Yeah unions have definitely changed over the last 40 years. Folks forgot the meaning of the word "solidarity" and are too impatient to put their time in like the older workers they like to complain about. There was an old guy that worked in a union fabrication shop where I used to work. His sole job was to run the band saw that we used to cut structural steel. Given how long a single cut took he spent the overwhelming majority of his time sitting on a stool reading a book and getting paid well for it. Meanwhile here's me pulling overtime fetching shit for every other workstation in the shop and ocassionally pulling 12 hour shifts in front of an industrial milling machine making cable trays. Over time I started resenting the hell out of the guy running the bandsaw, since he had a cushy job and was making way more money than me. I commenced to bitching about it one day on my lunch break and learned from some of the other guys in the shop that this dude had seen more coworkers maimed or killed and hand hung more structural steel than any other 8 men in the shop put together. Among other accomplishments he'd been part of the crew that erected the US 19 bridge over the New River Gorge. He'd paid his dues, put his time in, and was short for retirement, so the Union took care of him. He retired with a full pension (you go ahead and pretend a 401k is equivalent) and healthcare a year after I started working there. The shop found another graybeard to replace him running the band saw.
One way of looking at his role could have been that while you were running around, his health and safety was being preserved. If he (or any other vital employee) was injured in an accident that didn’t involve his explicit job requirements, that could have resulted in a bottleneck much more costly than his clocked time spent reading books.
