First, there are almost no unions left that exist as a collective of labor whose objective is to secure the best possible wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment from an employer. Only 8% of the private sector workforce is unionized today. That is less than was unionized in 1932 – before passage of the National Labor Relations Act. Almost none of those are in true private sector businesses, but rather they are in what many call the Third Sector; businesses that rely on government funding, do business primarily with goverment, or are heavily regulated by goverment. Examples are defense and aerospace companies, interstate transportation such as airlines, railroads, trucking, the maritime industry between US ports, healthcare, heavy construction, and publicly funded construction and maintenance.

These unions do not bargain with the employer in the sense that a true private sector relationship would dictate a contest of competing self-interest. In the Third Sector, the union and the employer work together to secure government funding and to eliminate competition; profit is never an issue because the high labor costs can just be passed on. What happened to the UAW is that imported automobiles changed the cost and quality paradigm and the legacy car makers could not adapt to the new paradigm because of their legacy costs, especially the legacy costs in retirement and retiree health insurance. You’re seeing now what happens when a company like Boeing tries to transfer work to a right to work state. The machinists and every AFL-CIO union will put enormous pressure on the Government to, first, not allow Boeing to move the work, then to make life a living Hell of regulation, audits, and inspection in its non-union plants or even union plants in RTW states. You will NEVER see a wage and hour investigator, an OSHA inspector, an EPA inspector, or any number of the alphabet agency inspectors in a union facility whose management reliably cooperates with the union and doesn’t fight Democrat governments.

In a Democrat controlled state or city, and even a lot of Republican ones too, you WILL NOT build a big building non-union. They’ll threaten the banks to remove their pension funds, the insurance companies to move their health insurance and other capital sources with whatever grip they can get on them to keep you from getting the financing. They’ll work with the Greenies and competing developers to keep you from getting the permits. If you make it past that, they’ll use their sway over OSHA, Wage and Hour, the EPA, and the NLRB or state/local labor boards to stop your work and run up your costs. And all you have to do to make it all go away is sign a Project Labor Agreement and give all the work to the unions – and a few bribes to the relevant politicians and poverty pimps are usually required to grease the skids anyway.

Anymore, unions don’t really function as the economic entity the framers of the National Labor Relations Act contemplated. They are almost entirely political entities and they and the employers they work with work with the government to relieve you of your money. Actually, they rarely have to resort to violence or that sort of thuggishness; the management is in it with them.