I think employers hate having to deal with a gatekeeper and some rubric as to who they can hire to do what, how much to pay them etc
I've worked in places where there was union labor for building management. You literally weren't allowed to unplug your computer and move it yourself. You had to file a ticket and have somebody come and do it for you and bill handsomely to do it. What's not to love from an employer perspective?
I'd argue that policies like that are the fault of employers not unions. Those sorts of rules are meant to protect against employers reducing workforce by heaping extra work on a smaller number of employees. If employers didn't try to pull stunts like that then the rules would not be necessary.
yes, employers hate that, employees also hate that. dumb police is dumb police - union or HR.
HR usually doesn't do stupid shit like that because it reduces employer KPIs so even if they do that for some time it gets killed quickly. unions have different KPIs to optimise for and if they're pathological and/or parasitic, you get dumb shit like the above.
an union which is not a parasite is absolutely possible in the same way a non-exploiting employer is also possible.
Most employees in the US do not in fact have unions. Only about 10% of US workers are unionized, partly because of their employers' attempts to prevent that.
To be fair, most businesses don't have HR either. Data collection isn't great here, but from what is available, it seems maybe only 20-30% of businesses with employees might have HR.