In my earlier days I was a member of both the United Steelworkers and later the Boilermakers.
They seemed to exist only to obstruct the company and protect the lamest of employees. Never did much of anything for me.
We were on strike at Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co.(17,000 blue collars at the time) for 13 weeks and extracted a $1.00/hr pay raise. Meanwhile I volunteer repo’ed my new vehicle, etc. Big win, eh?
Unions long ago passed their hour of need and drove manufacturing elsewhere.
I figured that at the rate they drive jobs overseas and send American workers to the bread lines, their real money is in overseas sweatshop operations and collecting political rewards (e.g. more union contracts) for creating and nurturing welfare-dependent Demoncrat voters. And as an extra bonus, the sweatshop escapees flood the border looking for better than slave wages, thereby driving up the Demoncrat voter rolls even further.
When I was 15 years old and a sophomore our teacher told us that when he was in his teens he had a job where the idiot union bosses held out for WEEKS for a fricken NICKLE raise. [My teacher was smart enough to quit to find another job] - The teacher said “those idiots never figured out that the wages they lost for being without work for weeks never filtered through the union thug’s stupid heads.” He said that there had been times where the unions had their place and did some good — (he was talking about things like the abuses of the triangle shirt waist factory, etc. — and owners cutting corners with safety issues) -— but he’d been amazed at the sheer stupidity of some of them — especially the so-called union leaders. Another friend of mine’s grandfather had been a founding member of the New York Iron worker’s union. HE eventually quit because he said that a lot of the union leaders were “As corrupt as some of the bas***d owners we were trying to fight.”