Question of the day: How can unions work within companies to help employees AND business goals? Part 1.

Thesis: They can work in harmony by uniting around people-planet-profit, rather than having an adversarial relationship.

People-planet-profit is a model that says people and the planet must come first, and profit should be evaluated from a long term lens.

Today, I started reading The Breakthrough Challenge by John Elkington and Jochen Zeitz. It's a very thorough, overview of what every aspect of business needs to transform. The B Team that Elkington helped make is made of truly ambitious visionaries. It always connects with the environment, human rights, wellbeing, and is very practical -- we need to transform capitalism and economics itself, analyze the true costs of doing business, and create more shared value for everyone. I don't think they left any stone unturned. As they put it: "If we are to build a more sustainable future around the people-planet-profit agenda, then we must look much more closely at the true costs of doing business and explore new ways of creating shared value across both socioeconomic and generational divides. We must adopt new and improved accounting principles and methods, and embark on the transformation of the master discipline of economics" (13).

My own thoughts below feel rather inadequate compared to expert research. I'm just a novice attempting to approach societal transformation from an entrepreneur's perspective, before I try to scale up my own business organizations.

Learning from others helps us build genuinely better things and do things better, but critical thinking based on what each of us can do is still essential.

Some background

What do unions offer employees? Collective bargaining power. I think that's needed. Not just 1:1 dialogues, although that is essential too.

America especially is a fire-at-will-at-any-time (4) country -- the default in 49 of 50 states, and the U.S. ranks near the bottom of the OECD's employment protection index globally (4). There is inherently a strong power imbalance, where employers have many ways to fire employees whenever they want to.

A shareholder primacy company is the most common for VC-backed companies. They're legally and culturally structured to run to make the shareholders as much money as possible above all else. It was crystallized, perhaps, by Milton Friedman's 1970 NYT Essay: "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits" (11).

A union is defined as a "group of workers who join together to bargain collectively with their employer over wages, benefits, and working conditions, so they have more leverage together than any one worker has alone" (5).

A personal experience

In the summer of 2023 and 2024, I was an intern at Boeing, and they have the SPEEA union (the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, IFPTE Local 2001) (6). All interns in my program were automatically put into SPEEA. I don't think it affected my day-to-day very much, since I was just there over the summer, but that was my first exposure to unions and corporate America.

In late 2025, around the time I graduated, I was a seasonal helper for a few weeks at UPS. UPS has a union. I learned a lot from the drivers, and we had meaningful dialogues.

I've heard of stories of people who were good at their job, but management retaliated so they were fired and able to be rehired through the union. There were stories of a few people who did badly at their job in the long-term, but still kept their job or get rehired because of union protections.

My takeaway: unions and companies can balance each other out. Usually, the union advocates for improving the employees' protections and benefits, while the company sets expectations for employees' performance. Unfortunately, even if a company has a union it can still drain and exploit employees.

UPS drivers earn a lot, but they're also seriously overworked.

Here is my recollection of what I've heard from 2025. Instead of hiring more drivers that work at more reasonable hours, it was apparently cheaper for UPS to pay overtime, force drivers to work overtime or get fired, make supervisors sometimes do drivers' work when they aren't supposed to, and proceed to pay contractual grievance penalties to drivers. Submitting labor grievances was just a regular part of the job as a driver, and those kinds of systemic grievances didn't seem like they could ever be solved, with UPS' priorities. The benefits package that a UPS driver was apparently quite good, and factored into the costs of hiring another driver.

This sounded like bureaucratic insanity.

It also corroborates exactly with public reporting on UPS Teamsters in 2023: the union's own strike materials described drivers "forced to work six days a week and up to 14 hours a day with forced overtime," and the resulting contract "increases various financial penalties the employer pays on grievances over harassment, excessive forced overtime, and supervisors working" -- UPS "routinely pays out these kinds of penalties and persists in violating the contract" (7).

In my conversations with drivers, we did generally agree that labor could be better at large corporations, we just weren't sure on exactly how.

I think it's possible for any large corporation to still do better over time, but it is tremendously difficult for the C-Suite since they're deep in the mud of the typical short-term monetary profit and shareholder model.

Back to the question.

How can unions work within companies to help employees AND business goals?

This adversarial relationship employer and employee is inherent in a company that is X, that's most corporate companies. They have competing interests. The company wants to make a profit and usually only cares about employees as an extension of profit: better employee care = better customer care.

Companies of all kinds think this way, but it seems to be especially felt by people working at in retail stores. It starts entry level and at a low wage.

I can relate to this a bit as an employee, since I've worked in retail for 5 months in early 2026. 5 months was enough for me, and I didn't stick around long enough to feel dehumanized.

