Yeah, I used to have a manual labor job and I had heard there the company had fleets in other regions that were unionized. I was like "Cool, can we do that?"

The response was basically "No, because even though our hourly wage would be better, we would no longer be able to work so much overtime so our take-home pay would be smaller."

Even at the time I thought that sounded like a better deal (I'd gladly reduce my hours for a higher rate?) But everyone else just took that as facts and thought the unionized fleets were a bunch of suckers...

I guess it doesn't help that manual labor jobs tend to be filled with the less educated...