Wisconsin had lot of heavy industry at one time. So union labor was ubiquitous. Especially in areas adjacent to Chicago area such as Rockford, Milwaukee. I am not sure how much of that heavy industrial base has been lost since I retired in 1998. When I started my jobs in Chicago industrial complex, there was a huge number of large industrial plants present. Slowly, they moved to southern states to get away from unions. All those empty manufacturing plants & buildings in Chicago were so depressing. My own company was non-union for many years and did very well. Then union came in, and that started the downward trend with eventual bankruptcy and shuttering of the manufacturing plant.
I grew up in the south but worked in Rockford in the mid to late 80s. It’s in Illinois, not Wisconsin, but you knew that.
Even at that time most of the union jobs were gone. I was a white collar engineer working at Sundstrand Corp (now Hamilton Sundstrand) which was really the only going concern in town. Everything else had shut down because it had been serving the auto industry which had gotten hammered in the 80s.
Sundstrand was an aerospace company but was unionized by the UAW. Go figure. Had to deal with the union assh*les.
At that time, there was a downturn in the normally cyclical aerospace industry. When the contract was up, the union still went out on strike demanding a 10% pay increase.
The company took a skeleton crew of non-union engineers (not me - wrong specialty) and kept the assembly line running. No only running, but the skeleton crew of engineers actually cleared the backlog that the lazy union workers had created so they could get overtime.
The company realized that they could keep product coming out the door indefinitely. Eventually, the union had to come back to work w/o a contract. (cue Nelson Muntz - ha ha)
Not sure what happened after that because I’d had enough and left. This insider experience taught me everything I ever needed to know about unions.