Unions at their core are just all of the workers in a workplace. Sure workers in the US can be reactionary as hell so how do we change that? Well, Lenin talked about unions being schools for communism. They're where the average person can start to gain organizational skills, political training and ultimately state building skills. These are skills no other school in the US will teach you. You take these skills to address the material conditions of the workplace and then you can broaden that to outside the workplace. As socialists we don't get power from capital, we get it from people. If we want any chance of meaningful power in the imperial core, then we need to meet people where they're at in the struggle. Lots of those people are workers struggling in workplaces and unions are the tool we can use to address that.