Total scam.
But setting up or carrying things things during the day had to use union people.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the union electrician is there because once upon a time someone setting up a booth daisy chained a bunch of extension cords of small gauge to run lights and demos and started an electrical fire in a crowded convention hall.
This doesn't sound like an advantage for software engineers. Surely unions can't decide on someone's competency. It kind of raises a red flag about potential gatekeeping methods (e.g. the tax status where you have to join or else).
Also disallows noncompete clauses. So if your current employer says no, you can go to another. Which is how I've seen quite a few promotions. The latter of switching employers is far easier, since life changing benefits (medical/retirement) aren't tied to employers. (Considering SV workers get their "share" by switching employers every few years, that would be a nightmare scenario for big tech as well. Since it further reduces employee stickiness, if SV unions decided to offer benefits).
But yes, there are gatekeeping effects, as the union is incentivized to prevent increases in membership or decrease in collective skill. It typically works out great for those in the union (and things like the Bar or Medical Association), not so great for those kept out.
I'd much rather have 8 companies with bad interviewers and 2 with good interviewers than 10 companies with the union who block me because I made one of their evaluators personally mad at me.
This just sounds like it is ripe for corruption and nepotism.
They have that ability already without unions - much more easily because they can reduce staffing without the entire company falling over due to strikes.
and know workers have a minimum level of training
They have that ability already without unions.
Not every union strangles their company like automotive unions
By and large the only unions that remain large and powerful in the west are those organising government employees, where strangling the host is impossible because tax revenues mean it cannot die. In most other industries they did indeed strangle their host industries until they declined.
Look at this thread. People keep talking about Hollywood as an example, apparently unaware of just how much business foreign film studios have taken from it, particularly the UK, due primarily to a much less aggressively unionised workforce.
Not every union strangles their company like automotive unions. Though those unions start to look better looking at nonunion companies like Tesla which somehow manages to pay their workers less, in one of the most expensive areas in the world, and maintaining an accident rate that would shut a union shop down.
Also it makes sense that Google would fight unions. Since the current implementation of unions for SV companies has been Kickstarter. And that union mostly exists to drive profit to their competitors by choosing what is allowed on Kickstarter. Something like that for Google would just end up making an easy paper trail for a prosecutor to follow for SV platform bias.