[Apocryphon]

> in my experience is the conversations almost never discuss the health of the company. They only discuss strategies for maximizing pay, benefits or ensuring that layoffs are impossible.

Those topics may dominate the discussions, but unions can be a way to leverage worker power for the good of the organization as well. How many times has a company turned out to have leadership that refuses to heed the concern of engineering, mandating development by sales bullet point and failing to allocate the necessary time to maintain product quality? How often does management order prioritize the wrong choices, leading to fiscal straits where the workforce suffers? How often are the concerns of the rank and file ignored, either dismissed at all-hands or filed away by powerless HR orgs? And how often do we hear stories of tech companies with toxic dysfunctional cultures?

There is at least some precedent for unions forcing leadership to be aware of market realities:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13986889