When the management pressure is for better quality, the union may interfere. Where management pressure is for lower quality, the union should interfere.
We see the harmful effect of unions where the police are in one.
When that starts, we may expect they will start by exploding mainly on test stands, instead of vehicles.
My intuition is that the latter would exceed the former, and that test stands aren’t a realistic environment for predicting their likelihood.
It is hard to imagine how you would determine, after the fact, whether a rocket blew up because of material failure or something else, but they seem to do it, anyway during development when they have a zillion sensors attached logging everything in real time: "hmm, a millisecond before the explosion, this reading went out of tolerance, and then this one, then this one, and then the data ends."
That one factory is the home factory close to where the designs are made and the other is so far away seems like a pretty important thing.
This seems like the kind of argument people who really love unions would make.