Personal experience
Partner works for a Gov lab here across the pond.
It's closed shop for non-management, every one is a Teamster.
Direct benefit to employees isn't clear. The union will do anything to keep the franchise as the only recognized union so just agreed to a 3year 0% paydeal.
It means work hours are fixed, clock in 7:00-4:00. In theory beyond that is overtime but that has to be agreed with union so result is the same amount of taking work home as any professional job.
Biggest worry is if there was a strike. Cross a picket line and lose job, but they have legally mandated (safety critical work) tasks and could lose their professional designation and never work again. We decided they would just take leave.
Day to day the main hassle is recruitment. It's hard enough to get physicists, programmers,data scientists to work for gov rather than silicon valley. But anyone with more union seniority has to be offered the job first. After you are hired you can still be replaced by any member with more seniority who qualifies. This results in lots of carefully worded job requirements to atop you having to interview every Teamster member in the state.
Biggest hit for personally is that you can't remove a union post. So if partner was offered promotion to management their current union job must be filled first. In this specialist field that can take a year, so they lost out on several management jobs. Ironically you can bring in outside hires into the management job, as long as the current worker stays union.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
