It takes two to tango. The problem with industrial unions in the US is not so much the salary and benefits paid to one, or even to a set, of individual workers

It takes two to tango. The problem with industrial unions in the US is not so much the salary and benefits paid to one, or even to a set, of individual workers. It's the demands by the union to maximize union membership (and dues) that make it impossible to take advantage of improving efficiency (which could lead to fewer employees). The story I've heard...was that steelmaking in the US went into decline after WWII, because US mills weren't destroyed in the war. USX, Bethlehem et al. kept making steel using inefficient prewar methods, with equivalent staffing costs. Foreign (ex-Axis) steelmakers invested in brand-new, more efficient methods to replace what had been bombed, and these new mills gave them a cost advantage. So why didn't the US mills upgrade? Because their contracts with the union more or less made sure that no matter how many fewer staff it would take to run, the number of United Ironworkers members on the payroll would never decrease. It wasn't worth the capital cost to upgrade in the '50s-'6s, and by the '80s, when it would've been, it was too late. There was a possibility, if the unions were a bit more farsighted, to accept a gradual drawdown in staffing, and consolidation of job definitions by attrition, with no real loss of individual wages or benefits. But that never happened. A similar dynamic occurred in the auto industry...labor (and the UAW is a bad, bad, bad, union for this) was very short-sighted, and Detroit purchased peace with them at a very high cost in terms of productivity per worker; partly because they had the money to, partly because it was seen as a necessary evil, and partly because the idea of being more efficient in operations was seen as intractable-they didn't listen to Deming when he first started to talk about it.