I can also attest to the higher dues because of RTW policies. I was once in a union that included all the restaurant service workers at an American airport. The servers and bartenders made excellent money and it was a viable career, thus the union made sense.

But, our union also included the food court workers, who were generally younger and didn’t view their job as a career. Most of them opted out of paying dues as health care and future raises weren’t their concern.

There was also the issue of the servers paychecks being too low to pay dues as well. Since taxes had to be paid on credit card tips, our checks were often $0 so we had to manually pay dues. That never happened though…