Fair point, I thought you were saying before that critiques of union workers earning too much were really driven by this white vs blue collar issue, while now I

Fair point, I thought you were saying before that critiques of union workers earning too much were really driven by this white vs blue collar issue, while now I see that what you were really saying is that the OP wasn't necessarily even talking about unions, just complaining about rich blue collar workers. In fact, before I saw the rest of the thread I was going to ask for clarification about the original oil-field worker point. I agree that manual work can have a high market rate even without unions, e.g. if it physically requires a very fit man to do the job, in addition to the right personality, dexterity, intelligence and reliability.