Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, is one of the top books assigned for courses in college, both for its writing, and as an essay on modern life in America. One of the subtexts (besides the generalization--nay, stereotype-- that the poor are noble, industrious and intelligent), is that companies like Walmart make communities worse off through their abusive market power, unlike those quaint little "grassroots" unions of mom-and-pop shops. Quite a different picture would emerge if they instead read Mobbed Up, about the life of union boss Jackie Presser. One passage describes the activities of union organizers in the 1930's:

Presser and many others, however, ran labor rackets that were simply organization for extortion and price-fixing. His Dry Cleaners Association was hardly a union. It was made up mostly of owners of small dry-cleaning businesses—Presser himself had owned a shop—who banded together and agreed to fix their prices, often substantially higher than the fair market rate. Then they or their musclemen would approach other dry cleaners and insist they join the association, pay regular dues, and raise their prices. If an owner didn’t go along, he’d soon need new windows or first aid.

Unionism's connection to organized crime suggests it was a classic combination of bootleggers and baptists. High-minded, idealistic, yet naive leaders created a top-down acceptance for excesses that would be unconscionable if they were committed by corporations, and simple thugs were the main beneficiaries of union rationalization of their petty extortion rackets. The description of union organizing at the mom-and-pop stores in the early 20th century show it to be a simple price-fixing mechanism, enforced thru violence, with much of the rents extracted by those who controlled the violence. There is lots of left-wing angst over WalMart and the big box retailers, but employees and customers are free to do business with them in a mutually voluntary manner, unlike the brute force methods that were de rigeur for unions in the early days, and are still present today. Of course, one would never know this reading the wistful writings about the labor movement.