I totally agree with you. Years ago when I was a college student, I worked summers for Morrison-Knudsen building missile sites, hard-core union US Army Corps of Engineers projects subject to the Davis-Bacon Act. In addition to requiring the country's highest union scale to be paid, petty union rules caused lots of squabbles over who was allowed to push a broom, wield a hammer, tie wires, etc. Although we worked Monday through Friday, the Corps required power to be on to each site during the weekends. That required, for each of six 8-hour shifts, a journeyman electrician to ensure that the site power switch was turned on, which in turn required a foreman to supervise the journeyman and a general foreman to supervise the foreman--all drawing double time. Then we had the union nepotism problem--for example, the Teamster union steward's college student son, also a Teamster member, worked the day shift and simply took one of the newest MK pickups off to a quiet part of the site and slept or listened to the radio all day.
After college and an Air Force career, I worked for a non-union company for nearly 18 years. I never saw anyone abusing the company like the unions routinely abused MK and the government during the missile site construction program.
Exactly! Your experience describes EXACTLY the problems. I have a buddy who works for a company providing high end stereos to auto manufacturers. He has been to the plants in Japan and Detroit, and has seen the way the Japanese “unions” work as opposed to those in Detroit.
He was appalled by the waste, inefficiency and simple incompetence of union labor in Detroit. I put the word “union” in quotes for Japan, because apparently, they don’t operate anything like our unions.