unions

You may feel your knowledge and attitude make you valuable to your company, but your life is improved, in economic terms, by higher income from wages. In turn, your wages are not determined by your own abstract beliefs or feelings about your value, but rather by the economic rule of supply and demand. As such, if labor is available to your employer and other employers in excessive supply, then its value in economic terms is diminished, that is, your wages are depressed.

Therefore, your enthusiasm over providing labor, and your doubtfulness for the union as a mechanism for strategically withholding your labor collectively with coworkers, are together contributing to your wages being depressed.

If your only ambition is to have higher pay than your coworkers, then, as long as you are successful in competing against them, your interest may be served by continuing the way you describe.

If, however, your interest is in having the highest possible pay, then the more suitable choice would be supporting labor organization through your union, even if a further effect of such a choice may be helping your coworkers also have higher pay, despite your ill feelings toward them.

By competing against your coworkers without supporting the union, the best outcome you should expect is that you would have more pay than other workers as an effect that only partially offsets the opposing effect, the stronger of the two, of wages for everyone, including for yourself, being depressed.

Generally, while I understand your frustration with your union, I wonder how much sympathy you may reasonably expect, as long as your attitude remains as one that would contribute to sabotaging its efficacy.