Good examples of self accountability? Sadly not. (Edit: see huffmsa for a good example)
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.
Unions have a range of outcomes for business success. Yes, some may hold management accountable and ultimately help companies; others screw over everyone besides long tenured employees. Suppose Stripe was unionized and somehow the union had convinced management to stop hiring in February 2022 which is the level they’re reducing headcount to now. Would the laid off employees been better off in that world without a year of Stripe employment, income, and benefits? It’s very unclear.
>somehow the union had convinced management to stop hiring in February 2022
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.
There are plenty of unions that keep supply low. Nearly every labor union in California, for example, has underfunded apprenticeship programs for exactly this reason. I’m surprised you aren’t aware this is a phenomenon. Unions answer to their current members, and there’s plenty of incentive to keep the current membership smaller.
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.
To be clear, I was technically a non-union employee in a union shop so that may explain some of my ignorance. (Most of the white collar employees were non-union. The controls engineers were in a quasi-union status without actually joining the union. It was a weird situation because of some ongoing legal battles.)
What you said does make sense though. The union apprentiships were extremely competitive, possibly because they were constrained to low numbers.
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.