Democracy and representation…
There’s always a dilemma when you have a majority of employees in a particular group who want to be represented by a union and a minority who don’t. As I recall BALPA (and I am sure others) resolved this “in the old days” with a “union shop” arrangement with BA. While a “closed shop” makes membership of the union a condition of employment, in a “union shop” the terms and conditions of all the employees (e.g. pilots) are negotiated with the union (e.g. BALPA), but the employees aren’t required to actually join the union. If the union negotiates benefits the non-members get them too. As the union members are also paying dues by payroll deduction (in BALPA’s case I think it was/is 1% of salary) the non-members were getting not just a free ride in terms of negotiation but actually were better off financially, so they also had the equivalent of the union subs deducted but this was paid to a charity of their own nomination.
To avoid the issue of the company controlling the ability of union representatives to have time to do business, (refusing to “de-roster”) there was a deal whereby a “pool” of work days was controlled by the union General Secretary, who decided what meetings should be attended and by whom. The union calculated how much time it needed for representation, and how many full-time people that was equivalent to. These is was paid for either by all employees giving a day off a year (I think), or the total head-count was increased by this number. The company didn’t pay an increased overall payroll cost, as when their global pay bill was divided by this increased number, every employee effectively then took a tiny pay cut to pay for them. I can’t recall all the exact details and it may have been some combination of both, but it worked pretty effectively.