A facebook friend of mine criticizes unions from the left:

[Warpy]

3. While he's right about the often narrow focus

he's wrong about what unions could actually accomplish in a country that was so hostile to them in the first place.

They did accomplish a lot: vacations, sick leave, overtime pay, the 40 hour week, improvement in overall conditions. However, they lacked the clout to influence people in other countries even with strong outreach programs. People in the developing world were glad to get paid a relative pittance and work long shifts with no benefits because it kept them off the edge of starvation.

People in the developing world are now used to paychecks and would be much more amenable to improving their lot through unionization. As for the environmental concerns, that was our government's job. Tariffs should have been levied against goods produced by massive polluters using near slave labor. But they weren't.

It's hard to say what unions would have accomplished had liberals in this country not lost power in 1969 and never regained it.

However, your friend is blaming unions for things that were beyond their means to accomplish at the time they were trying to accomplish them.