Another way to look at this is that there hasn't been much progress in the labor market over the last ~50 years. Wages have been stagnant for that long, states introduced legislation that neutered unions and organization is at a comparative low. Given the trend of replacing employees with contractors who have less rights and benefits, you can even say that we're taking steps backward compared to where we were not too long ago.

If anything that article supports the idea that unions protect people, and without them companies will push even more irresponsible decisions that put people at risk for the sake of profits.

Perhaps because some sockets are one the same circuit and they don't want to overload that? (At best, risking a power outage because of a circuit breaker going off and at worse a fire if you happened to plug your electrical strip into another electrical strip)

> I'm not allowed to pick up an item sitting twenty feet away on the loading dock.

Perhaps because there may be active work or equipment moving around and you aren't wearing high viz and aren't communicating with someone operating heavy equipment?

These 2 things, though, aren't union related. 1 of them (the electrical strip) may not even be regulation related but rather simply that the organizer has had problems with this in the past. The why for these rules aren't exactly hard to imagine or understand.

> They make public transit too expensive

Public transit is expensive because we refuse to accept the notion of operating it at a loss. We are perfectly capable of partially or fully subsidizing public transit through taxes. In fact, we'd probably save money by running it completely off of taxes because we'd eliminate all the measures we take to ensure someone isn't riding for free. Someone hopping a ticket stand wouldn't jeopardize our ability to keep the trains running. We could further save the tax payers money by adding enough public transit to eliminate or severely reduce the need to purchase cars. Directly saving money on car mileage/purchases/insurance and indirectly saving money by the reduced climate impact and cleaner air (less lung cancer).

Some public services are worth taxes. We (usually) think that way about police, fireman, libraries, and public schools. Heck, we already think that way in terms of transport (most roads aren't built through usage fees).

A little less restriction at tradeshows from union rules would be welcomed and convention centers would be smart to bargain with the union for it.

As for Silicon Valley the hatchet job at Twitter wouldn't have been so easy if the company had been unionized.

I really wish the TVC at Austin Google well in their efforts to unionize. When Pichai gets almost a 1/4 billion a year in compensation surely there is room to pay folks at the bottom better. It shouldn't take several years contracting at Google to get a 50 cent raise to $14. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-subcontractors-face-lo...

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigation/bart-inspector-gene...

Unions can be great, but they can also abuse their power.

Number of top performing athletes, with million dollar contracts and unions, that entertain hundreds of millions of people: All of them.

Number of tech companies with offices in the EU that also hire unionized employees and haven't cannibalized themselves: All of them.

It's got just enough truth to it that one can't straight-out call it a lie (because it's referring vaguely to the possibility, not saying it happens everywhere or in specific, falsifiable, cases), but it's basically propaganda.

In reality, by definition, most people (and in fact nearly everyone), including most people on here, are not getting pay above the rates that a union would be able to negotiate, even if you assume that a given union coming into your workplace would negotiate for something approximating flat rates or scheduled rates. The data all show that going from non-union to union increases compensation by significant amounts—I've seen numbers from ~11% to ~20%, so it probably varies across time.

I hope that one day you, too, can come under union representation, even if it's against your own desires, so that you can see how much more money you'll get, how much better you can be treated, and how much more your voice will matter.