My humble take is that unionization is valuable as a counter-balance in a company and can benefit it and all within. Let's take extreme examples: 1) CEO sees a

My humble take is that unionization is valuable as a counter-balance in a company and can benefit it and all within. Let's take extreme examples: 1) CEO sees a blip coming in the quarterly income results. CEO disposes of enough people to reduce costs, hit profit target and claim their bonus. CEO is better off, company is worse off. Repeats each quarter until the CEO retires. 2) CEO tries to focus company by laying off unionized employees in legacy area. Union blindly prevents this, company is stuck on legacy path, company suffers and so ultimately do the employees when it all implodes. The problem in both cases is simply due to a misalignment of personal goals/compensation within the company. When it's "working right" The CEO can defend their "not randomly firing employees" as being too expensive due to their unionized status. Converse is that the union can accept that some employees need to go to be replaced with other employees in another field to reflect the world changing (and help relocate/pay off/re-train as needed). In summary - plans rarely work out and ideally there's an internal buffer/slush-fund to cover this. When you're publicly traded, there's always going to be somebody demanding you cash in this buffer to the shareholders in the short term. Unionization provides a nice external buffer.