“I’ve been in the trades since 1979, and can tell you that non-union journeymen only made half that wage in the late 80s.”
I would hope that would be the case for non-union, but the union boys certainly weren’t cheap...and then couple that with the legendary productivity of unions and it becomes obvious why there was such an effort to finally break them.
No, they weren't, but most commercial job sites in Cali employed non-union labor 40 years ago.
The unions owned the state and municipal projects, and most large non-residential work, in those days.
By the time I became a licensed contractor in the late 90s, they'd started to lose their iron grip on those sectors. My buddies and I used to get offers from the state to bid on there projects all the time, in those days.