Have you ever been involved with trade show setup? The trade show unions have elaborate rules about work attendees can and cannot do for themselves.
At low-budget startups, we built our trade show booths ourselves. We had to carefully read the union rules during booth design so we made sure we could install our lighting without the use of a ladder and tools, for example. We used a lot of tool-less fasteners and kept everything low enough that our tallest person could reach it without standing on anything, because otherwise it would trigger union labor rules that required us to pay extra and wait for the union labor to get around to our booth.
Sure enough, on the trade show floor we had a union member watching us to make sure we didn’t get up on a ladder or use tools when installing certain pieces of equipment. Presumably they were getting paid to monitor us and ensure we didn’t actually do any of the forbidden work ourselves.
This is the inefficiency that people see when they think of unions. That inefficiency isn’t going away, because it’s central to how unions maximize income for their members. That inefficiency is why many developers don’t want to form or join unions.
I'm trying to think of how this is different than how the mob operates but I'm at a loss.
Does it really, though? Because literally every one of your complaints above would be solved, if your companies employees stopped actively fighting the union, and just simply joined it instead.