I thank my union that I have the right to refuse dangerous work that would put my life at risk of injury or death. If it weren't for the union, the company could fire me if they wanted to or lay me off and pay someone at half the wage to break the law and do dangerous and unsafe work.
By the way, often trades have unions too. At least in Canada. Not sure about the USA or elsewhere.
Majority of union actions these days are not beneficial to the workers, but give them incentives the not thrive and push themselves to excel. I have seen and worked with people in union and non-union jobs. In vast majority of the cases, they use your reasons to excuse their loss of drive and difficulties that they avoid while claiming 'worker's rights'.
Maybe the management and middle level workers should claim 'risk' and dump their responsibilities on the workers and the higher ups, lounging around and bitching about how dangerous work they are doing.
Maybe you want to take a hike and travel to sweatshops in slums and countrysides of china and southeast asia and discover what it's REALLY like to work as an oppressed slave laborer.
At some point, you need to accept a certain degree of risk and dangers that come with the job. It's your personal responsibility, as well as the responsibility of those who have oversight, to ensure and assist you in a way that you become more capable and stronger to push through and surmount such factors, not hide and try to sweep things under the rug while claiming 'safety' or 'fair and danger-free work environment'.
Loss of company's motivation to help the workers, either both by sheer greed or being tired of dealing with babying the workers, and the complete breakdown in the mentality of common working man who takes little to no pride in their work and instead thinks they are owed something more than trying to drive through and win their game, is collectively destroying your jobs and work environment. To be fair, the social atmosphere does little to aid the average joe in building up a sense of security and pride in their work - but that does not mean that you need to go with the flow and blame others just as the greedy CEOs (I mean parasites in another uniform, other than a blue collar one) do.
Unions need to check themselves. They are too corrupt and ignorant to even champion fair hours for many people. You just look at immediate results and not the bigger picture. So long as people like you allow these union rats to get away with their greed and hypocrisy just because they throw a few candies down the pipe (of course, all the while bitching and trumpeting 'brotherly good will to common man'), you are abetting in this racket that is in many ways worse than oppressive CEOs - at least they are just a little more honest about it, and don't twist and corrupt the cause of 'equality' to the point of fuckin blasphemy as unions do.