Nor should they be, their goal isn't as your servant, which I think is alot of the problem.
Employees are not part of the business, if they were part of the business you would give them part of the profit and they would suffer part of the loss.
Employees supply labour, a resource you use as part of your business venture to make money.
A theoretical store would buy labour from employees, goods from a wholesaler, promotional material from a marketing agency and space from a landlord.
the store would shop around for the best prices on each. But the store couldn't easily (and often legally without voiding a contract with the supplier and wholesaler) go to the supplier to bargain for better prices for their store.
Instead the suppliers all have the Wholesaler get a better price for their behalf, and as a result the store gets a worse price. But it has to deal with it, this isn't a charity and the wholesaler isn't going to make less money for the store to make more.
likewise the market agency probably gives its sales people a territory, the store can't go shopping around inside the agency until it finds a rep willing to give them a better deal. It can find another agency..unless the store is part of a franchise or signed some other form of contract where it HAD to deal with this agency for this location (such as part of a past deal for supply in the past)
If you go to the landlord, you will probably find the property is being managed by a company other than the owner, who doesn't want to deal with the hassle, and now this property management company handles your rent. And with the vast number of other properties they hold they can force the price to be higher than it would otherwise.
Even though this raises rent for the store, its a business and they aren't about to make less money so the store can make more.
Now we come to labour suppliers. The store goes to find labour and thus negotiates with a couple dozen people, playing them off each other for a lower price (as the store should). If the labour unionizes, they (like the wholesaler, landlord and marketing company) now present a stronger negotiating positions because they control alot more of the labour supply available. They will will not choose to take less money, so the store can make more for the same reasons as the wholesaler, the marketing company and the property management firm: This is a business not a chairty, their goal is to make their own business prosper, not the store unless that causes them to prosper even more.
When I work for a company I am not "part of the company", I don't share in profits, I don't suffer for losses and I file my own taxes with my own listing of revenue and expenses unrelated to the company I sell my time to.
This "magical line" between labour and other suppliers is crap that lazy companies who don't feel like earning their profit but instead having it lavished upon them with a silver platter dream up.
Unions are not there to benefit the company, anymore than the property management firm is there to benefit that same company, or their other suppliers.
And if the unions cause the automakers to collapse, good for them. The automakers only employ a small amount of people proportiantly.
Their value only comes from the high wages they pump into labour suppliers, which are then spent on the local economy (houses, appliances, more cars, services, etc) creating a nice multiplier effect.
If they aren't pumping money into the local economy through wages, they aren't really that important. Not any more so than Wal-mart or McDonalds.
