To be clear, I was technically a non-union employee in a union shop so that may explain some of my ignorance. (Most of the white collar employees were non-union

To be clear, I was technically a non-union employee in a union shop so that may explain some of my ignorance. (Most of the white collar employees were non-union. The controls engineers were in a quasi-union status without actually joining the union. It was a weird situation because of some ongoing legal battles.) What you said does make sense though. The union apprentiships were extremely competitive, possibly because they were constrained to low numbers.