Generally, no. My work insofar hasn't been unionised, so I'm going off of the years my mother has spent doing manual labour in factories in saying it's not worth your time.
Her experience has been inconsequential snobbery from some for her lack of union membership, and evident uselessness of the union in the defence of people who have been made redundant. There was this guy at work who kept harassing her, and after filing a complaint with HR he was pretty much done. But not before the union added ten times the paperwork onto the task of his firing. Protip: be on good terms with your employers first and foremost!
Some additional experience my family has (we're all working stiffs) was in the West Virginian coal mines. My maternal grandfather worked as a truck stop driver, and my paternal grandfather was a genuine coal miner. He just died recently of black lung. We have roots deeper in WV than anywhere else, so we all understand pretty well that the evaporation of coal jobs is why the state is a wasteland of drug addicts and malpractise suits. The unions never stopped pushing the envelope, and eventually forced the companies into strip mining. It's an embarrassment.
From a different side of my family, my husband spent several years in San Francisco going to film school, and he has much better things to say about Hollywood's unions than I've ever heard elsewhere. The key difference is, they're trade guilds. The genesis of those organisations was unlike most unions in American history, as there was a purge of communism by the federal government around the time the big studios went under and restructured themselves for the new frontier of independent film production.
