Skills driving a forklift? You've got to be kidding me.
Look, don't blame unions for the incompetence of business owners when they lose at the negotiating table. I'll be the first to say that most unions have brilliant negotiators, but most business owners are beaten before they ever sit down to negotiate. These guys go in with defeat in mind; they say the same thing you do. "How can we ever compete with unions? Gosh, what can we do?" With that kind of attitude, is it any wonder that they get trounced when it comes time to draw up an agreement?
You're beginning to compare white collar to blue collar. You can't do that and expect to have a legitimate comparison. White collar jobs don't need unions for a few different reasons:
1) There are a lot fewer white collar workers than blue collar. That evens up the odds right from the very beginning.
2) Not only are there fewer white collar workers, the "field" of white collar workers is further subdivided by specialty. You are a software designer, someone might be an architect, another is an engineer, etc. So that cuts down on the supply right there, again leveling the playing field.
3) White collar jobs lend themselves more to showing superior skills than blue collar jobs. You might be a genius software designer and no one else in the world can do what you do--you wrote Linux or whatever. That additional skill ability gives you further negotiating power over your employer. Who says that about forklift drivers? What, is there a Mario Andretti of forklift drivers? Of course not--one forklift driver is pretty much the same as any other forklift driver.
So what I'm getting at is that the bargaining position of a forklift driver is a lot different than your bargaining position as a software writer, or whatever it is that you do. Yeah, you can leave and go work for another software design company. Because you have unique skills, you are a valuable asset to your employer (presumably). Forklift drivers and other blue collar workers that make up unions don't have that luxury. They can't say, "give me a raise or I'll quit." It's super for you that you have a unique skill set that gives you leverage over employers, but just because blue collar workers don't have those skills it doesn't mean they should be disallowed from even-field bargaining.