[factfindingisfn]

Ha! This is a best loosely coupled. EPI discloses labor unions fund them. Labor Unions did nothing for families in the 60s,70s,80s, and 90s when all manufacturer jobs were driven out of the US due to bad labor negotiations. Joining a union is about as helpful for your job as joining a country club except you don’t get any real perks.

[wpietri]

Laying all of the US's industrial decline at the feet of unions is a bit much. I think a lot of the management-hostile, zero-sum thinking that drove bad union behavior was a clear response to previous management behavior filled with both exploitation that drove the rise of unions and hostility when they couldn't get away with as much.

An instructive example here is the story of the NUMMI plant in the 1980s, which clearly shows the awfulness of GM's internal culture, the cluelessness of management in the face of existential threat, and how much things can be different, even with the exact same union workers: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

If we want unions that have a collaborative, win-win approach with management, I think we first need management that has that spirit toward the workers. But looking at how US companies are reacting to the recent uptick in unionization, I'm not very hopeful.