[jacobolus]

> Long term, it simply helps another competitor to come up without a union

Alternately, long term it helps attract and retain excellent staff who care about the business and feel like they have a stake, and helps the business make better decisions because the decisionmaking process takes more information into account.

[woevdbz]

If this were the case, I would expect many more successful companies to have discovered this secret competitive advantage. It's not like employee-owned or union businesses are new. They've been around forever at the timescale of the Internet, and it's not like they haven't tried investing. I used to work for one that tried to diversify into tech and I can tell you what I saw: during growth phases, union pay wasn't competitive enough to retain top talent (due to a more egalitarian pay structure than the industry), and pretty quickly the strategic long term prospects of the company became pretty bleak compared with where the industry was going. So everybody who stayed aboard the egalitarian pay ship basically sunk with the ship.

Again I agree exceptions exist, but if it was some magic secret sauce, it'd probably be obvious by now...