If a company is not going to pay you a living wage either way, the union did not mean anything. I often decry compromise because it means settling for worse - in the case of Michigan, while it is awful how rampant poverty and unemployment are there now that the union jobs dried up, the alternative was the slow gradual death of reasonable wages like is happening everywhere else. The union bought their workers as much time as they could but nobody will stop the trends of globalization and automation, and as a society we need to do a lot more to handle rampant unemployability than we are now.<p>Unions can only protect the living wage employable in the long term.