There are a lot of people who are not in unions who do no work.

It is a plague in the programming field.

Not having unions is not a silver bullet for that problem. So maybe it is a false attribution/bias on your part

This. 100%. The absolute irony of techies getting paid big bucks while doing zero work, just posting on their phone on HN during the "workday", complaining about ... union fat cats getting paid too much and doing no work. Maybe there's actually some wisdom to it. like "Uh oh.. if the people at the bottom figured out their own scams and aren't working either.. this whole house of cards I'm on top of might collapse!"