> For starters, fewer industries need unions these days. Unions don't help most office-work and white-collar careers, where pay is on-average sufficient or high, and hours are standardized already (nobody in Accounting or HR is working 12 hour days on the routine).
I routinely hear about people doing super long hours in loads of industries. Sit-down jobs. Hell, loads of people in IT get put through the wringer.
> Additionally, in some sectors, unions are a net-negative. Take software for example, where folks routinely make bananas money for regular work. In those environments, unions typically protect unproductive peers, and limit high-performer's maximum compensation.
Would you rather make the obscene amount of money or work with a bunch of people who aren't permanently stressed out from internal rat races? How many stories about people getting chewed up at places like Amazon do we need to hear about?
> As an aside, people do need to learn to say no to work. Just because you want to work on say, video games or VFX doesn't mean you should accept a job that compels you to work horrendous hours for little pay. Just say no and move on... the market forces will correct and adjust accordingly out of necessity.
Unions and labor action can make all of this happen on a way smoother time scale, and without squeezing half a generation of people dry. Why sit around and wait for a bunch of companies to collapse, people to go jobless, when you could instead coordinate efforts, figure out what people want, and move towards that in a coordinated way?
There's nuance, but employers negotiate as a bloc (in that even a single company has its own overall policies), having employees do the same just feels like common sense.
A bit of an aside: I do think it's important to look at what actual union agreements look like. Places like Netflix got better deals when they were smaller. Unions often end up with tiered payments anyways. Agreements get made over multi-year periods offering a good amount of stability. The idea that a union forces everyone to get paid the same and for a strike to be inevitable the instant the kind bars disappear from the break room is prevelant, but the reality is much more nuanced (partly because people usually just want to do work and get paid and do what they want to do).