Tell you what bk - you come and live in the "Land of Smiles" for 10 years, living off what you can earn here (not savings or investments) and you'll find you meet an all together different type of Thai to the ones who marry walking ATMs and escape to foreign lands.
While you're still over there though, ask your Brooklyn Thais whether their politics lean to the yellow or red shirts, your comment about industrialisation leads me to think they're closet nationalists of the red shirt variety, and they'll believe Thaksin Shinawatra was a good man. Ask those same people if they think Hitler was a good man, and they'll say yes ... because he was a strong leader.
Then ask them which part of Thailand they're from - I can probably guess already - they'll say Issaan (North East Thailand), or somewhere like Phitsanulok, Uttaradit or Sukhothai and that they grew up on a rice farm or in a small town. Then do some research on ThaiVisa.com and find out exactly what all that means - I guarantee your perspective of what they are telling you will reverse 100%.
Thais here WANT jobs in factories - they get much higher than national minimum wages, plus free lunches, plus free uniforms (and all Thais love their uniforms) plus retirement and medical benefits - a Thai working in a Japanese or western owned factory here gets several times the national income when all benefits are lumped in - making them far better paid than the police or the army, but without the opportunity to boost income via "graft", that may be their sole gripe about industrialisation.
If you don't know the reality of this country, I don't expect you to know the right questions to ask, and without those a Thai will very very rarely offer the information (it's actually an Asia-wide trait) - worst of all, Thai education is based on only giving half answers - you have to know the questions to get both halves - and that firmly grips how they deal with people socially and commercially. A simple example being they will not tell you about a product warranty if you don't ask if one exists, nor about a promoted discount if you haven't seen the advert and ask for it..
Union / non-union - yup, worked both, several times. Also been at the bottom of the corporate chain and at the top of it, plus several places in the middle. Nothing special about any of that.
Love to see you get a drag-racer's rear tyre into first class mail - be sure to send me the photo of the post office clerk's face when you ask for it.