Y'know, unions are like lawyers. There are a courageous few who stick their collective necks out to try to increase people's rights. Among the majority who are content to merely help people enforce the rights they already have, some are more skilled than others, and some are more diligent than others. And it burns people when they have to pay a lawyer, or a union, for no other reason than to get something that theoretically should already be theirs. But a right without the ability to enforce it is no right at all.

It wasn't that long ago that Americans were laying down their lives to be in a Union. If a large proportion of non-Union workers in the USA have better-than-third-world working conditions, they can thank the Unions whose work and sacrifices brought those laws into existence.

Taft-Hartley, among other anti-Union laws, is one of the reasons why USA Unions haven't been able to bring working conditions in the USA up to the level of the rest of the first world ... and why Unions here are actually largely prohibited from "more than simple 'representation,'" or even "simple representation" outside a narrowly defined range of issues. If you want your Union to have more power, lobby your legislators for that.

No, democracy all by itself doesn't solve anything, especially when the range of questions one can vote on is so restricted. But I think most of us would much rather have more control over our lives than less - and the workplace is a large part of most peoples' and families' lives.