I have never been a fan of unions, however recent events have come to pass that has driven me to the point of nearly absolute hatred of everything they do. I will provide 2 examples that have led to this revalation.
1: I live in Chicago. Chicago has a great number of expressways that run around and into it. This summer it was decided that ALL (and I mean all) of these roads needed to be resurfaced at the same time. On a side note, most of the interstate freeways/highways/expressways built around Chicago are old, and such are only 3 or 4 lanes wide. This typically leads to dramatic traffic to begin with. Couple that with reducing these roads down to 1 or 2 lanes in each direction along with slower speed limits and you face a situation where traffic becomes horrendous (not like China, but still bad). I have regularly heard traffic times this summer on the radio of 250 minutes, 120 minutes, 115 etc etc for drives that are maybe 10 or 15 miles. So as the construction is just getting underway, the lanes are tore out (this is a key point) and the unions decide to go on strike. Keep in mind the intentional waiting until after the lanes were tore out so that they could not be reopened during negotiations! Every day these people were just standing there holding up signs looking for pity from the millions of people parked on the road trying to get to work. This was particularly offensive in that during this time when so many people are desperate for any job, these rat bastards decided that they were going to complain about the jobs they had (high paying jobs I might add). This act was despicable.
2. I am currently VP of the small company I work for. It came time to hire some people in as we had a small influx of business and were falling behind. I placed an add and got literally hundreds of responses. After sorting through the initial emails I then called in several people for interviews. I was looking to hire 2 people, one with experience and one at entry level type work. I quickly hired an experienced person who has never worked in a union shop but had 15 years experience. He requested and received $16/hour to start. Then I started looking for the entry level type person. After seeing 6 people who had experience ranging from 0 to 5 months I called back 3 for second interviews. These 3 people all 0, 2 and 3 months experience in this type of work, however all 3 worked in union shops. Their desired salaries nearly made me laugh: $24/hr, $21/hr and $29/hr. I literally asked the last person if they were serious and with dead certainty he was. $29/hr for a person with 2 months experience is an absolute joke. Eventually I found a recent high school graduate who started at 9/hr but quickly through hard work has earned himself 2 raises.
Now on to the consequences of Unions. 1st off they mutate true cost of production and manipulate and abuse minimum wage work. For example, if my company bids on a job against a union company (This is in Illinois which is a Union Shop state) we have to add to our bid the amount of money it would be at average union wages. So say we have a job that will take 10 hours and our average shop wage of the employees working on that job is $15/hr we would have to add to our final bid an amount of money to bring that wage up to $24/hr...in other words it is set up for us to not be able to compete with union shops.
The second problem is that Unions cause higher unemployment and hurt the economy of the states in which they are powerful. For example: John Deere is headquartered in the Quad Cites (Moline & Rock Island, IL and Davenport & Bettendorf, IA). Illinois is a Union Shop state meaning that Unions are very powerful and are able to manipulate employers to their benefit. Iowa is a Right to Work state, meaning Unions have no power, for example if my company was located in Iowa and I simply heard an employee talking about unionizing I could fire him/her on the spot. A few years back it came time for John Deere to build a new factory to replace its aging one located in Moline, IL. John Deere decided that the new production factory would be build 4.5 miles away from the existing shop...across the Mississippi in Iowa. They allowed anyone who was willing to not be unionized to stay and the rest were fired and replaced with new non union workers. The average wage of their employees dropped from roughly $28/hr to $15/hr (Still a decent wage, especially in that part of Iowa/Illinois). This practice has become more and more common in Illinois for companies located along the Mississippi and it has dramatically hurt the economy and employment of the people of Illinois that used to work for these companies but were being overpaid.
Unions once served an important purpose when employers were truly abusive. But today the unions only use their power to get themselves higher (overpaid) wages for work that could be done for a livable but much lower wage. The tables have turned 180° and unions now abuse employers to the point of going out of business. These people are blinded by greed and the "glamor" of the union as they don't realize that as they strong arm themselves higher wages that when the company paying them goes out of business they then earn nothing.