Why is this taken as the only way these things can be in the US?
My experience in Belgium is very different.
>1. At their best unions protect members from managerial malfeasance, but unions also go out of their way to protect incompetents who should be fired. That is soul crushing as a coworker, bad for the company, and possibly harmful to customers.
As far as I'm aware there's not much our unions here in Belgium can do about that. If there's a legitimate reason they have no interest in spending their funds fighting a court case going nowhere. They do occasionally take action when it's harmfull to the company when there's legitimate reason for firing but this involves the company laying of lots of people when they are closing down a division or plant or so which generally doesn't stop it but makes the closing more fitting to the workers.
>2. Unions are heavily involved in politics. As a worker, part of your paycheck is being seized to support politicians whom you may vehemently oppose.
Our largest unions are very plainly politically aligned. We have a leftist union, christian democrat union, liberal union and then a neutral union or 2 , industry specific unions. Either way tho part of my paycheck does not go to politicians and if it did not to politicians i don't align with. In fact what i pay to the union is a tiny sum. They compete among eachother and these big unions operate at scale.
>4. Unions foster adversarial relationships within companies, an us/them mentality against "management". Sometimes the environment is already toxic so nothing is lost, but it can also turn an otherwise reasonable workplace sour.
I don't think we interact with our unions much on average.
My experiences with them were limited to.
1) them blocking entry for trucks ( i could just walk in) when there was a big announced nationwide protest regarding things like wage indexation i believe.
2) Them checking the legality of the contract i was offered and given pointers.
3) Them paying me my unemployment at some point and handling the paperwork.