Throughout my working life, I have worn many hats to put it mildly. I have experience from being in a union, supervising a location that had a union and being on the outside looking in at my wife working for a union.
I have to say, and this may be based on my geographic area, I don’t believe unions are all that great (adios to my karma). Before you go off downvoting, let me explain.
In my 20s I worked for a very long time at a union job. It seemed great. The way things were setup, the pay and benefits were good, everyone seemed to get a fair shake at job bids (based on seniority), people that were brought into the office got representation dealing with management that they would have otherwise not had. Honestly, they seemed very beneficial.
I started to notice that certain core members of the union seemed like they could get away with murder. They would hog the overtime, only actually represent people that were paying union dues (even though everyone is supposed to be covered by the union and the lower paid staff may not have been able to afford the dues), etc. It started to cultivate a very hierarchical atmosphere.
Then the day came when our company got bought by a much larger corporation. They immediately wanted the union gone. They did everything in their power to remove it, following the union contract. This mostly consisted of moving union work to non union shops and taking what they couldn’t move and putting it into another facility they owned, just outside the proposed radius for having to offer everyone their jobs and keep the union. I was still young and needed a job. So I applied to work at the new facility.
As luck would have it, not just myself, but my wife were chosen to move to the new faculty. Same jobs, better pay, slightly worse benefits(not by much) and a shorter drive. Mostly positive in my eyes. Now, they eventually shut down operations at the new facility, but it wasn’t any different than the shut down at the union building. Same severance, same opportunity to move to another facility, etc.
Other dealings I had with unions were supervising union staff. It seems like those guys were less likely to want to work than other union facilities I worked at. Always volunteering to go home. If I had to call in workers from another shift, they never wanted to come in early. And before I could help them myself, I had to make the phone calls, since it was union work. In this instance, it just made things more complicated, when they didn’t need to be.
Most recently, my wife was working for a union facility. They had been working overtime for most of the year in anticipation of a large order coming down. That order never came. Hours were cut, she was displaced from her bid because she had been having issues from a workplace sustained injury, and basically told they were looking out for her. She took this opportunity to find a new job.
Basically in my experience, unions are not always a good thing. They protect the lazy, do not always save people’s jobs, often aren’t fair and are generally a waste of money.
Granted, this is just my experience. I would love to hear from others who have had experience with unions. I haven’t worked in a union job in some time so maybe things have changed, so I would love some input on this.