In what way could they stop the company from doing this? Besides making firing (even bad) employees difficult?
Any future growth that may have previously resulted in hiring full time workers could easily now be redirected to freelance, temp work, and p/t workers regardless of the union.
I remember watching a Tronc video when it was trendy to make fun of them and they were already talking heavily about digitizing much of the work that was done manually. It's a much more dynamic industry than an old-school factory that needed a set of bodies with predictable roles to show up.
They could stop the company from doing this by negotiating work rules.
Some (many? most?) union contracts with companies specify that X type of work must be done by members of the union. For example, in TV stations, among the graphics equipment like character generators, the union rules at least used to be that engineers could use the keyboard, but only (union) artists could use the mouse. At the time, I worked for a character generator company; we deliberately made our character generator so that you could do everything from the keyboard, even though it had a mouse.
Any future growth that may have previously resulted in hiring full time workers could easily now be redirected to freelance, temp work, and p/t workers regardless of the union.
I remember watching a Tronc video when it was trendy to make fun of them and they were already talking heavily about digitizing much of the work that was done manually. It's a much more dynamic industry than an old-school factory that needed a set of bodies with predictable roles to show up.