Once a union matures into its own thing, independent of the original idealistic/altruistic founding group of employees, giving things to members that the union didn't "win" for them becomes a big problem in their eyes.
I am in SEIU (and also AFT and IWW, but that is a whole other deal) and this is not my experience at all. The union doesn't have any issues with management providing benefits that were not a part of the contract negotiations, hell it happened all the time during the pandemic and the union was fully on board. SEIU is about as mature as a union gets and in my experience, across three rather established unions, the Union is the people that run it, which is my case has been my fellow employees.
That's good to hear. My experience with trade unions has been the opposite. They have full-time people who run it, many of whom haven't plied the trade in many years (and often only a token amount, if at all), and if they feel left out of any aspect of company<->worker transactions they become very prickly.
