If don't have to back-up anything. If you are interested you go and do the research, it's actually very easy these days. Also, I worked within a unionized environment for eight years. I have seen the beast from the inside. What it does to people and businesses is nothing less than horrible. I have seen people come to work drunk knowing full-well that they could not be fired for it. I have seen people sleeping at work. Again, can't fire them. I have seen people refuse to help out where help was needed because it was not in their union contract ("Can you help me move this (light) box? No. It's not in my contract"). I've seen people get paid $150K per year to do what most anyone would consider nothing or very little. Jobs that in the "outside" free market would not justify more than $15 per hour suddenly become $50 per hour + benefits + pension for life jobs in an unionized environment.

When you look at the fact that government is loaded with unionized workers one of the most immediate reactions should be: As tax-payers we are getting shafted. These people are getting paid lots more than their free market equivalents. Lots. And, of course, when you count lifetime pensions funded by taxpayers the numbers are far worst.

OK, since you are an evidence kind of guy (or gal, I don't know) I'll take the time to give you some of that data. Let's use this link:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm

Oh, wait a minute, that's the link YOU provided. Yup. Thanks. I reviewed the page and came up with these interesting notes:

"In 2011, among full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median usual weekly earnings of $938, while those who were not union members had median weekly earnings of $729."

Translation: If you do the math, median union worker wages are about 29% higher than equivalent free market workers.

I'll leave it to the reader to Google a little and find data comparing wage differentials by occupation.

Here's another one:
"In 2011, 7.6 million employees in the public sector belonged to a union, compared with 7.2 million union workers in the private sector."

Sounds fairly benign, right? Until you read the next two sentences:

"The union membership rate for public-sector workers (37.0 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private-sector workers (6.9 percent). Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership rate, 43.2 percent."

So, on average 37% of government workers are unionized. And, if you look locally, over 43% belong to a union.

Only 7% of free-market workers are unionized!

Something stinks here. Government workers figured-out how to game the system by unionizing. We now work for them.

This is where the huge conflict of interest is created. Government workers belong to unions in staggering numbers and they vote and act as a block. They also enlist the support of other unions in getting behind legislation and politicians who will keep throwing candy at them. Again, all you have to do is look at California and the disaster that politicians and unions have created to understand how badly this can degenerate.

There's plenty of evidence of this on the web:

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/december/california-pensi...

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/pension-336894-california...

http://www.pensiontsunami.com/

A quote from one of these links:

"a research team based at Stanford University and headed by Joe Nation, a former Democratic state assemblyman, released an updated analysis of state and local pension funds, concluding that they are underfunded by hundreds of billions of dollars and, unless reformed, will seriously erode future financing of schools, health care and other services."

Anyhow, you can believe what you'd like. You can believe that corporations are evil. And that's fine. That will not change reality. Even when corporations cover everything form the corner bakery to Apple. And, BTW, nobody ever claims that Apple is evil. It's those other evil corporations. Also, nobody ever seems to state at what revenue level corporations become evil. Or after what number of employees? By any measure Apple should be one of the most evil corporations in the world. The reality that remains unchanged is that we and our children are very likely to have to pay for union pensions for the rest of our lives. And, that, among other things, is horribly wrong.

While I could be more ignorant than I have a clue (as someone in this thread kindly pointed out) the sad reality is that even this does not alter the facts. If it did I'd gladly declare myself to be an utter idiot. The facts are that unions are causing and will continue to cause a lot of damage at many levels. Here in California we ought to seriously look at the idea of, at the very least, removing them from government.