Here's a fun story about union influence in NYC (with a little twist I hope you'll indulge[1]):
In 2005, I moved into a 19th-floor apartment in lower Manhattan. My girlfriend and I spent about 12 hours at IKEA getting everything needed to furnish the place. By the time we finished taking (2!) taxies back from Jersey with all my stuff, it was about midnight on a Friday night. It took another hour or so to schlep everything up in the elevator - everything, that is, except for a sofa, which we'd tied to the roof of one of the taxis and which was now the last thing between us and sleep.
We were just about to load it into the elevator for the last run of the night, but _not so fast!_, said the doorman: that's the passenger elevator, and you aren't allowed to use it for furniture.
We pointed out that the sofa, at about 80-100 lbs, weighed quite a bit less than the full elevator cars-worth of stuff we'd already brought up, but he was undeterred. He could lose his job, he explained, because the building's contract with the labor union prohibited use of the passenger elevator for "furniture".
OK, I said, not really understanding what that had to do with unions, where's the freight elevator?
It's locked, he said, because you aren't allowed to use it.
Why not?
Because the building maintenance union regs say nobody who isn't in the union can touch that elevator, and require the use of union labor to move anything in or out via that elevator. (At something like $160/hr, iirc.)
And since it was a Friday, the sofa would have to sit in the building lobby until 10am on Monday, at which point we could get in touch with the labor union to get the Appropriately Licensed and Bonded Personnel to load the sofa into the freight elevator. (Assuming the members of the sanitation engineers' union hadn't already decided it was trash and carted it away -- and yes, he did warn us about this.)
Counting PATH train and taxi rides etc, we're now about 14 hours into the furnishing-my-apartment project. We haven't eaten in about 10 hours, it's the middle of the night, and I am beyond frustrated at this point.
I don't want to get arrested though and the guy is clearly not going to give in, so I'm not really sure what to do. I half jokingly ask the guy: well, what about the stairs? Do the union regs prohibit the stairs too?
He laughs. No, do whatever you want in the stairs, he says.
I look at my gf. She looks at me. _Well? You want to?_, she says. Remember: 19 floors. I think: I can't believe we're going to do this.
But we do. ~40 flights of stairs later, we both look like we just climbed out of a lake, and are breathing like horses. And though I'd already had a pretty strong suspicion in this direction, at this point I was certain: I had to marry this girl.
I still don't think much of unions, but 11 years and 2 kids later, I'm grateful every day that I ended up with such a strong and capable partner. [1](Sorry for the autobiography but I thought folks might appreciate the story. And it really is on-topic... sortof.)