Remember, there’s been a well-funded campaign pushing back against the New Deal for longer than most of us have been alive. Unions are not perfect but there are a lot of misrepresentation and urban legends circulating and most of the stories you hear are likely either wrong or leaving out key details (e.g. the union got adamant about certain tasks after management tried to avoid honoring their contract). Unless you have first-hand experience or lots of documentation, be skeptical.
There's this perspective that the best way to keep a system working is to make it unusable, so that nobody uses it, and thus nobody breaks it, and so you don't have to keep fixing it. It's something I've seen parts of organizations navigate into without any union-related involvement.
As a simple example, how often is purchasing inordinately expensive because something was abused in the past and that group was told to make sure it never happens again? Or a sales group setting engineering up for failure because they personally had a huge financial incentive to do so?
The union might be a corrupt and self serving enterprise. They may just be reacting to abuses by management.
Perhaps the company kept getting fines from the fire marshal for unsafe use of extension cords. Management tries to use that as an excuse to harass or fire their electrical workers. The union responds by saying that their electricians never saw nor approved the use of the cords and that they had no way of knowing they were in use. After enough hostile interaction, you wind up with a rule that nobody can plug their own computer into an existing outlet.
The places where I hear about the worst red tape, are places where the relationship between the unions and management are really antagonistic. Both sides need to remember that everyone wants the employer to be successful, because then there are more profits for everyone to share.
Yes, unions can make things less efficient. Yes, unions can cause unnecessarily stupid systems that harm people. But so do employers! I'd rather have one I can at least vote in.
It's a bit like the tax code or some complicated piece of bureaucracy. Some of the stuff in there sure seems stupid but you can bet it was put in for a reason that, at the time at least, looked sensible. In the case of things like "only an electrician is allowed to do that", it's a pretty safe bet that at some point in the past management tried to do an end run around the agreement and have cheaper labor do something they weren't trained or compensated for. In the US at least the system is so adversarial you end up with hard lines being drawn on both sides.
I knew a guy who came to work at Google and didn't get a laptop for two weeks. No unions were involved.
Thinking about it, this anecdote isn't a great counter-example to systemic foolishness after all, d'oh!
Ok, fair enough. I once had a job where there was no union, but if I needed to get something deployed to production (or even test), I had to fill out a form, submit it to devops, have them tell me that I filled it out wrong, fill it out again, wait for them to prioritize it, stay on a call with them while they did it, have them tell me again that my form wasn’t specific enough, resubmit it again, wait again, and hopefully be permitted to let them complete the job that I was being held responsible for. I could have ssh’ed into the server, uploaded the binary and restarted the server at any point, but bureaucracy prevented me. This is, in fact, pretty standard. This has nothing to do with unionization, it has to do with liability and risk management.