I posted the story here before but my only experience with unions was when my friend and then-roommate was waiting for his teaching license to transfer over fro

I posted the story here before but my only experience with unions was when my friend and then-roommate was waiting for his teaching license to transfer over from SD to WA, so he had to have multiple part-time jobs to survive in the interim. one of the places he got a job at was one of the Redmond QFCs. he worked there as a cheese monger and was paid minimum wage for doing so. (it's statistically likely that a nonzero number of readers of this comment bought cheese from him sometime in 2015–2016 lol). we both had worked at various Walmarts in the past so we were familiar with their explicitly anti-union rhetoric, but it had never affected us, so we didn't think much of it. my friend was shocked to discover that union membership was mandatory in order to work at QFC (this has been since made illegal in WA apparently), which included a union initiation fee of like a hundred dollars iirc, in addition to the monthly union due. my friend was not looking for some kind of long-term employment with Kroger (QFC), he just wanted a short-term part-time job that would help him get cash quick, to stay afloat. yet, the union literally did nothing for him but take money from his minimum wage income while he was employed there. like I said, mandatory union membership is apparently illegal in WA now, which is great. and there are probably situations where unions are helpful and productive. but I have seen a lot of people have this opinion that unions are unassailably forces of good in all situations, and that just seems silly to me.