I feel ya. My dad was a Boilermaker. There were good years and some really bad years during the "boom" time of the 1980s! He worked out of town a lot. Phrases like "six tens" or "seven tens" meant how many days per week of work and the hours. He could get time and half on Saturday and double time on Sunday. He'd work like that for 3-4 months, then get laid off and our family would coast on what he earned plus unemployment for awhile after. We were never homeless or living out of a car, though. We had a crappy house, and probably no one thought I would ever amount to anything. Growing up there was sometimes fun, not like suburbia at all. It made me a man, not like these cuckold twats who are scared of their own shadows. I learned how to fix things and get by on limited resources and it definitely made me eager for a better career and better life, something which I worked very hard to obtain.
The saddest thing of all is that my dad was a great carpenter and fabricator and should have been building houses in the 1980s, a business he had already worked in and knew how to do. At some point he become obsessed with that union pension and couldn't think about anything else. So while a lot of people were getting rich in the '80s, our family was just scraping by. He got that pension, though. But he almost got us killed trying to stay in that union.
Anyone who thinks unions are happy fun organizations don't know anything about unions and what they do to their members--it's just another power structure with the regular people acting as raw meat. The Boilermakers tried their level best to force members out before they could reach retirement age and collect their pensions. They were horrible to women and minorities, too. Imagine a bunch of bikers, just the trash of the world, running the show and you have a pretty good picture in your head of that union.