Unions lobby the government to make them pass laws that make your work life more enjoyable even if you don't belong to one. This is needed to counter balance the lobbying power of the employers. For example, if fire breaks out at the place where you work, most probably you'll find fire extinguishers and emergency exits, and this fact is not due to your employer's benevolence or your professionality: your employer would be compelled by market forces to make you work in a dangerous place, if there weren't laws in place preventing malevolent employers from competing with him.

You don't need to be a communist to actually believe in the role of unions: the IMF, certainly not a lair of leftists, found out that inequality and poverty rise when the power of unions falls.

Hello, English learner here, what about the case of a sentence that *was* true in the past (not "might have been true" as the GP suggests)?

"If I was fooled, that's because I wasn't careful enough."

"If I were fooled, I'd be sorry now."

Actually, in Europe (at least where I live) we do study British English in schools. But then people learn American English because of America's cultural supremacy.

Although Windows Server 2003 is an affected product, Microsoft is not issuing an update for it because the comprehensive architectural changes required would jeopardize system stability and cause application compatibility problems.

In practice they're admitting that Windows 2003 is so broken by design that not even them can fix it without causing problems. I'd like to hear now the opinion of those who were lamenting over the quality of open source software after the heartbleed bug.