I’m not a union guy in the way you might picture a union guy. I’ve complained about unions. I’ve worked around them because the budget demanded it. I’ve watched strong-arm tactics that embarrassed everyone involved. I’ve sat in a production office calculating how much cheaper everything would be if we just went non-union.
And I still think unions are probably the most important thing that ever happened to working people.
My dad spent his career as a machinist at an aluminum can manufacturing plant. Union shop. When the economy went sideways and the company started cutting people, he kept his job. He had to shift roles — went from machinist to something closer to maintenance — but he didn’t lose his income or his health coverage. The union gave him leverage he never would have had on his own against a company that wasn’t going to protect him out of the goodness of its heart.
I know this because I worked there too. Summers during college — they had a program where they’d hire the kids of union workers, and I ended up on the floor. Twelve-hour shifts, four days on, four days off, day shift then night shift. It was genuinely hard work, the kind that makes you understand in your body why people fought for lunch breaks and overtime rules. But the pay was the best money I’d ever seen at that point in my life. I was going to SUNY, which wasn’t exactly expensive, and I paid my own way through those summers off those shifts. That was the union doing what unions do.
So when I hear people talk about unions like they’re some alien imposition on the natural order of business, I think about that plant floor.
The Film Side: Complicated
When I moved into production, I ran into a different version of unions — the film and television guilds. Every department has its union. Camera. Lighting. Grip. Art department. Each one with its own rules, jurisdictions, protections. Turnaround time. Meal penalties. Minimum crew sizes. When you’re producing on a shoestring, all of that feels like friction, and friction is another word for things we can’t afford.
But when we could work union, the crews were seasoned. They’d been doing the work long enough to be really good at it, and they stuck around in the industry because the industry was worth sticking around in. The rules weren’t arbitrary — someone had already lived the version of the story where those protections weren’t there, and it wasn’t a good story.
The Teamsters are a different conversation. On film shoots, they developed a reputation — justified in a lot of cases — for tactics that crossed from protecting workers into something that looked more like a shakedown. That stuff hands union opponents exactly the ammunition they want, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist.
But corruption shows up everywhere there’s power. It’s in government, in corporate boards, in churches. Jimmy Hoffa didn’t invent human nature — he just gave people a convenient way to write off the entire concept of organized labor because of the behavior of its worst actors. We don’t do that with corporations. We don’t say that because Enron existed, the concept of publicly traded companies should be abolished. We hold the bad actors accountable and move on. Unions deserve the same standard.
The Irony I Can’t Get Over
Some of the loudest complaints about unions I’ve heard have come from people who work public sector jobs. City employees. State workers. Teachers. People who retire with pensions at 55, carry health coverage through retirement, and have genuine job security — and who will, with a straight face, tell you that unions are bad for the economy.
Those protections? Unions. All of it.
The right-to-work movement has been remarkably effective at convincing working people that the thing protecting them is actually hurting them. States race each other to the bottom — come build your factory here, we’ve made it easier to pay your workers less — and frame it as economic freedom. The car manufacturers go south. The wages follow. The jobs are real, but the life those jobs can support is thinner than it used to be, and nobody in that negotiation was at the table fighting for the workers.
What Corporations Are Actually For
This isn’t a condemnation, it’s just the architecture. Corporations exist to generate returns for shareholders. That’s the legal structure, the fiduciary obligation, what they optimize for. They are not set up to pay workers well. They are set up to pay workers as little as they can while still getting the output they need.
The only thing that changes that math is leverage. And for individual workers, leverage comes from one place — joining together and being willing to act as one.
Without that, you have people who know something’s wrong, who see the fraud, the corner-cutting, the decisions being made at their expense, and who stay quiet because they can’t afford not to. That silence doesn’t make the problems go away. It makes them worse. More fraud, more bad decisions, more costs that eventually land somewhere — usually on the people with the least cushion to absorb them.
There’s a version of this argument that’s purely economic self-interest for the ownership class: better-paid workers are better customers, rising tide lifts all boats. But we’ve been making that argument for a hundred years and it keeps losing to the quarterly earnings report, so maybe we should stop waiting for corporations to figure it out on their own.
So Where Does That Leave Us
The people who will benefit most from a stronger organized labor movement are the same people who’ve been told unions are the problem. That gap — between who benefits and who’s been convinced to oppose it — is not an accident. If someone is telling you unions are bad for workers, they either believe something that isn’t true or they have a reason to want you to believe it.
The right to organize, to collectively bargain, to not be fired for doing either — those should be treated as non-negotiable, not as courtesies that employers can route around through right-to-work legislation. There’s a real argument that right-to-work laws function as anti-competitive practices dressed up in the language of freedom, and someone should be making that case louder.
Could we require that every company above a certain size offer a genuine path to union representation — with real enforcement and actual consequences for obstruction? Probably not in the current political climate. But political climates change, usually when enough people feel the floor drop out from under them.
That floor is dropping.
Even that's Odd 
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