John Oliver the TV actor who lets people feel smart had some long (pre-written) rant about American unions. Americans love being told how bad they are by people with cool accents.
Thinking about how the fall of American unions has changed the country, it isn’t wholly bad or wholly good. Its a complicated question not solved by correlational research or videos. Either way, American workers have been ill served. Visiting the giant rust-belt is one of the signally most depressing things about life in these United States.
Probably government policy in the Clinton and Bush II eras should have focused on fair moonlighting of underperforming industries instead of just not really caring and as well as should have thought of the dangers of a mostly offshore supply chain (something that we are rehearsing today).
In a textbook world, labor is elastic and mobile, but government policy and the way we live today encourages some of it to be less mobile and more inelastic. I would probably prefer it to more elastic and mobile, but I am think we need to be realistic.
As a society we have to admit that we have made those choices so we must help people along those lines.
Therefore people's lives and communities deserve support, no less than the Arts.
A grown up conversation on this topic, probably excluding academics and government busybodies, would also differentiate between the idea of unions that secure basic working class rights or middle class rights versus the ones that are still standing in America, many that that allow workers to earn at or greater to the top 10% or 5% percentile for labor that clearly isn't in the percentile.