Unions are anything but an anachronism - they are as needed today as they were in the 19th century. However, they are democratic institutions and there is no safeguard against greed. You see the same thing when City Council or wealthy corporate CEOs give themselves huge raises. Greed is a human condition, not a by-product of unions. Nor is greed the only goal a union has/should have.
The difference is CEOs compete with each other, and have their wages/benefits approved by the shareholders of their company. There are cases of idiotic shareholder approving grotesque salaries for CEOs in companies which routinely fail to do anything (GM anyone?) but it is their capital at stake. They invested it, and it's theirs to loose.
More over, most CEOs have to work damn hard to get there. You would be surprised how many MBAs and BComms are out there competing for these jobs. From personal experience, someone starting in these fields can expect 6-7 day weeks and to be in the office at 6am till 9pm and if you don't have clear and tangible benefits to the firm, you get fired. The real sweatshop of the 21st century is white collar. So, it's not like CEO's just waltz in and get absurd wages, they typically earn it.
The problem in Canada is that a disproportionately high amount of unionized workers are in the public service. Their unions fight for better wages that come out of tax payers money, true, but if workers in the private sector were getting the same wage increases there would be more tax revenue to cover the costs.
Not necessarily. Think about it, a firm sets up shop making a gizmo and in order to produce this profitably they can, say, spend 100$ a year on labor. Assuming a minimum wage of 10$/year, they can hire ten workers to make the gizmo. If the workers unionized, and demanded a raise to 20$/yr without any rise in productivity, the firm will either cut costs and employ only 5 people to remain profitable (offshore to China...) or just go bankrupt (GM, Chrysler). Either way, if the firm can only spend 100$ on labor to stay profitable, endlessly rising wages (which don't represent a bump in productivity) will either shrink the workforce to bankrupt the company.
If you look at the state of the labour market in Canada today where there's people working off two full time jobs just to make the ends meet, where for many people a liveable wage is becoming increasingly hard to come by, the idea of the union becomes quite applicable to our world, our city right now. We have women working in the custodial industry not getting paid for months too afraid to do anything about it because they can barely speak English. We have garment makers doing work outside of their homes from a small percentage of the pay they would've made in a unionized factory. We have educators around the province find stable and well-paying jobs increasingly hard to come by.
Unions wont solve that, if anything, they would just make it worse. You can see this in any country with robust labor laws. A select few get unionized jobs with all of the benefits, but they drive up the cost of doing business in a country. Firms (excluding government), are naturally profit maximizing, so they will just hire less people. As a result, unemployment goes through the roof. They people that get especially screwed are the poor and uneducated. Look at Europe, even with moderate or negative population growth, they routinely have unemployment in the double digits. There are vast segments of society in France (mainly immigrants) who are completely frozen out of the labor market because of unions.
If you wanted to improve the quality of life for marginalized residents, you would be better off providing better services to them. If they can't speak English and get a decent job, we would be better simply giving them an education than trying to unionize the nanny industry. Transit, social housing, E.I. and education. Ironically, as we have seen elsewhere, the unionization of these services results in grossly unsustainable wage hikes. What happens? Tax hikes, which drive off employment (screwing the poorest most) or service cuts (also, screwing the poorest most).
