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When you have a system like that of the US of A one tends to wonder they bother complaining at all.
Unions are by the people, for the people.

That's funny. Let me tell you how it really works.

In the USA, unions are by the mafia, for the mafia. Typically the mindset is that they want more dues so that the union boss can be rich. They'll push for things like higher wages or preventing lazy workers from getting shitcanned towards that end. They'll also sabotage the employer whenever possible and throw union members under the bus towards that end as well.

Unions in other countries (especially Europe) tend to be good organizations, just not the ones in the US. European companies tend to like labor unions because it gives them a medium to openly have dialogue with their employees, and collective bargaining can be seen as mutually beneficial for the employee and employer alike. This is why Volkswagen's management tried to get their US employees to unionize; they were expecting European style unionization. However the employees themselves declined because they were a bit more wise about just how corrupt and thuggish UAW really is:

http://www.labornotes.org/2001...

Ah, this is the one I was thinking of with respect to Boeing: http://labornotes.org/2015/09/...

That's the union perspective, here's another one: http://townhall.com/columnists...

They didn't go on strike, they sued Boeing before the National Labor Relations Board.

So a union sued a company to prevent it from adding jobs in America, because it was in a state that didn't have a machinists union. This was to be a second production line so they could fill their huge backlog of orders more quickly and take market share from Airbus. They were not moving jobs, they were not laying off people in Washington state... the union prevented Boeing from adding NEW jobs for other Americans.

the EU is more prosperous than the US, with a similar population, higher GDP, healthier economy, healthier people, more econonomically secure people, people who live longer, and people who wont far as far or as fast because they have ACTUAL welfare (unlike the POS we call 'welfare' in this nation).

the EU does all this, while having more regulations in their economy. ie, theire economy is "less free" than the US's.
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as for your question of why the US is successful?
Cotton and slave labor.
That's why.
The US benefited from a unique confluence of circumstances. Much of colonial expansion by the european powers was driven by economic desires, such as the desire to grow cotton (England controlled India in order to grow contton). The US also had prime cotton growing capability. And the US also still had something else, something that England was slowly abandoning: cheap labor in the form of slaves.

The US came to dominate the world cottom market, growing hte lions share. But the margins even larger than everyone else because they didnt have to pay their workers. Everyone bought the cotton, bringing money into the US economy. Money that was invested and used to buy other things.

Really, the economy of hte entire western world was built on Cotton, primarily US cotton, and by extension then on slavery. The US was simply the biggest beneficiary, and that momentum carried our country's economy for many many decades, and really, still is. even the majority of current economic wealth is traced backwards through history, through each subsequent investment, originates in cotton profits.

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/h...
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/africa...
http://www.labornotes.org/blog...
http://www.economist.com/news/...
http://news.nationalgeographic...

Plenty of adults are stuck working part time as well. They may be perfectly willing to work full time, but the new management style in retail and some other areas is to use software at the last minute to create the schedules and get the optimal number of employees on site at any given time without ever having any extra employees. As a result they will typically be scheduled with erratic schedules of 30 hours or less a week, and because they schedule is constantly changing, they can't easily schedule in a second job either. It's even worse for employees who need to juggle work schedule with arranging child care. And the argument of "they should find a better job" doesn't really hold water either. Depending on location, transport and the local job market, there may not be any other better jobs available. You can find plenty of articles about this over the last few years if you search for "just in time scheduling". Here's one representative article discussing the problems it causes for a significant portion of the workforce. http://www.labornotes.org/2012...

Seriously, why wouldn't Police be allowed to pull over autonomous vehicles?

Of course you have to give police the ability to stop these vehicles, if for no other reason than to avoid accidents or congestion. Not to mention the possibility of sending bombs or something.

But its not always that easy. When was the last time you saw a policeman pull over an Elevator? Or an Escalator. Or the unmanned shuttle trains such as at SeaTac Airport or Morgantown WV Personal Rapid Transit.

Admittedly captured vehicles on their own tracks are not exactly the same as autonomous vehicles mixed with other traffic.

An autonomous vehicle is not that easy to stop other than get in its way and hope the programmer has designed in a safe stop. Alternatively you would need a police radio device to force a stop. (Which would be the first thing a terrorist would disable, and the first thing the hackers would p0wn).

But liability hardly seems a new issue. Its obviously going to be the person in remote control, the owner, or the manufacturer, probably in that pecking order. I suspect this is an area of settled law based on the elevator / escalator / automomous trains.

There is starting to be a history accumulated with Remote Controlled Freight Trains. These trains already exhibit 25% more accidents than trains with engineers aboard according to one law firm. In some cities, unmanned trains are allowed to cross roads and bridges. So even while confined to their own tracks they do interact with human operated vehicles.

Making autonomous vehicles that only have to deal with other autonomous vehicles would be much easier than making them deal with humans. That fact alone pretty much argues for separated systems, or separate segments of the roadway, portions under mandatory computer control, and other portions under human control.

Then after realizing it was all coming from Taiwan and China I thought "Invented in America, Made in China" but I still imagined this premium I was paying lead to good American ethics and proper treatment of employees to consumers. The deaths of nine or more plastics workers in Apple's iPhone supplier followed by a million in kickbacks being stored in shoe boxes by a corrupt Apple Manager and suddenly I realize that buying Apple just means you're paying a premium on something that might provide you a better experience but really employs all the same corruption inherent in almost any very large business.

Did you know that the rate of those suicides was significantly less than the rate for China overall? So working for Apple actually DECREASES the suicide rate, who'd have thought!

Here's an article on the subject. In it we learn that Foxconn employs over 1/2 million people and have had 12 suicides in the past year. Lets extrapolate that to 24 in a calendar year, the article wasn't specific on what they meant by this year, that's a rate of less than 1 for every 2,000 workers. The national average for China is 12 for every 1,000 people - approximately 25 times higher for all of China when compared to Foxconn.

Maybe Apple's investments in Foxconn have lead to "good American ethics and proper treatment of employees" after all...

I don't know where you got that notion from but it simply doesn't match reality as I have seen. Post Offices in small towns have closed recently due to decreased volume and the employees from those offices have been let go. Existing offices are not hiring, even to replace retiring workers.

I've got your reality right here. Well, strictly speaking, 584,000 of the 600,000 USPS workers are covered by the no-layoffs clause. Sue me.

From their labor union's blog:

http://labornotes.org/node/1947

(as far as I know, the layoffs they were fearing did not materialize)

And from the CATO institute:

http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/the-postal-services-union-problem