Has it ever been a good thing for the workers when their company gets bought by another? Seems always universally bad.

Most of the time this means a company bought another in order to decrease competition or to enter a new market. In both cases they are planning to reduce staff and other costs. Sometimes this is due to redundancy, like only needing half the HR staff. More commonly it's because those in charge need to ensure "the numbers" are good for the first few years so they don't get blamed for a loss of profit.

Also, always remember that worsening working conditions are often just constructive dismissal. The new boss that seems bad, the worse commute, the worse responsibilities? While those can just be the way the new overlords do tgings, it can also be a way to get you to quit so they don't have to pay unemployment.

The tech company I worked at got bought up by a bigger and fancier company. We were promised the stars and the moon but none of it materialised and all we got was increased bureaucracy and being integrated into a cringe, self-important and slightly cultic corporate culture.

I'm happy I left that place.

I work in heavy industrial production and my company bought another.

Their plants were in a much worse state in regards to health and safety. Higher incident rates, worse safety practices, less maintained equipment and a worse culture about mistakes and criticism lead to people get hurt much more often.

Among all the corporate nonsense, I appreciated that they actually invested the money to make work safer. People get heavily injured or lose their lives when dealing with these large machines. Most of the workers there were grateful as the last owner was just interested in running the plant dry, no matter the cost of human lifes.

If that company is state-run, it can be pretty chill. Like those Serbian steelworkers whose factory got bought by a Chinese state company.

I'll tell you what my tech company got bought a bit ago and in the process they fired 10% of our staff and demoted me two levels. I know almost everyone got demoted. They did give me a 2% raise though and some stock in the company which is also great because in the short time since they bought us said stock has dropped 50%. This was before the tariffs. Oh and it doesn't vest for 4 years so I have to stay for 4 years to even access the stock. And if they fire me I lose all of it so. Yeah so good.

I have a friend whose company got bought 2 weeks ago and in the announcement meeting they read off the names of everyone who leaves immediately, more than half the company. The rest were told to stay for 2-9 months but all will be gone by the end of the year.

So yeah investment capital is really super awesome for the workers and the capitalists who bought these small private companies have really added a lot of value to the workers. Clearly.

Small tech startups, where workers got shares/stock options

Last two places I worked got bought out within my first year, so I got to see the same degradation process twice.

People who had no idea what made the place successful in the first place trying to squeeze profit while destroying long term sustainability

Just capitalist things.

Fwiw, my uncle worked for Motorola, and he was really happy when Lenovo bought them out from Google.

I think that was mostly just because he didn't have to put up with the Google/ATAP techbros anymore.

Big Bill Haywood put it simply: "If one man has a dollar he didn't work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn't get." (I'm sure Marx said it more comprehensively.)

If your company is bought and the old owners make money, it comes from somewhere.

There are probly scenarios where some or all workers get an upgrade but it is an exception/fluke outlier rather than a likely situation.

My buddy is a pipeliner and his company got bought by another and he got a 5 dollar raise. They’re union though.

Probably never. Especially if it is a private firm (still, a shitty patriarchal hierarchy) being acquired by a "publicly" traded company (all of the downsides, but without the pretense of a "benevolent" patriarch who's looking out for you, the wage worker, like a "family"). In a private firm, the third generation failson who owns it MIGHT decide that they can put off the second yacht for another couple of years. They MIGHT be personally fooled that some form of capital-labor peace is possible. They MIGHT hesitate to crucify some of the workers their dad personally introduced them to. When push comes to shove though, your ass is going out on the street long before they sell their boat. On the other hand, a "public" firm will turn the screws relentlessly, regardless of whether they are making record profits or facing hardship.

The trend of private firms going public seems to be reversing recently, though. It may be the culmination of years of stock buy-backs. I am sure this is not a good thing either. The concentration of wealth and power is still only going in one direction.

Taking a few steps back, these mergers and acquisitions are essentially the process through which industrial capitalism transformed into the monopoly capitalism / imperialism we know and love today. Despite all that masturbation about free markets and competition, we end up with only one company in any market segment. The consumers have nowhere else to go, and neither do the technicians / specialists doing the actual work.

One company I used to work for got bought out by a venture capital company who were looking to strip them for parts. When they did, hiring froze, and raises were reduced. I quit after a couple years of it getting progressively worse, but from talking to some old coworkers I later found out that they were bought by another company that wanted to just run the business normally, which led to more hiring and raises returning.

But then they banned using external devices in the building and started tracking all usage of computers, even if people are on break, which pissed a lot of people off, so it's kind of a wash.

From experience, no

We are trying to stay below a certain headcount so we effectively have a hiring freeze, and our management has been trying to hit unrealistic budget goals for a few years

I lost my job after the startup I was working for got bought by a larger company.

I worked for a company that got bought, but I'm a pmc guy so I owned options and so I got a small check that made my taxes complicated for a few years.

But the new company definitely sucked and I moved to a new job shortly afterwards.

My company got bought out by a much larger company a few years ago. The thing I always tell people is that all of the problems with a small, family-owned company pretty much evaporated immediately. However, they were replaced with a whole set of new problems.

All of the openly racist old men are gone, and I feel a lot safer at work wearing my hair long and telling (select people) that I am queer. Now, there is private equity and uncertainty that there didn't used to be. I got lucky and some of my coworkers didn't. My new management team is wonderful and I do make a bit more money than I used to. Overall, I'm happy with some of the things that have happened. But, I am planning to get as much as I can out of the experience and eventually find something else.

It can be if the company is buying something to add onto something they are already doing. In manufacturing industry these days, especially with the tariffs coming around, you will likely see large international conglomerates picking up large regional businesses in the U.S. Btw, this is what will end up happening if the tariffs work to actually 'bring back manufacturing', without capital merger controls, this is what it will end up looking like. Everyone is picturing the comeback of smaller local manufacturing industries, but this is the most likely 'successful' manufacturing growth scenario.

Anyways, if they come in as manufacturing conglomerates with the idea of adding additional facilities and products to your lines and expanding their product expertise to your engineers, then shit is usually good, if they come in under private equity, shit is usually bad because they are trying to turn a higher profit immediately. If people are making money and not in debt, they are usually willing to wait three to four years for facility and process maturation to occur, but if the creditors are at their heels and they are trying to turn a quick buck, shit goes south real fast.

Sometimes in trades it can be good but that's usually cause of a union

It generally sucks for everyone.