I have dealt with unions on three occasions in my life. The first opportunity occurred when I was a teenager in high school and started working as a delivery boy at a grocery store. A condition of employment was that I had to join the shopkeepers union, which was a state law in California. According to Bernard D. Meltzer, a leading labor law scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, “union safety provisions in employment contracts have required membership in or financial support of the signatory union by employees, as condition for employment by the signatory union". signatory employer” (2277). This is called closed labor, meaning that only union members were entitled to work. Therefore, I had no choice but to join the shops union. I quickly noticed that the union collected membership dues every month, but I never received any benefits from being a union member. According to the union's work rules, management would have to give its employees a minimum of six hours' notice if the employee was scheduled to work. In my case this would rarely happen. At the last minute I was constantly told that I had to work and that if I didn't go to work I would be fired. I would have complained to the union representative (who was my union representative), but nothing ever changed. I filed a complaint with union management and was ignored and fired. I felt frustrated and angry with the union's propaganda that they stood for all workers' rights, when I knew for a fact that they didn't. It was around this time that I began to wonder whether unions really cared about their members or whether they only cared about themselves and their members' dues, and whether unions were still necessary in today's society. What is a...... medium of paper ......Virtual reference library. Network. October 15, 2012.O'Hara, S. Paolo. "Unions". St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. vol. 3. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 72-75. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Network. October 26, 2012. Prah, Pamela M. “The Future of Unions.” CQ Researcher 2 September 2005: 709-32. Network. 26 October 2012. "Laws on the right to work". West's Encyclopedia of American Law. Ed. Shirelle Phelps and Jeffrey Lehman. 2nd ed. vol. 8. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 362-363. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Network. October 15, 2012.Rubin, Jennifer. "Work, the movement's dangerous wish list." Commentary 128.3 (2009): 20-25. Academic research completed. Network. October 21, 2012. US Department of Labor. Union Member Summary 2011, 27 January 2012. Office of Labor and Statistics. Washington DC Press. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm