As has already been mentioned, it depends heavily on which side of the Atlantic you're on. Here in the US, I've never been a member of a union, but I've known a lot of people who have. I've heard their stories. And those stories consistently fall into two categories:

1) The union screws over those who are any good.
2) Those who should be fired manipulate union rules so that it's impossible to get rid of them.

"the crazy notion that being a member of a union makes you surrender your rights to, for example, negotiate your own pay deal"? I know teachers who work for a union which dictates that pay rates be determined solely by how many years you've been on the job. Skill, ability, and personal negotiation are completely irrelevant and disallowed.

"being a member of a union means you have to obey union officials"? What scope of obedience are we talking about? A couple years back, my dad's union (which he's a member of only because they've convinced the company to take union dues out of his paycheck whether he's a member or not) was considering a strike. They put it to the members for a vote - with the stipulation that, if you vote against striking and a strike actually happens, the union won't pay your wages during the strike. Is it at all surprising that the strike was overwhelmingly approved, since nobody could afford the risk of going against the union bosses? (Another fun story from my dad's job: The union has reprimanded him for being too efficient. It seems he was doing his job so well that it made his "brothers" look bad by comparison.)

So I'm obviously no fan of unions and tend to think of them as corrupt and even worse than the worst of the modern-day corporations operating in the US. But, on the flip side, my girlfriend, being from Sweden, has entirely the opposite viewpoint and sometimes seems to find it difficult to imagine that anyone might not want to be a member of a union. Apparently they operate very differently there than they do here.

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