But the jobs didn’t disappear to Asia, the office jobs moved to Detroit and the factory jobs moved to other cities/states. Flint was the birthplace of the UAW, and it’s generally credited with driving all the jobs out.

That said, blaming globalization for the loss of factory work feels intellectually lazy. Some things will always fall to the lowest bidder, but a lot of stuff is extremely complex and you wouldn’t send it overseas unless you felt like you had to (either because of unions, suppliers, local politics, or some other reason).

The irony is most HN users advocate for unions, but never join one because the work is too boring or the pay is too low, as if those aren’t a direct result of the union.

There are different models of union. IIUC, Nordic countries use sectoral bargaining: [0]

Sectoral bargaining is when a union covers an entire sector of the economy, e.g. telecom, electrical, aviation.

In sectoral bargaining, companies don't fight unions as hard. ("We'll have to pay our workers more, but all our competitors will too, so we won't be at a relative disadvantage.")

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_collective_bargaining