I can't speak for this situation, but before I moved to tech I worked in a heavily union industry, and all the union shops had in their bargaining contract that the employer could not hire anyone who wasn't in the union.
For people in the union it was great. For people not in the union, it sucked. And before somebody says, "well just join the union" (do you really think I'm that stupid not to have thought about that?) joining the union was really, really hard. You basically had to wait for somebody to either retire or die, because nobody ever left for other reasons, and because employees were super expensive and impossible to fire, union shops were extremely conservative with hiring. Union employees got paid double what non-union did and had 1/4 of the work to do, plus they slacked off like crazy and never got in trouble for it. The union was (or at least looked to us) like it was great for the employees. I'd hate to be the employer though.
A lot of union businesses also benefit from regulatory capture and have the inside track on government contracts as their main source of income. There's no effective competition for these types of industries.
Exactly. This industry is highly regulated and the unions help write the laws and regulations. Because of that it's mostly large players and very, very few small ones. The large ones all have agreements with the unions because at their scale it's impossible not to, and to get that agreement they have to agree to only hire union.
Also a lot of the materials producers that supplied us were union, and many of them didn't want to provide services to a non-union shop. I don't know if they had any formal policies against it (probably they didn't) but anytime we called or places orders, etc we were a super low priority for them.
> they slacked off like crazy and never got in trouble for it.
The heirs receiving dividends from the New York Times company slack off to the extent of never working a day in their life, yet receiving massive amounts of money from those doing the work and creating the wealth at the New York Times company.
The union works so that the workers creating the wealth send less of it to these lazy, slacking "job creator" parasites.
For people in the union it was great. For people not in the union, it sucked. And before somebody says, "well just join the union" (do you really think I'm that stupid not to have thought about that?) joining the union was really, really hard. You basically had to wait for somebody to either retire or die, because nobody ever left for other reasons, and because employees were super expensive and impossible to fire, union shops were extremely conservative with hiring. Union employees got paid double what non-union did and had 1/4 of the work to do, plus they slacked off like crazy and never got in trouble for it. The union was (or at least looked to us) like it was great for the employees. I'd hate to be the employer though.