Industry in Detroit is a perfect example of what can happen when unions have way too much power. The current conversation really downplays how ridiculously powerful unions like the UAW were. It was effectively impossible to lose your job -- you would have line workers that would bring a portable TV to work and watch their work roll past them all day, and they were able to do that until the plants closed down because of the terms the union had in place. I have multiple drawers of tools from vendors that only ever sold B2B; in my father's time, you would buy them off UAW members that stole them from auto manufacturers in decently large quantities, because you wouldn't get fired for it. The only way to reliably lose your job was to cross the union itself. Even people who were part of a union at that time will pretty readily admit that they were unsustainably powerful. We're not even started on the organized crime that came out of unions in Detroit at that time.
The point isn't that unions shouldn't exist at all. The point is that you need to be really careful with comments like the root comment, which describe unions as the common man engaging in a heroic struggle against the forces of capitalist evil, while completely glossing over what they have become in multiple places at multiple points in history.
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