It looks like possibly the Unions had something to do with weekends in the US, so perhaps you're thanking them for that. I think globally the practice of resting on the sabbath goes slightly further back.
Everyone has a choice. Either they decide to take a job or they don't. Unions are all about blackmail and holding employers to ransom.
Unions are sort of a fun idea, but they end up as a 'them' vs 'us' mentality which quickly escalates to strikes and blackmail.
Strikes hurt the strikers far more than the negotiations they are an alternative to. No one wants strikes.
If you decide to strike, you should be sacked. Simple. You've broken your side of a contract to work.
Funny how the site there kinda glosses over the disastrous Union woes of the 70s, how the country was brought to its knees.
Of course I'm not a Labour Party supporter at all, which is perhaps another reason I dislike Unions. The two go hand in hand. The Labour party is after all, bankrolled, and totally controlled by Unions. I disagree completely with the philosophies of both of them. They're about waste. Unfairness. etc etc
Do you know the answers to the above? Until you do, you're missing out on important parts of British history.
I do not think unions are an unadulterated good, and I think many times the law goes silly trying to make it hard for companies to weasel out of their agreements (which is where many of the laws benefiting unions come from), but to act like they don't ever do good things, you really have to have not looked at what Great Brittan was like before they came about.
You're looking at something without the perspective of history when you look at the state of modern labour without looking at it's history and thereby missing 90% of their reasons for doing what they do the way they do it. Lots of the structures and behaviors are there to combat the shenanigans of the companies employed against the workers in the past.