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Wrong!! The unions have so abused power and have become so political that the workers no longer want or respect unions
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/04/05/366339/index.htm
Knowing these disparities might make Schwab and Grace turn over in their graves, though Grace did get an early taste of union power. He was forced in 1941 to let the steelworkers union into the company. Thereafter, Bethlehem, typically joining in industrywide bargaining, grimly settled into triennial negotiations in which the union worked unbendingly at keeping the maximum number of its members employed at the highest possible pay. That vault in wages shows how well the union succeeded. Worse--this is an industry in which that word is persistently relevant--the industry let itself be locked into work rules and narrow job descriptions that protected workers whom automation and efficiency should have made superfluous.
The point is driven home stunningly by the contract changes that International Steel Group wrung from the steelworkers for those six Bethlehem plants it began operating in 2003. ISG's CEO, Wilbur Ross, who characterizes Bethlehem's contract as "terrible," got the union to allow the cutting of job categories in his plants from 32 to five! As just one example, there is no longer a job category called electrician, which means that when a light bulb needs changing, a machine operator doesn't have to call such a specialist in (perhaps from the far reaches of a plant) but can screw in a new bulb himself.
The ultimate error was the steel industry's approach to pension and health benefits. The history here is revealing. From World War II on, wage and price controls intermittently slowed wage increases. Written into the contracts as offsets, though, were a long string of benefit improvements. These took up their role as company killers.
Management, however, originally viewed its benefit promises as benign compared to wage increases calling for immediate cash. Health costs were modest for many decades and, besides, were normally pay-as-you-go. That is, few companies during this era bothered to fund health benefits in advance by putting money into a trust for employees. Until the 1990s, when new accounting rules came in, pay-as-you-go also meant that companies were not accruing expenses for what they would eventually have to pay retirees. Corporations were thus left oblivious to true costs and real earnings.
Pension plans, in contrast to health and insurance plans, were normally funded and eventually had to be. But before that requirement took hold, companies had wide latitude as to how much, if anything, they would contribute in any given year. Consequently, a lot of the pain related to pensions could be pushed into the future if that's the way management wanted it.
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