"My dad worked at Ford for 30+ years. 99% of the time, he didn't vote for dems. Neither did a lot of the people he worked with."
We've all heard apocryphal stories about how so many union members are really all just Republicans. It's only their leadership that support the Democrats. Bullsh*t, I say. If this is so, then why can't any union member explain to me why they sit back and allow their unions to support and their union dues to bankroll every idiotic leftist cause, leftist candidate, and leftist party to come down the pike.
I have an apocryphal story to tell of my own. My brother-in-law's father was an Electrician who worked at the Ford Rouge Plant for over forty years, beginning in the late thirties. He was one of the original members of the UAW Skilled Trades council, back when the UAW was being created. He saw it all through the years, including the "Battle of the Overpass", the burning of the Ford Rotunda, the construction of the Ford World Headquarters building. But, before he retired he was so disgusted with what the UAW became that he hated every day he went to work and was against everything the union advocated and everyone the union propped up just on general principle.
He told me the turning point for him was during the sixties, when the union was forcing minorities into positions that they were obviously unqualified for just to fill racial quotas. He viewed this policy as life-threatening to him and his colleagues. There was one Sunday he had to repair some high-voltage welding transformers on the line with some minority guy they told him to work with. The minority had brought a liqour bottle with him and was drinking shots all day. My brother-in-law's father had to tell this guy to just sit down and drink because he was afraid the guy would either knock over his ladder or wind up flipping a switch and zapping him to death.
The fact that the union foisted these types of things on the membership, and many other things too numerous to mention, led him to despise the day he ever bought into the "union brotherhood" bullsh*t.