One common issue is wages. The company is incentivized to increase its YoY profits, so it would rather not increase people's wages. But people want to, and should be paid more, to meet their basic needs and improve their quality of life.

I read Sam Walton's Made in America. He said that a company needing a union already means management has failed, thinks that unions would slow down company progress (1). It is a common sentiment among businesses.

Although I respect how hard he worked, with simple values, it is also a narrow way to look at labor. Labor theory and history is incredibly complex.

Like with any topic, I made AI do some deep research with citations. I haven't found any clear cases of how well a company works with the union. It depends on a lot of factors.

Kaiser Permanente: a mostly promising example of labor partnership

Kaiser Permanente had a successful union and company partnership for around 20 years (2).

The passing of the former CEO Bernard Tyson in 2019 and the change of the company to questionable decisions that kind of threaten their union (such as planning to acquire a non-unionized health care system) shows to me that the CEO did not sufficiently help his executives and managers grow as people (2).

Specifically, they didn't seem to become humanistic managers with a truly transformative business philosophy. AKA, they didn't become breakthrough business leaders. They operated like it was business-as-usual for them.

This is an anecdote from a nurse that has worked for Kaiser from the beginning of LMP to 2021:

"I started to see it unravel probably around 2016 or so. It may have been because there was a turnover in managers who were trained, or believed, in the partnership. In my opinion it's gone downhill from there." (3)

The breakdown of relations seems to have come from managers that didn't get thorough training in KP's unique LMP style. They went back to a "more traditional style of leading" (3).

At the same time, their national union (the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, originally a joint 34-union coalition) split into two groups in 2018 -- 22 unions forming a new Alliance, 13 staying in the Coalition -- and even a 3rd, when UFCW Local 555 later left the Coalition entirely to bargain locally. They all started competing to win better contracts than the others, using others as a baseline. That applies "extraordinary" pressure in the next negotiation (2), and KP leadership had to deal with several separate negotiations. That doesn't sound productive at all.

In all of this company infighting, the people's needs were not even being met anymore. We can still trace it back to leadership issues in the company.

Why didn't variations of this model spread?

Well, I found this MIT paper that outlines two key reasons. First, some labor leaders might be not be willing to champion this new approach that collaborates with management rather than being adversarial. Secondly, in management, although they're told to support human resources, they still engage in "holding down wages, cutting benefits, and resorting to layoffs " to boost the traditional bottom line. There's an unwillingness from both sides to take new risks, and they're comfortable with maintaining the status quo. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/res-15-003-shaping-the-future-of-work-15-662x-spring-2016/ce897bdb46edea3dd5548b7150839760_MITRES_15_003S16_saturn.pdf

You see this repeatedly at tech companies that do layoffs to boost their short-term profits. They boast about prestige, and the products that they make might be innovative and competitive in their technical capabilities and monetary value. They can also pay employees a lot, and people can greatly advance their careers and skills from working in those places. We all make our own decisions and have our own priorities.

But from my perspective, such companies are very boring.

Despite tech companies' efforts to appear "green", their operations and labor models are generally business-as-usual. It is stuck in an ignorant way of viewing the world, and always extracting from people and life. That is not enough to lead positive, long-lasting improvements in the complexities and crises of the world. They aren't ambitious enough to set goals and restructure for the sake of the people-planet-profit agenda.

Starbucks: the controversial one

There's Starbucks and the employee-led union, Starbucks Workers United. Starbucks continues to bust unions. There's 700+ unionized stores as of mid-2026 (8), and they blatantly discriminate against unionized / non-unionized stores -- confirmed by NLRB judges, who found Starbucks illegally withheld wage increases and benefits from unionized stores that it gave to non-union stores (9). But with their business strategies, customers like it, and due to the significant efforts of in-store employees, customers still get solid service. Their investors and shareholders seem happy.

The Breakthrough Challenge also talked about transforming the fundamental principles of accounting. For most of human history, companies had no way to see their costs and supply chain with detail and accuracy. They could make innovations that ended up harming many people, but they never saw those harms or effects reflected in their balance sheets.

Money is only one form of capital, among social, environmental, public health, people's wellbeing, and other things -- but money has usually been the only thing optimized so far. The software for transforming accounting does exist, like Trucost, but it's still a long way ahead before truly transformative accounting becomes the norm.

At the time of this piece, the C-Suite at Starbucks seems to thinks that their loss and gain is expressed only in money. I doubt that they see the harm and cost that they bring to people as related to their bottom line. It means that they probably don't see employees' well-being as real returns on their business.

But any desire can be used to create good or evil.

