Good examples of accountability to the board? All over. But boards care (by mandate) only about profit unless specified otherwise. There's no incentive for a board to care about whether people are put out on the street either; it's one of the major reasons for why unions exist and are successful: they provide a mechanism for accountability that ties adverse employee decisions back to future revenue loss.
Tl;Dr: nope, and that's sadly by design because why would anyone be self-accountable when the consequences hit the wallet? I was hoping for a ray of light to pierce the dark.
Why would the union do this? It seems like a contrived example to prove a point. Unions would conceivably benefit from more hires because they would have more union membership.
My anecdotal experience is that unions are a massive benefit to laid-off employees. Laid off employees were given 80% pay while they waited with a known re-hire date. In other cases, they are given priority when the company is looking to rehire with an unknown rehire date. Unions have downsides, for sure, but I don't think your example points them out here.
And my example was simply continuing the original poster’s insinuation that a union could have helped management avoid the over hiring mistake they were about to make by making the consequences of that mistake greater.
What you said does make sense though. The union apprentiships were extremely competitive, possibly because they were constrained to low numbers.
Also, Japanese execs are paid substantially less than their US/UK counterparts.
I doubt that it has happened in quite a while, but there have been CEOs that have committed suicide, when their companies failed.
Doubt that will catch on, in the US.
A lot of the nice stuff that musicians and actors have, is actually owned by the company.
Gilded cage, so to speak.
(Tbf, I'm sure he was told to resign. But that's largely because the Navy has tried to institute a culture of accountability, albeit imperfectly)
After having to layoff a lot of their staff in the 90s, Chouinard decided to switch his compagny values and reason of being.
This article sums it up I guess, https://medium.com/@adamler/limiting-the-engines-of-growth-a...
https://www.fastcompany.com/3056662/she-created-netflixs-cul...
Remember, “companies don’t exist to make you happy. You know that, right? The business doesn’t exist to serve you. The business exists to serve your customers,” reminds McCord.