Right out of engineering school, I took a field service job starting up power plants. On one job in Arizona, I needed to make a very simple adjustment to a coal pulverizer. I picked up a wrench and nearly shut the entire plant down with the unions going nuts. That simple 10 minute job that would have cost $10 if I did the work took SEVEN trades a total of three hours — probably $1,000 or more. Then there were the electricians in Longview, WA who proudly called themselves the “FLEs” — Fat Lazy Electricians. They could featherbed a job at the tail end like nothing I’d ever seen. You couldn’t get them off the job.
Five years in field service gave me a lifetime of education about unions.
I had a similar experience fresh out of school when I worked in aerospace. I was always in trouble with the union stewards. I was not allowed to talk to the union machinists without a union steward present.
The factory made big missle parts and some of the machine tools were as big as a house. I would walk onto the fatory floor and the union steward would see me from afar and start heading my way. I would duck behind one of the big tools and then go the other way. For about 20 minutes we would play “cat and mouse”. Most of the machinists thought it was hillarious. I would then leave the factory without talking to anyone. It used to really pi$$ the union steward off because he never knew if I talked to one of the machinists our not.
After 3 years, I had enough of aerospace and moved on.