This is a rather vague statement... Protecting the rights sounds noble but I'd look at the whole package. Workers are doing very well in industries like tech wi

This is a rather vague statement... Protecting the rights sounds noble but I'd look at the whole package. Workers are doing very well in industries like tech with ~0 unions. American auto workers are doing worse than they used to because they made their industry long-term uncompetitive for a short-run benefits. Police and teacher unions are great for their members (protecting the incompetents, make-work); so are guilds like AMA (artificially limiting the supply of doctors, including qualified immigrants) but terrible for society. The general pattern is that unions are parasites, so they can only go 2 ways - they can make the host weaker or kill it off; or if the host itself has captive audience (e.g. taxpayers) they just make it worse for everyone on average, while transfering some of the remaining reduced pie to their members. Note how much teacher unions hate private and charter schools - they really don't want people to be able to escape the system, it would interfere with milking the taxpayers with nothing to show for it.