A union can ask for whatever raise it wants, 23% or 230%. It’s a free country.
The problem is that management does not have the courage (or sometimes even the right) to permanently fire all of them, and bring in new people.
So, yeah. The union has a nuclear weapon, the strike. But management has no such weapon. There’s no balance. And so the union always wins. I saw a similar thing during my steel mill days. The union always won. But then one day the mill closed down for good. And no one in the union leadership could figure out why.
Not that they stuck around long enough to figure anything out. Once the mill closed down for good, I am sure the union officials scurried off to greener Union pastures.
Shades of Atlas Shrugged-————