Having been both a shop steward and the owner of a business that employed several dozen people, I settled on the definition of the union as a hired gun a long time ago.
Unions are useful, but law is better, otherwise you end up with clanking monsters like the UAW.
When I worked for IBM, they treated their employees so well that unionization was widely regarded as a joke.
When I hired people, I paid them well, and treated them morally and legally correctly. Turned out to be good business.
I note that there is a constant drumbeat for unions here. I think it is a silly waste of time, indicative of a lack of understanding of the process that improves world worker standards.
What we really need are enforceable laws, and a government that enforces them, and a population that elects leaders who regard all people in the world as worthy of government protection.
I really think the time for unions is past, just like the time for nations is past. The United Nations has already written up the Human Rights we need.
UPDATE: I put a question mark in the title to indicate the need I felt for some serious discussion.
In the spirit of discussion, I included a tip jar, which has received four troll ratings, apparently by people who wish the whole subject would go away.
I'll respond here to make my point: People think that unions are the ONLY way to improve working conditions for workers. A corollary to that is that everyone is a worker. They're not.
Unions haven't been able to adequately protect workers because they are single-occupation tribes, and people change jobs. Further, the unions have become bureaucracies just enough to weaken them, once again, because they are myopic.
My interest here is to point out that we need to move to a broader social protection plan that covers universal health care, universal OSHA protection, universal access to the legal system, and other social goods.
All these can be more efficiently obtained through progressive electoral action, which is what this site is about.
This is not a union site. It is a Democratic activist site. I fail to see why I have to be for unions to post arguments for the successor to unions, which is progressive legislation and enforcement.
Troll rating me for bringing up this discussion is purity enforcement of the most destructive kind.