@georgeob1,
Indeed. Many years ago I had a part-time job at a factory while attending college. There were probably, at the most, 50 employees and most of them were woman who worked on the assembly line.
One day the Teamsters arrived to attempt to unionize the workers. I wasn't around for the union's pitch, nor the response of the company but at some point a strike was launched. I arrived in the afternoon after classes and was greeted by a sight so cliche it was difficult to take seriously. While my fellow workers marched around in circle bearing signs, a swarthy little guy sat in a Cadillac, and two big swarthy goons stood outside of it. When the Plant Manager came outside and started taking photos of the strikers and the Union reps, right on cue, the goons grabbed his camera from him, smashed it on the ground and sent him sprawling after it.
When I tried to cross the line and pull into the parking lot, the goons approached me, but fortunately I was well liked by most of my fellow employees and they got between the goons and my car. They asked me not to cross the line and I told them I really needed the job and just like that I was allowed through with the goons yelling curses at me.
The strike lasted one day, but the Teamsters were able to unionize the plant and I became a Teamster too. They never did anything for us, which meant they couldn't kill the host, and I always suspected they had been paid off by the company while still collecting dues from all of us.
I had two more jobs where the workers were organized as Teamsters and again there was no notable benefit other than the honor of paying dues.
Eventually I got a white collar job, but once again I found a Union was trying to organize the workers. The company had about 7,500 employees countrywide and so it would have been a plum for the union (Not the Teamsters, but I can't recall which one). Based on my past experience, I wanted no part of a union and the company was making promises in order to keep us from voting for it so my vote against it was never in doubt. It did cause some bad feelings among a few of my fellow workers who thought joining a union would be of great benefit, but with one exception all the employees in our office who were in favor of the union, had never had full time jobs prior to graduating college and joining our company as trainees, and none had ever worked even part-time in a union shop. A couple of them were all gung ho about workers of the world uniting and at the time I was quite the lefty myself, but my experience told me that the ideological appeal of unions was hollow. None of the companies that were unionized, or where it had been attempted, after I was employed were such that the workers needed to organize under a union banner, and where the unions won, the benefits to the workers were negligible. It was harder to fire an employee who screwed up but that was of no value to those of us who had to carry the weight of the screw-up.
This all occurred in the early to mid 70's and even then the need for unions had long disappeared. The worst characters in all of my experiences with unions were the local reps who were supposed to hear and remedy our grievances and negotiate better deals for us. What a joke. Whether or not they had been paid off by the companies, they were useless parasites.
I'm sure there are workers who benefited greatly from their Unions and as a result eventually found themselves out of work due to the financial disasters caused by management always making concessions to prevent or end strikes. Private sector union membership is way below what it was in its hey day because companies got smart and offered their employees many of the benefits unions would promise them, and because a plethora of State and federal employment laws provide workers with protection from predatory practices any company might foolishly attempt. Law firms specializing in Employment Law and Class Actions replaced Unions as the workers' champion.
They still have the power a great deal of money can provide and their involvement in the public sector has grown. This is where they cause the most damage, because if private company management made too many costly concessions to unions, government "management" gave them the keys to the treasury. Why wouldn't they? The unions have been funding their election campaigns for many decades.
Liberals often accuse the GOP and Corporate America of trying to break the backs of unions as if it was a crime against humanity. They certainly are not friends of Unions and why would they be? Union money goes to Democrats. Always has and always will. If Unions still served workers in the way they did when they first came upon the scene, then it might be a dastardly deed to break their backs, but they don't. There are millions of workers who have jobs with companies that have not been unionized and they are all doing just fine. They're not treated like indentured servants, and if they were, the unions would be successful in their efforts to organize.
Private sector unions have been largely broken, and it's high time the same happens in the public sector.
