[Dr. Bobsky]

I'm also in a union.

The fundamental value of these institutions is that employers have zero loyalty to their employees, and unions rightly fill this void.

I work at a university, where the central administration makes bad fiscal decisions that are then passed down as 'voluntary' redundancy when the budgets get broken (read firing whole sections of staff). Our salaries are not keeping up with inflation, so year by year, we're effectively getting salary cuts, making it harder to survive, let alone thrive (and this isn't because inflation is extremely high this year -- they didn't manage when inflation was 1.5% either).

The union works to put pressure on the University to match salaries with inflation, it provides limited legal advice when the University is behaving badly (which they often do), it provides support when little twerpy students decide to abuse complaints processes.

Academia is a grind even with the unions; I am not sure what it would look like if they didn't exist.