Yes, what people need to understand about the history of British unions is that they effectively shut down the entire country repeatedly to try and force the Government to keep coal mining which wasn't viable anymore going. That's basically intolerable in a democracy. Thatcher's breaking of the unions only happened after previous governments who thought the unions could be negotiated with were brought down by their inability to deal with the damage being done. (There's also some impressive double-think on the British left around this and global warming, since of course dealing with that means that coal mining and use has to go away.)