And, coincidentally, should you ask a person making such statements I am confident that they will place themselves firmly in the "excel" category. Ignoring, of course, that self-categorization does little good when Jobs is calling up Schmidt (wait, calling would be the smart move; they documented it in email instead) to say, "hey, you don't hire our workers, and we won't hire yours. Win, win!" Where's your meritocracy now? I'm not going to say a union would have prevented that particular incident, but a union would carry more weight saying, "remember that shit you and $OTHER_COMPANY pulled last year? Yeah, well, to prevent such things in the future..." than some IC in her manager's office where the manager holds all of the cards.