Look at all these people trying to tell a private company what to pay it's employees... Whatever wage structure they've utilized it's been negotiated and agreed upon by both sides.
Probably helped expedite? I can't imagine why manufacturers would have invested BILLIONS in software and robots and new factories if they could have kept more of their payroll costs closer to market wages/benefits that match non-union shops. In fact, I would guess this process was accelerated a generation.
I don't know how some of those people can get to a place where they are willing to overlook the negative health concerns of their products to make a buck. Cigarettes, for example, I don't think I could ever work for a company like that. I worked for Gerber for a while, the knife/tool company, and I understand that their tools are used to kill people. But there are positive uses for their products as well. Survival, industrial, etc. I don't see any positive uses for cigarettes. Or Monsanto, for example, have ruined agriculture in America.
Yeah it is interesting how you can easily overlook that stuff at a "ground troop" level when the factory is the only game in town and you need a job. But at the VP/C-level, that sort of Stockholm Syndrome has to go extra far. The CEO of the nice-to-employees company I work for is a former Monsanto VP; I like to think he's reformed.
One company that I can get behind is Google. The things they are doing with renewable energy and internet are amazing. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57550904/google-invests-$75-million-in-iowa-wind-farm/
Google fiber is another thing that I wish we had here..... supposedly 100x faster than anywhere else in the US. https://fiber.google.com/about/
You greatly overrate "college" as it pertains to providing useful and applicable job skills in today's world, you clearly misunderstand the representative purpose of unions, you're completely wrong about current job safety in the US, and you're blaming the victims for their own murder.
Check out how the economies of the countries at the top of that graph are doing, and compare them to the rest. Pretty clear unions are necessary for a stable and thriving economy.
