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That’s a big part of the problem. It seems people would be happy to make the choice to negotiate directly with the employer but they don’t have that choice. I come at this from a management position. I used to be a manager in an industry in the CA Bay Area which was non-union. But once we broke into the market in San Francisco where it was all union, we were actually limited in what we could offer the employees because of union restrictions. We were not able to negotiate schedules, rate of pay or offer incentives of any kind for performance. And hard as we tried, we couldn’t keep the SF employees from finding out how good non-union life was just minutes south of the city. So the good employees in SF begged to be transferred out to the other accounts. Needless to say, the SF business went in the toilet. We simply couldn’t keep any decent employees up there because we couldn’t be flexible with them.

Unions kill productivity and prevent any attempt at being both a competitive employer as well as a competitive service provider. And the people that suffer the most are those folks whose wages are being confiscated for the pleasure.