Some additional context: I have seen colleagues fired for illegal reasons, discriminated against, egregiously, as well as managed out through no fault of their own. I have seen terrible politics at upper management levels, which eventually rolls down to workers doing somewhere between acceptable and good work. Unions are, in my professional experience of ~25 years, the least worst option versus no union. I understand some have a different lived experience, or think they can do better on their own. I argue and support what the data and my lived experience tells me I should.

I would only swim with sharks with a cage in between us to protect me, similarly. Labor regulations and unions protect workers from sharks, and sharks are everywhere (broadly speaking, sociopaths, narcissists, and those with dark triad personalities who ascend to positions of power in entities).

The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day: Narcissism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639459 - June 2026

Marissa S. Shandell, Courtney E. Elliott, Adam M. Grant, Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 195, 2026, 104496, ISSN 0749-5978, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2026.104496

> Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.

Khorram-Manesh, A., & Burkle, F. M. (2024). Sociopathic narcissistic leadership: How about their victims? World Medical & Health Policy, 16, 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.588

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

(the meritocracy does not exist, the hierarchy, status, and power games remain as it always does, and worker livelihoods cannot be left to luck and optional benevolence)