For every anecdote one unearths about bad union work rules, I'm sure that you can find a hundred about a union successfully looking out for the interest of a member. Is best not to be distracted by anecdotes.
One day my job was to clean out some office trailers out in the back lot so they could haul them to a new site in a few days. To do this I needed a vacuum cleaner (which they had) and a generator to run it (which they also had). No problem, I said.
Until I found out that the generator was so low on oil that it wouldn't start due to the low oil cutoff switch. The oil was black and needed to be changed.
No problem again, I knew where the oil was, and I knew how to change it so I started to do just that. Until a union mechanic yelled at me and asked me what the H I was doing and that only a mechanic could do that job. I said "Ok, I'll just top it off so I can start it" ,and he said "Nope, you can't do that". I thought he was joking and kind of laughed until he called my boss over to explain it to me.
The mechanics, of course, were busy, so wouldn't get a chance to change my oil until next week, so I told my boss that I wouldn't be able to do my job. He said he'd take care of it.
And take care of it he did -- he said to go to the trailers and wait, and sure enough, a union driver showed up with a tractor trailer towed generator -- it must have been a 500KW generator, maybe larger. The union generator operator showed up soon after and started it up for me, and said he'd be back at quitting time to shut it down.
So all day long a 500KW generator sucked down 10 (?) gallons of fuel per hour (not to mention the wear and tear on that huge generator and the cost of the driver and generator operator)... just so I could run a shop-vac.
All because I wasn't allowed to put a few dollars of oil into a 5kw generator due to union rules.
That is when I lost all respect for unions.
I've not witnessed such an incident first hand, but as soon as I do I'll likely think "wow, they weren't kidding" and lose all respect for union activities from one incident.
By anonymous posters, most likely who have never actually worked a union job and are just repeating something they've read in threads like these.
Yes, unions have dumb rules. Do you think those rules were developed before or after corporations dictated onerous policy? So who are the good guys?
I don't think "losing respect for all Chinese because one wasn't acting rationally" is a fair analogy, more like "losing respect for all Chinese because they not only follow arbitrary and counter-productive rules, but they actively support them and will fight to keep them"
We usually call that "ideological blinkers".