People also conflate historic unions with the current post-New Deal legal framework around unions, which is a framework that only really benefits labor lawyers

People also conflate historic unions with the current post-New Deal legal framework around unions, which is a framework that only really benefits labor lawyers without really benefitting other people. Just because they're called "unions" does not mean that they are the same thing as the historic "unions." They're a completely different thing governed by a highly complex body of law which is utterly different from the previous framework, operating under totally transformed social and economic conditions. Current day unions are fee bonanzas for lawyers paid for by the workers, the corporation, and the shareholders. The New Deal is often misinterpreted by current day leftists who incorrectly conflate their own views with FDR-era progressivism and the legal reality that it created. They like the fantasy idea of unions in the same way that we can admire the elven kingdom of Lothlorien, and do a lot to avoid perceiving the bureaucratized reality of contemporary unions in favor of nostalgia LARPing.