1) Isn't it more efficient to mandate minimum safety standards through the government/OSHA than through unions?

That's an interesting question. My initial inclination, however, is to answer "no". The conditions and safety issues associated with different jobs vary so greatly that it would be quite difficult for any general organization to encompass and mandate all relevant standards. Unions can be much more specific, even taking care of issues like, "Workers working in location X should receive extra pay because it is 15 degrees warmer than the rest of the plant." (That's a bad example, but I hope you get what I mean.)

2) When you took the job, did you know about the conditions there? If so, why did you take it? I can't speak for you, but I want to guess the money made up for the suckiness, right? So, it seems like if people know what the conditions are in a job before they sign up, isn't it up to the individual to decide whether the money is enough to get them to put up with the sucky conditions?

The 3 summers were actually 3 different jobs. The first one I took, I didn't know much about the conditions. My uncle got me the job (he's a boss there), and the experience turned out to be a very eye-opening one. This was actually the one with the worst conditions: the company I worked for that summer was hired to do the things that their client companies' (unionized) workers wouldn't want to do. This meant that we were in places with high carbon monoxide, extreme heat, excessive dirt (I crawled around in grease on several occasions), and so on. This company was not unionized, and its workers received abysmal pay... anywhere from $9.50-13.50 per hour, with only a couple guys getting more than $11. On one occasion, I worked 11 straight 13-hour shifts, and the full-time guys were frequently expected to work a month or so at a time (8+ hrs/day) without a day off.

The reason the company could go on like this is because work in my area is at a premium. I live in the steel manufacturing area of northeastern Ohio, and since the early 90s, plants have been slowly laying off workers and closing down. There are so many people without jobs that places like the one I worked for can pay ridiculously low amounts for very dangerous work, and they are bound to get someone to take the job. I guess if you've always lived in a place with plenty of jobs, this situation is hard to envision, but sometimes when you have a family to support, you'll take whatever work you can get.

The following 2 summers, I managed to get a job in one of the steel mills, instead of the company I had worked for before. For me, the situation improved dramatically, largely because it was a union job. The pay was better and the demands were much more reasonable. There were still some jobs, however, that if someone asked you to do them, your first reaction would surely be, "Are you serious?" One of the summer workers' duties was basically to work these jobs that the more tenured workers would never do on a regular basis. At least for us, we could look at the end of the summer as the light at the end of the tunnel. For the guys who worked there full-time, many had 30+ more years to go. So I didn't complain too much regardless of what job I was given.

In all cases, I worked the jobs because they were the best money I could get close to home. This does not mean that the money even comes close to making up for the actual value of the worker or the peril of the job (although in the case of the union job, the situation was markedly improved). This is where unions become very important: to ensure that even in a poor job market, workers get their due compensation for the work that they perform.