I worked in a unionized refinery and my personal experience has been that unions are unnecessary. As an engineer, I was unable to touch any tools, provide any assistance to our technicians and operators for "taking work away from a union employee." While not always the case, the union gave protection to the laborer to be extremely lazy and unproductive because as long as he showed up to work on time, there was no way he could get fired. The technicians and operators started at $28.00 an hour, which was more than I made as an engineer. Obviously they have a much lower ceiling and top out pretty quickly, but that is an enormous amount of money for someone who can get away with being lazy as he wants. Also, during lead ups to labor negotiations (there were two big ones while I was there), there was ample evidence of sabotage to the plant while engineers were being trained to operate the refinery in the event of a strike. I cannot for the life of me understand why one would put people at risk in order to protect their job.

There were several unionized technicians and operators that were very pleasant and worked hard when asked to do so, but this was not the norm. Additionally, often the best unionized workers were promoted to management and were no longer protected by the union.

I understand that there was a time in the nation when we had fourteen year old kids working 18 hours a day, but we have long since moved past those days.

I'm all for finding ways to close the income inequality gap (higher taxes, more efficient tax code), but I assure you that unionizing labor will not solve our problem.