Manufacturers build factories in South Carolina, and Alabama, and Tennessee, and other places that don't favor unions or collective bargaining, and they pay their workers a little bit less than what union shops would pay. The difference after deducting the cost of union dues is actually negligible. They know what they are doing - they need people who are responsible and who WANT to work there, who WANT to keep their jobs, in order to build good cars.

There is a point where you can't cut wages and still attract people to work (or at least people who aren't brain damaged). That is what having the free market set wages is all about. When it costs more to ship from China, then the US becomes an attractive location again.

My point is not that unions need to go away (though they way they are presently structured, that would be a good thing), but that unions can't stop or affect a global phenomenon. They can bitch all they want about how great they are, but all they do is get themselves unemployed.

Unions don't help workers' pay on their own. The law of supply and demand ultimately determines everything. When the US built everything (i.e., had a monopoly on supply of goods), unions had the leverage to dictate labor contracts. The US worker had a monopoly on the labor pool as well.

Now, the US produces a great deal, but expressed as a percentage of worldwide output it has shrunk dramatically, and we do much more with fewer workers (unions helped drive Detroit to automate large portions of their industry to eliminate the need for lots of workers). Union shops started producing work of lesser quality than non-union shops, undercutting any benefit.

If unions keep losing (and they will), it is not because management is "waging a war" on them, but because they have no effective leverage. If they strike, the company will just look for other places to put new facilities (including overseas) or, in the case of financially insolvent companies like Hostess, just sell the intellectual property to someone else who can start up in a place where unions aren't looked on kindly.

And as for "right to work", forcing someone who doesn't want to join a union to be in one is just perverse.