I'll tell you people a true story about unions.
I work for an engineering firm. And we once had a manufacturing floor where hourly, union people built the products we designed. Since we were once owned by a car company, our union was UAW. And they did a fine job.
Well, a few years ago, our company decided to carve out a work schedule so we could all have every other Friday off. It required employees to work 9 hours per day, Monday thru Thursday. Then we would get every other Friday off. Sounded great to all us engineers.
But the union held things up for a long time with their refusal to agree. Any guess as to why they refused to agree? Anybody? Because they INSISTED that they be paid time-and-a-half OVERTIME for working the ninth hour each day Monday thru Thursday. Yes, even though they still only worked 40 REGULAR hours per week, they thought they could finagle OVERTIME PAY into the deal. They were sadly mistaken.
That was the straw that broke the camel's back for our management trying to deal with the UAW. When the union contract was up, our company discontinued manufacturing at our facility, got rid of all the union workers, and sub-contracted our manufacturing to a non-union company in Florida.
I'll tell you some other stuff the union did. Every time they voted on something in closed-door meetings, there would naturally be some votes for and some votes against. But once the outcome of a vote was determined, the vote was secretly taken again, and everyone was then expected to vote together 100% for the already-decided outcome so the union could report a "completely united front". And they thought we didn't hear about it.
And here's another good story. Every Friday while we had the union, an hourly union employee was "rewarded" with the task of performing "surprise" walkthroughs in all the labs to make sure us engineers didn't have any coffee cups or cokes in the lab (they were "forbidden" in an electronics environment). Well, what that "inspector" didn't know was that my boss was 3 minutes ahead of him, walking through the labs to tell us to put our cups and cokes in a drawer until the "inspector weenie" came through.
And here's another one. About 15 years ago, at about 6:00PM on a regular work day, a circuit breaker tripped in one of our labs. Another engineer and I were working late against a deadline and were helpless with the circuit breaker tripped. Can anybody guess where this story is headed? Guess who were the ONLY people authorized to flip the switch on the breaker? Union people. My friend went to the union office, but they had all gone home for the day. So my friend flipped the switch, and we were able to finish our work and meet our deadline the next day. But guess what? Somehow, the union found out that my friend had flipped the breaker switch and filed a formal complaint against him, and it was messy. Very messy. And very petty of the union to do that.
Unions are good to an extent. But they have gone way overboard.