Uh, not quite. How about union-represented employees who kill people? We continuously read how Police department unions defend cops who kill unarmed citizens:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/how-poli...

Once of many examples from the article:

"Hector Jimenez is one Oakland policeman who was fired and reinstated. In 2007, he shot and killed an unarmed 20-year-old man. Just seven months later, he killed another unarmed man, shooting him three times in the back as he ran away. Oakland paid a $650,000 settlement to the dead man's family in a lawsuit and fired Jimenez, who appealed through his police union. Despite killing two unarmed men and costing taxpayers all that money, he was reinstated and given back pay."

There's a difference between the rigor required for an online discussion, and the rigor required for a formal paper. I knew some of my post would miss the mark - and by a very WIDE margin - because using very simplistic, stereotypical cultural lingua franca makes the general point easier to make, but lacks pretty much any rigor.

Viewing it more as a starting point for discussion - and trying to see past the many bad parts - is all I hoped for.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI#History

In this telling it's the GM management who are incompetent, not the line workers. Clearly that's not the version you're selling though.

Unions are democratic institutions that rely on precedent, so it's really essential to defend employees all of the time.