At the heart of the union mentality is the deep desire to advance their members at the expense of non-union members. As we have seen the full flower of this min

At the heart of the union mentality is the deep desire to advance their members at the expense of non-union members. As we have seen the full flower of this mind state has cost the US economy millions of jobs as the total cost of Auto jobs and by collateral influence many other jobs - whose work went to cheaper labor cost places. If we all were in the union and all wages were the same (with skill/education/risk/etc modifying premiums) this would be workable. As it now is China and India(to a lesser degree) can now sell finished goods into the USA for a lot less than they can be made in the USA. In an ideal world, currency changes and import duties would act to level this. Sadly this is not the case and various forces will make Chinese and Indian products take larger portions of our markets every year. The exception is big bulky/fluffy items, like mattresses and some furniture that is so bulky that freight costs act as a de-facto import duty. Now in Europe we have a far higher degree of unions than the USA, so there is not as big a wage spread across the workers, as we have in the USA. In the UK the unions got so far out of hand with greed etc that Thatcher was forced to act. I refer to strikes, work rules, featherbedding (Google it - union men who did zero work at all - but got paid because they used to have a job where they made an item for 8 hours, and the company eliminated the part completely - yet the whole factory went on strike to keep these men paid). As you can see the US and UK auto business pretty much died off in terms of the number of workers (compare the number of USA/UK Auto workers in 1960 to 2015) Now to Uber. The taxi companies deeply want to kill Uber, and they will invite the unions to help them, and they do not see that taxi unions will kill the taxi companies - (autonomous cars will help do this as well). Uber succeeds because the cost of taxi ride is huge with most of the money going to the medallion holders and not to the drivers (except for independent drivers who own medallions - tax and other laws force heirs to sell medallions after the owner dies in most cases because few heirs want to grow up to drive taxis). Medallion owners allow a pittance to reach the drivers - which is why Uber did so well. A person could drive for Uber and make lots of $$ and some for Uber as well. Medallion prices crashed by 80% or so. Many medallions in New York were bought by huge loans that are worth a lot more than the medallion is worth with either Uber drivers of autonomous cars in the race. Huge legislative efforts by medallion owners to allow them to fire their taxi drivers and shift the medallion to their autonomous fleet are being made. Enuf rant