No, you have listed a handful of anecdotes, most of which have a whole other side. I posted a Princeton study, that includes thousands of anecdotes. You actually used coal as an example (?!) and keep talking of plants. We all know manufacturing and coal are nearly dead in the US! The anti-coal lobby hardly originated with unions, LOL. There is no way the U.S can compete in the global manufacturing market.
Please address the industries where unionism is growing - service sector, education, retail, etc. Since a vast majority of unionized workplaces don’t “shut down,” and do raise wages and benefits, then unions do far more good than bad.
Of course unions are adversarial. The boss and the worker do not have the same interests. It is the most adversarial before the union is organized, it’s just that the workers have no power except to grumble and complain. When the bosses treat the workers well, there is no need for a union.
You seem to be focusing on 'coal', when it is the market effects I am referring to. Market effects are not tied to a particular industry. Market effects are universal. When you strike, people tend to switch suppliers to something that is not going to be shut down every time a Union complains.
Customers do not just stand around waiting for you to sign a contract.
They move on. They find other people to conduct business with.
Education unions are growing, because most of the education market is run by the government. So naturally when you have a lock on the public school market (meaning tax payers can not choose where their money goes), and the people paying the bill are the tax payers and working people, then of course there is only upside to being unionized.
With how absolutely horrifically bad public education is, relative to its cost, I hope the private school movement gains traction and eventually wipes out public education.
Service sector unions are growing? I'm not seeing it. Walmart hasn't unionized, and good thing. McDonald's hasn't unionized. Clearly the car wash unionizing in NYC failed miserably.
Where exactly would you point to, as the great success of Unions?
Link broken, but CAPA is a left-wing biased source.
If you go back and read the history of labor in the US, work place conditions were improving, and work day hours were shrinking, before unions ever existed.
Further, there is no indication that unions significantly improved the realities of labor much over what was naturally happening from market forces.
Things would have continued to improve with, or without unions, because they were improving before unions existed.
Again, does that mean unions never served a purpose? Sure. But to claim that without unions there would be no middle class, is unsupportable by the evidence. Correlation does not equal causation. The fact that A is true, and B is true, does not be A caused B.
The fact working conditions improved, and the fact unions exist, does not mean unions caused working conditions to improve. I realize this is a popular and self-serving belief system for a person who is in the union management, but facts do not support the opinion.