I can't help if you joined a bad union and did nothing to move it in the right direction. But your crummy experience is no argument against unions. Any more than the (true) claim that cities tend to be liberal in their policies and thus to be condemned. By that logic, we should not have cities?

I was in a union for about 40 years, becoming active on the heels of a righteous strike for a contract that was only a continuation of the previous contract. New management (from a merger, all of them Jack Welch followers) wanted to squeeze us. They figured we would whimper and go away. We struck for 40 days, innovating in the art of striking. Our members were designated to authorize delivery of airplanes, and while we were on strike, Boeing could not deliver airplanes to customers. They could build them (only the engineers and techs were on strike, not the factory workers), but they had to park them along the length of Boeing Field---where the whole world could drive by on Interstate 5 and see how the strike was going by the length of the parked lineup. And they were running out of apron space to do the parking. At some point, not far off, the Company would have to shut down the factories, which would be real pain. The Company caved and agreed to continue the contract.

In "peacetime," the union was pretty good at monitoring contract compliance and representing members in cases of discipline or contract violation. I can tell you that management has no regard for ideas that ordinary justice is built on.

The union had an arrogant, overbearing Executive Director (paid employee), who functioned as a dictator, with the elected leadership mainly as bribed stooges. The general membership were not happy with him, but there was mainly grumbling and no action. I and a half dozen others got together and formulated an opposing "party" and a political strategy to oust this tyrant. It took 5 years, 3 election campaigns, and thousands of personal dollars, appealing directly to the membership, for us to gain control of the Executive Board. We instructed the tyrant to heel, he laughed at us ("You'll never fire me"), and we indeed fired him at our next meeting. There was immense backlash, and we were ultimately recalled and thrown out---but there was no turning back. The dictator's henchpeople were informed that any attempt to reinstate him would be met by a popular movement to decertify the union. Ulp! Sorry, Charlie, you're in the can. (From this I derived my observation "You know who is in power by who can fire whom.") So, the moral of the story is that oppression can be dispelled, but it takes dedication and courage.

Unions are only an expression of the freedom of association for the purpose of collective bargaining. If you are opposed to that, you are nothing other than a tyrant. If you don't get what you want, look in the mirror and ask yourself whether you are willing to work for what you want. What we are seeing today in the clash between the Deep State and MAGA is only what happened in my union, on a larger scale. Does this mean we should abandon constitutional government, because it leads to a Deep State? Or should we realize that we have been gliding for generations and are now met with the result of that neglect and inattention?