Ironically, if someone has a pure spirit to optimize profit, they can use that for good. If they truly accept that profit is more than just money, and cost is more than just money, they may be extremely energized to create a Breakthrough in their business to make it more for the future, for the environment, for the supply chain, for all stakeholders.

What if everything else was good

Germany has this system called co-determination (Mitbestimmung) -- it's not one company, it's a law that applies broadly. Workers get seats on the company's supervisory board and works councils with real say over hours, safety, and staffing changes (10). A natural experiment on a 1994 German law change found that giving workers board seats actually increased investment in the company, with no clear effect on wages (10).

Companies and workers can work together amicably on almost everything, like investment, safety, and working conditions. But the one exception is the wage split itself, which stays a real, separately negotiated fight even in the most cooperative system studied.

A practical solution: structure

Create a company with a completely different structure from day one, or make your existing company change who it answers to. The structures (or systems) you set up affect everything else: incentives, goals, power dynamics, the vision of your company. Naturally, all of that affects stakeholders too.

For example: a worker cooperative is a company that workers own -- not shareholders, not investors -- so that workers get a percentage. Any surplus revenue that didn't go back into growing the business or paying out wages just goes back to the employees, rather than C-Suite.

A great example of a company that changed who it answers to is Patagonia (12): they were already a certified B Corp, and in 2022 they restructured further. 100% of voting stock (aka control) got transferred to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, while 100% of the non-voting stock (aka nearly all the economic value, which was ~98%) went to Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the climate crisis.

So no private owner holds both control and profit anymore: control sits with a trust bound to the company's stated purpose, and profit (an estimated ~$100M/year) flows out as dividends to the nonprofit instead of to any shareholder. That's what "Earth is now our only shareholder" (12) actually means structurally to Patagonia.

If you want to learn about other transformative business models, some AI research can surface references as starting points, and check out the Breakthrough Challenge. Here's an excerpt from it:

"If we are to build a more sustainable future around the people-planet-profit agenda, then we must look much more closely at the true costs of doing business and explore new ways of creating shared value across both socioeconomic and generational divides. We must adopt new and improved accounting principles and methods, and embark on the transformation of the master discipline of economics." (13)

Sounds exciting, doesn't it?

References

1. Sam Walton with John Huey, Made in America: My Story (Doubleday, 1992), Ch. 9
2. Healthcare Dive, "Inside Kaiser Permanente's labor relations breakdown" (Sept. 2023) -- https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/inside-kaiser-permanentes-labor-relations-breakdown-strike/695135/
3. Healthcare Dive, "Kaiser Permanente's historic labor-management deal survives again" (Nov. 2021) -- https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/kaisers-permanente-labor-management-partnership-survives/610320/
4. USAGov, "Termination for Employers" (at-will is the default in 49 of 50 states) -- https://www.usa.gov/termination-for-employers ; Montana's Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act (the one state exception) -- https://mca.legmt.gov/bills/mca/title_0390/chapter_0020/part_0090/section_0040/0390-0020-0090-0040.html ; OECD, employment protection legislation cross-country ranking -- https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/af9c7d85-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/af9c7d85-en
5. NLRB, "Rights We Protect" -- https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect
6. SPEEA, IFPTE Local 2001, "About SPEEA" -- https://speea.org/about-speea/
7. Labor Notes, "UPS Teamsters to Vote on Contract that Ends Driver Tiers, Lifts Part-Timer Pay" (July 2023) -- https://labornotes.org/2023/07/ups-teamsters-vote-contract-ends-driver-tiers-lifts-part-timer-pay
8. FFXnow, "Starbucks baristas at Barcroft Plaza cafe vote to unionize" (July 2026) -- https://www.ffxnow.com/2026/07/08/starbucks-baristas-at-barcroft-plaza-cafe-vote-to-unionize/
9. Seattle Times, "Starbucks illegally kept wages, benefits from union workers" (Sept. 2023) -- https://www.seattletimes.com/business/starbucks-illegally-kept-wages-benefits-from-union-workers/
10. Jäger, Schoefer & Heining, "Labor in the Boardroom," IZA Discussion Paper 12799 -- https://docs.iza.org/dp12799.pdf
11. Milton Friedman, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," New York Times Magazine (Sept. 13, 1970) -- http://doc.cat-v.org/economics/milton_friedman/business_social_responsibility
12. Patagonia Works, "Patagonia's Next Chapter: Earth is Now Our Only Shareholder" (Sept. 14, 2022) -- https://www.patagoniaworks.com/press/2022/9/14/patagonias-next-chapter-earth-is-now-our-only-shareholder
13. John Elkington & Jochen Zeitz, The Breakthrough Challenge: 10 Ways to Connect Today's Profits With Tomorrow's Bottom Line (Jossey-Bass, 2014)