I voted generally bad, though there's some cases where they do good.

In general, I say they are a temporary solution to a permanent problem. The vast majority of problems happened at the first part of last century.

I've certainly worked my share of crap jobs - on a berry farm with a bunch of migrant workers, making minimum wage in 80+ hour weeks with no overtime, and I've also worked as a laborer in a industrial painting company that used to be unionized and then became un-unionized.

And I still generally am against unions. They limit flexibility in business, by making job descriptions very strict, among a thousand other things. The more powerful the union, the worse it generally is.

I've worked in a large non-union refinery and from all that I hear the experience, for all employees, and especially the relationship between hourly and salaried types, is much better than in unionized refineries under the same company.

Unions are a symptom of poor management or aggressive unionizing attempts by faltering unions (the UAW is trying to unionize the graduate students and assorted folks at my university), so it seems better to me that you solve the underlying problem instead of boasting about a powerful union. It's like thinking that taking strong antibiotics is better than not having a disease in the first place.

CR