As you would gather from reading my post, it was my own experience.
No, in both cases, the information you had was (at best) second-hand.
In the case of the factory, you said:
"
Eventually, the owners of the factory ended up selling out to a different company because they couldn't afford to do business the way things were. The union workers remained, and the next company that owned the factory didn't do so well either and ended up the same way."
Unless you were party to the discussions happening at the upper levels of management, you have no idea what truly motivated their decisions. Maybe the factory was poorly-managed and/or had outdated equipment. Maybe the purchasers only bought it to consolidate competition; or maybe they didn't do their due diligence with regards to the true profitability of the facility.
Union contracts, even the tough ones, typically have processes in place for enforcing standards and holding workers accountable. What you need in those cases are clear processes and strong, disciplined managers who follow them. If your managers are feckless and wanting to avoid conflict, then yeah, stuff will go south.
In the case of your security contract, you said:
"
I've also been on the side of being an employee who try to get actions done through unionizing. We ended up losing our jobs as a result of asking too much. It was only a $0.75 raise which the company said they couldn't afford at the time, which ended up being proven soon afterwards."
However, unless you were party to the discussions happening between your company and theirs, you have no idea what your company was actually billing for your services. The differential between what a company bills for labor and what it pays is typically far, far larger than $0.75/hr. From what I've seen, labor services are often billed at 2-4x what the worker is paid. If you'd had 100 FTE guards, that would have come out to an additional $151,500/yr, which is about as much as a single middle-manager would've cost (assuming this is several years ago). Unless the company was on the verge of going under (which still would've been a management issue), somebody above you could've eaten that $0.75/hr without batting an eye.