The US auto industry was badly mismanaged; SUV craze, killing off electric vehicles or assuming they had no future. The unions can't run the company for you, management has to do it. The unions made sure the employees got paid enough to do their work. Whether or not it was the right work to do was up to management.

Also, banks and insurance companies got far larger loans than the US auto industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program#P...

The unions wanted to keep the auto workers employed and that's kind of hard to do when the companies go to shit (mainly because of management). It may sound anti-free-market to you, but then you have to consider the bansk got larger loans. How is that a free market? Why not just let them all fail?

So yeah, I would say the union works pretty well for auto industry workers. Unions never sit well with management because their business is to cut costs and maximize profit, employee welfare be damned.