will not see a bigger paycheck, because if employees don't have negotiating power, the employer will capture all the cash from that.

Your "pity the poor companies bit" is just bizarre to me. It's true that companies compete for workers, which is why employees have any negotiating power at all. But it doesn't change the fact that employers still have more negotiating power because of relative size. The same is true when companies negotiate with one another: Walmart, for example, is famous for jerking suppliers around because of the relative need.

>Businesses are the frail side of the equation, if you make any

If this were true, real salaries would have increased as the GDP increased. Instead they've been stagnant for over 30 years. You're argument is incredible and would need some sort of evidence to back it up against what is being observed in real life

Salaries and Profits do account for GDP, but that doesnt meant that all salaries and all profits are divided equally.

There is concentration on both sides of that equation. Small businesses do not have the profits and margins big companies have.

You weren't specifying small businesses and even then I'd say you have to get super small, <20 employees for that effect to start making them equivalent.

I will concede that if every business was a small business, then unions likely would be unnecessary as the negotiating power is more equal

I didnt, i mean all business which includes small business.

Unions are a super-business organization, they affect both big and small business, and unions dont represent all workers.

If all workers were unionized, there would also be little point for unions.