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I crossed a picket line to work a couple of times at the Big Public University when I was not a union worker. Faculty had the luxury of symbolically not working but non-union staff would have simply been fired.
In any case I had been in that particular union and thought they sucked. They limit promotions and do their damnedest to keep people from advancing. They want your only benefits to seem to come from their hard negotiating skills, which they didn't have. They lost every strike they staged. I also had to ask (and did) if everything was so terrible for the workers as they argued, didn't all that happen on AFSCME's watch?
I did learn during those strikes that an uncomplicated view of labor as unions good, management bad, tended to be by people who had never held a union job. It was all academic to them and they didn't have the firsthand experience I'd had with AFSCME.
I have a theory that any organization's purpose is superseded by their goal to grow/survive/strengthen as an organization. It's like sociological evolutionary biology. Labor unions put themselves (as an org) before the workers they represent.
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