One of the reasons that so much American heavy industry went out of business and overseas is precisely because of the union power and high number of manufacturing jobs. More precisely, the high number of people employed in manufacturing vs. the amount of work being done.
I hear folks often complain that they are doing the work of three people. Thirty five years ago, it was the other way around. Three people were doing the job of one.
The union rules in place in the plants my friends worked in ended up with them performing maybe two hours of actual work in a shift. For this they were paid $20+ per hour. What’s that now in inflation-adjusted wages? $50-$60 an hour? And they were shocked (shocked!) when the mills closed down.
Absolutely true. I can tell you that from personal experience, growing up in a heavily industrialized river town and my father in the industrial supply business. Some of the wages at the time were absurd and considered good money today, and their productivity was crap.
When Carter did the Russian grain embargo followed by Volcker clamping down on the money supply and the resulting recession, the whole union made illusion collapsed. The Japs were already on the prowl by then and everything just evaporated. Hence the Rust Belt. 4,000 jobs in my county alone have been lost since then.