https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/fiduciary-duty-to-investors
They owe a fiduciary duty of loyalty to shareholders - they (named executives) must act in the best interests of shareholders. So that doesn’t necessarily mean doing everything possible at all times to maximize profits/share price in the short term, it does mean they need to attempt to do that in the long term while balancing that duty against other duties they owe (like to act lawfuĺly).
True! Co-ops are great
It also depends on the state the company is incorporated in, but yeah that’s true.
And it is a duty to the corporation (legal entity), notably not to the workers themselves; so while the interests of workers and the corporation may align sometimes - you don’t have to do what’s best for the workers if it isn’t best for the company.
You still need to operate lawfully, and you can’t pay so little that you can’t hire/retain anyone, and you need to pay enough that you can hire people skilled enough to do the job, but you need to pay (ideally) only that amount and no more. Anything else takes away from profits and, you could say, makes the company less likely to succeed - if the company doesn’t succeed, then no one would have jobs. Or so they’d argue.
The same as for goods, the price of labor is treated by employers as “what the market will bear”. For goods, that means higher prices, for labor it means lower prices.
The reason for this is pretty simple: necessity.
Companies Corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders.
If no union exists, that means depressing wages as much as possible while meeting staffing needs.
If a union is forming, it means spending as much as you need to stop it since, if you don’t, you’ll be unable to depress wages over the long term.
When a union exists, well then they have to negotiate to continue operations and so workers get paid more fairly.
Join or organize a union if you can.
That is from the loyalty section. Shareholders best interests are achieved by balancing the various duties, as I said.
That is why I said that it isn’t about short term profits necessarily. The best interest of the shareholders is not short term profit seeking that destroys the business. It is long term profits and a company that can continue to generate them.
It would be very difficult to argue that decisions damaging profitability in the long term are in shareholders best interests.
In this case, union busting, clearly executives think union busting is in the best interests of shareholders. If that isn’t because of profitability, why is it not in their intersts?