[Pollster1]

Two union goons cornered me when I was young enough to need school permission to hold a job. I was legally entitled to hold that job without joining the union - for thirty days. After my union-free window expired, I quit rather than join a union that would take a huge chunk of my summer earnings, and moved to another job in which I would also be required to join the union but not for another thirty days. On my way home from my first day on that new job (nowhere near fully grown teenage boy, riding a bicycle, faced by two goons in a pickup truck), the union thugs cornered me and threatened to break my arms if I didn’t join or quit.

The thugs won - obviously - I quit. I have hated unions ever since then with the passion that they so richly deserve. I never again took a job in a union shop, and my votes throughout my entire life have been shaped by that encounter with evil and by later observations of unions that are still just as thuggish.

[sparklite2]

I was offered a ‘regulated’ job at the General Dynamics F-16 fighter factory in Fort Worth. Never regretted for a single moment saying ‘no.’

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Place I used to work for had a lot of union workers who held a strike every decade or so. The goons would do things like drop bowling balls from the overpass onto cars in the parking lot. Guys you saw every working day turned into psychos during strikes. Means they were psychos the whole time.

[Myrddin]

I was a first level manager at a BOC writing software for the company. The 212 modem assigned to me in the computer room rack was mis-optioned. I asked the CWA union steward multiple times over 6 weeks to fix it and he would not. My connection would drop into remote digital loopback and destroy hours of software editing work. I was finally pissed off enough that I flipped the switch myself. The turd shop steward looked up my home phone number and had his union goons clip my main number. No dial tone. This happened 10 minutes after the turd learned I flipped the switch. I reported the outage. The turd called his goons to "fix it" by turning over TIP/RING leads so I got dial tone, but reverse polarized so my touch tone pad would not work. I never let on to the turd that I had a 2nd unlisted number at the house and was able to call my wife to diagnose the problems. The turd also didn't know that I was the former Toll Central Office Equipment engineer for the office supplying my dial tone. I was very good friends with the Wire Chief at the office. We quietly fixed the problem without the belligerent CWA pukes. My "drop" had been cut with diagonal cutters. Deliberate sabotage in the central office.

My first union run-in was with IBEW. They wanted to force me to join so I could walk into the San Diego ship yards to care for electronics on the tuna seiners. The bastards wanted their $60 initiation fee so bad that the took a power saw and cut the radio (AM/FM/8-Track) out of the console of my car. $1200 damage for an F'ing $60 fee. The other guy in my office had all the windows of his car smashed and $400 in camera gear stolen. Suffice to say, IBEW is permanent on my S-list. I avoid union interaction like the plague.