At a different time in my career, my view of the available unions were that they had the most unambitious people desparately co-dependent on their marriage to a job for life in the most nepotistic way and it would have been 10% of my paycheck for nothing. I was earlier in my career, making less and that 10% would have been much more consequential compared to when I would theoretically be making a comfortable amount due to the union in perhaps 20 years. Except my timeline of working for someone else didn't involve 20 years, or not 20 consecutive years, and not out of necessity. So far, this was an accurate assessment.

The higher paying jobs I was pursuing didn't have a union at all and I wouldn't have to pay that supposed 10% either (or whatever the union dues really are), and I didn't plan on being in any particular high paying job for more than 1-2 years before hopping for an even higher paying job, and there is no such thing as pensions or long term benefits from being married to a job, so the association for me was blue collar worker unnecessarily milking a system. It wasn't relatable to me at all, and not relatable or relevant to my perception of the tools available to me in the world, or my ambitions. "Ambitions" only when looking through the lens of the comfortable-enough lifelong 9-5'ers that were surrounding me at the time, until I could finally switch up my surroundings. So far thats been an accurate assessment of unions as well as how my career would go, even though my view is much more pro-union now.

The correlation of who joins unions is still heavily there, but I recognize it doesn't have to be and can include even highly paid software engineers given the size of the organizations they work for now (multiple multi-trillion dollar company, really?), although even these new union pushes are just on the blue collar side. Thats just how its panned out, for now.

Regardless that was just on the seemingly desperate-than-other worker side, on the "evil union" side, it was also reinforced by examples where the union tried something that didn't benefit employees at all. Like when the union tried to get wages raised at some cereal company but it was too much and the company just declared bankruptcy, firing 30,000+ people. It was like how out of touch was the union on the health of the company, and all the employees were also this out of touch too? Or maybe all 30,000 weren't out of touch but just had to toe the party line? But even the non-union workers were effected in this mass layoff because now nobody is employed! Sure, even if it was some vulture private equity firm playing all the fiddles, it just reinforced how powerless the unions actually were. All perceptions leading to the conclusion of "irrelevance of an annoying gang".

Anyway, my view has evolved substantially on this. I'm in favor of some future form of collective organization and collective bargaining of even highly-paid, job-hopping, white collar personnel. I feel like there was a time period where I wouldn't even need that distinction. I want this collective organization to have a board seat or two with some forms of employer, by law. But I've basically gone from one extreme to another extreme (unless my view catches on, of course).