system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
what are the economic effects of curbing Union power? (as Thatcher did)

In the late 70s UK, many had become scared about union powers dragging the economy down. Thatcher was elected in as a result of much of this fear, and proceeded to curb union powers via making closed shop agreements illegal, ensuring ballots had to be cast before strikes could be called and ensuring union leaders had to go through elections every 5 years. This has often been characterised as 'democratising unions' by her supporters and as destroying the empowerment of workers by her detractors. My question is, where these measures beneficial to the UK economy? If not then what was the best course of action at the time?

Any corrections on UK history is much appreciated as I'm certainly no expert.
gpt
There are several problems in answering this question objectively:

* The labour law reforms were only one part of Thatcherism, other parts included bringing down inflation (economically costly in the short term), improving government finances (beneficial mainly in avoiding future fiscal crisises, which are terrible for the poorest, but it's hard to measure something that doesn't happen, particularly when numerous other countries are making similar reforms), privatising industries and reforming the tax system towards a broad-base, lower rate approach. 

* Numerous other things are changing in economies all the time, e.g. changing demographics as the baby boomers move through the workforce, new technologies working their way through (once 95% of every factory has been electrified or you've gone from 20% of the population being to high school to 95%, the gains from that area are gone).  There's been a worldwide fall in productivity growth since the 1970s which may be just the result of the new inventions of the Second Industrial Revolution having played themselves out. Other countries' economies can also change. 

* The whole topic was and is politically controversial. 

I will say that one thing to bear in mind is that many of the poorest and most marginalised in society live in households where no one is earning a market income, often due to health problems or caretaking responsibilities. Therefore those households don't benefit directly from higher wages, the effects of unions matter to them through the effects on prices and goods/services availability. Any analysis of the distributional impact of reforms that focuses solely on workers is missing an important part of the story from both equity and distributional grounds.