In my humble opinion, this qualifies as among the top hundred posts ever to grace the pages of Free Republic. Everything you wrote is accurate to a T and your conclusions are unassailable.
The labor union movement in the United States is a direct result of foreign socialist influences operating here. Believe it or not, Hollywood leftist Warren Beatty's Reds film from the 1981 depicts this properly with the rise of the IWW, known as the Wobblies. The whole gang that accelerated unionism in the 1800's and 1900's is a rogue's gallery of evil: Eugene V. Debs, Big Bill Haywood, the foreign-born Samuel Gompers, socialist Walter Reuther and many others of that ilk.
Perhaps the worst president in our nation's history, Franklin Diablo Roosevelt gave fuel to Big Labor with the vile Wagner Act, giving unions and their corrupt bosses unprecedented power.
It's long past time for unions to be abolished. I contend that RICO laws can be brought down hard on Big Labor to put every last one of them into the graveyard of history. Unionism is tantamount to an extortion racket. The Mafia has been defanged over the years and the same aggressive approach must be taken to forever exterminate the blight of unionism. When unions are extinguished, the light of American Free Enterprise will shine brightly. Watch our economic engine come roaring back when the stranglehold of unionism perishes!
Can’t deny the role of communism in unions history in the US.
However, as someone who had 1 grandfather thrown in the river and shot by Sheriff Chapin’s deputies for organizing and had another with his leg crushed in a mine and was on Blair mountain during the battle, I know there was a reason 100,000s of thousands of workers joined unions a 100 years ago.
And it wasn’t communism which attracted them.
Tellingly, unions fell into disfavor at the same time government undertook to set and enforce workplace safety standards.
Could be workplaces weren't safe ~ actually, I've worked in factories where big heavy things like engine blocks and cupolas full of molten iron could break loose and fall on the floor, or the employees. Bunch of them over in the foundary at Naptown IH truck engine works had their legs burned off in just such an accident.
To a degree union representation didn't protect them at all from that sort of accident happening, but they did use union representation in court when they sued the company for damages.
Lot of this stuff is time and place, of course.
There's a contracts clause in the body of the Constitution. Simply requiring employers to sign work contracts with the people they hire to work ~ with conditions enforceable in courts of law ~ would go a long way toward disposing of even residual inclinations toward unions.