My first and only experience with unions came after high school, where I took a year off before college to work, which is very common back in Trinidad & Tobago. When I started at the local telecom company (which was a monopoly at the time), they were in the midst of a heated union struggle that was already in its third year. The union workers claimed that the board and the executives were unfairly benefiting from the monster profits associated with a monopoly in a booming oil-based economy, while the workers were being denied the annual raises and benefits that had been agreed to in the last collective bargaining agreement from a decade before. The primary method of protest used by the union was bomb threats. The union members would make anonymous calls to the busiest company locations at peak times of the day, disrupting operations as workers would have to be evacuated for at least an hour. Because there was only one bomb squad unit in the country at the time, if simultaneous threats were made at multiple locations, we would have to be evacuated for up to 4 hours. During the most heated times of negotiations, these threats came every single day of the week.