A lot of the people who work hardest, horrible hours out int he cold doing hard labour before you wake up, only make a reasonable living because of unions.

People have literally fought and died for the right to unions, for unions to be taken seriously. A bunch privileged silicon valley tech workers (not me, I'm a privileged seattle based tech worker, totally different ;) ) write off unions as inefficient and useless.

The great lie is that the harder you work, the more money you make. Under a fully unregulated capitalism (no unions, no min wage) your wage is uncorrelated to the hardness of your work, it is correlated to your worth and scarcity on the market.

Sometimes harder workers are harder to find, so they get paid more. Sometimes they're not. If working harder simply led to more money, salary negotiation would not be a teachable skill.