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You know, I was raised in a union family and firmly believe that unions were necessary and enormously beneficial back in the day. Sometimes, I assume, they still can be and are.
But I had a union job at one point. As an entry-level guy, they wanted some absurd amount of my paycheck. I'd have been working a couple months out of the year for them. Ended up leaving the job and the union.
Soon thereafter this union put its workers on strike for, IIRC, over a year. The demand was higher wages and a few other things. I saw people striking out in front of that place for a long, long time. Replacement labor was hired. At the end of it all, the union caved entirely, across the board, except for a couple of provisions which did nothing for the workers but benefited the union itself.
I think the reality is that unions are functionally obsolete. We didn't use to have strong protections for labor in terms of workplace safety, social welfare, healthcare accessible to the poor, reasonable human needs like lunches, breaks, and so on -- but now we do. If workers aren't making as much as they want, that's generally a market problem, not a regulation/union problem. And unions only have leverage inasmuch as labor is unwilling to agree to the baseline compensation (in whatever form) that employers are offering. The union I was in was toothless because, actually, a whole lot of people were willing to do those jobs at that pay and under those conditions. And that was completely reasonable.
So, my personal experience is that unions make things much more expensive and don't actually provide much value except in special cases of skilled labor which for some bizarre market failure reason (probably also related to overregulation) isn't making as much as it should. And that's before we get into the costs of protecting people who really deserve to be terminated, or the ties to organized crime.
In general, I don't see how unions aren't just making everything worse for everyone.
Union still have a positive role, it's just a union by union basis. For instance Resident Physicians are starting to unionize at various places, they do this because health systems will blatantly violate legal requirements and their contracts with the residents, because the residents can't leave.
If given the ability to do so most employers will misbehave ASAP. Beware of that possibility, even with shitty unions like this one.
The other thing is, I'd rather have these social problems solved by unions than the state, so my position is kind of all over the place.
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They can also function as useful negotiating partners and as a way to limit wildcat strikes/unofficial industrial action and keep business running. Which ironically is very important in key sectors and bottlenecks in the economy, such as docks.
An example of this working is Sweden which despite it's very large number of unionised workers has among the lowest amount of strikes in the west.
The railroads in the USA are also 100% union. Sometimes paying an efficiency cost for keeping things running is worth it.
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