I live in a very unionized country (Uruguay) which has heavily contributed to the issue of having an oversized state, leading to one of the highest costs of liv

I live in a very unionized country (Uruguay) which has heavily contributed to the issue of having an oversized state, leading to one of the highest costs of living in South America and the abuse of unions as a tool to push political agendas completely unrelated to the industry work they're supposed to fight for. As an example, reading US Twitter these last few weeks for me has been a tragicomical affair, seeing people constantly complain about gas prices that are still cheaper than what we've been paying for forever because unions have made it impossible to eliminate their legal monopoly and reduce the size of our nigh-unproductive national refinery, despite it being cheaper to just import the final product. And it gets even better/worse after you account for our actual incomes. There are good unions out there doing good work, or in more pragmatic/realistic terms: having a net positive effect. But mindlessly setting targets such as "Every worker in XYZ should be unionized" lacks a historical and/or global perspective and can only be considered wildly ignorant of the trade-offs, or willfully misleading.