I've seen that behavior all the time in my work experience and I've never been in a union job. There are shitty, frusterating, lazy workers in every job at every level, from entry level to the C level, and plenty of them find a way to not get fired and keep skirting by. I don't think saying workers can be lazy in a union is a very compelling argument, especially considering the collective negotiating ability the union gives you that will just be gone if everyone was left to negotiate with management themselves. I've set to see an argument against a union that couldn't simply be pointed to a non union workplace just as well.

Yes, I don’t think there is any argument you cannot simply assert against to the negative or nullify with the same argument against other kinds of organizations on the Internet.

Oh come on, no need for this cynical sentence that gave me a headache just to parse in the afternoon :)

The two big arguments I see against unions are

1. lazy workers

2. corruption

And in the case of 1., I mean come on. Lazy workers are everywhere union or no. In the case of 2., yes this happens. Wage theft from the worker by management happens probably a lot more, on the other hand. It impacts at least 1/3 of minimum wage earners in cities like LA and Chicago, and for those who have experienced a pay violation on average they loose out on 12.5% of their actual paycheck (1). Just look at the second page of this report and see the horrors for the working poor in our country who are under very little labor protections; all of these issues would have been stymied by a union protecting labor.

At least with a corrupt union you have some recourse where you can drum up internal support among similarly exploited people, and change your organization via vote. As a nonunion worker, in contrast, you can't do anything to enact change if management isn't playing ball with labor, short of quitting your job and losing any and all your benefits like healthcare in the process.

1. https://irle.ucla.edu/old/publications/documents/LAwagetheft...

Sorry, yes, that wasn't the best written sentence. :) I wouldn't actually say the problem is laziness. Developers are famously lazy. It's more of a problem of malignantly wielded protected status. A helpful analogy to the non-unionized world might be a manager's pet employee or a nepotic hire. A bad union environment systemically rewards this in addition to reducing wages through dues and reduced opportunity for good workers.

Wage theft is serious, but has enforcement paths independent of the presence of a union and if reform is needed, it should start there.

I am sympathetic to the plight of the poor but they can be harmed by labor practices supposedly friendly to them.

That kind of thing can happen in any work environment, frankly.

Sometimes people end up in the "yes I can do that" status group.

Could be they have union representation and contract rules that give them considerable agency coupled with low cost and risk.

Could be they are untouchable for some other reason too, principle friend, family, lover, child, sibling... Or, could be they have secured it through various relationships, power, leverage.

Unions do not cause this.

Poorly functioning workplaces can permit it to happen, and any workplace, union or not, can be poorly functioning for a ton of reasons, legal, contractual, managerial, financial...

Where that agency exists, sometimes people exercise it, simple as that.