It's not just "the unions" that any carrier might want to kill off.
It's the stupid copper! Do you realize how expensive it is to
repair & maintain copper? As someone who has to deal with the
fallout of poor copper, I would love it if they would eliminate it
altogether. Bandwith wise, it sucks. Crossover problems, attenuation, signal degradation among a few problems. People
who still use the SLOW devices called fax machines, well, lets just say about anytime you get a good size rain storm, my service call load goes UP. Drive down any street that has a good size trunk line running overhead, something like the photo above, and notice you will more than likely find a HUGE "air tank" strapped to a pole. What they are doing is pumping liquid nitrogen through the line to freeze out and evaporate any moisture that has gotten into the line. That water, corrosive in nature, over time, degrades the copper, causing the "bacon frying" sound you hear on the lines, the "I can hear other conversations" problems, which attenuates, gain hits, crosstalk the line to where it doesn't work. On DSL, this results in signal loss, dropouts, low bandwith etc.
I don't blame them for getting rid of copper. Plus, with the price of copper, you've seen numerous stories where some idiots will climb a pole in a somewhat rural area, cut the trunk line just to get to the copper. Fiber, initially is expensive, somewhat to deploy, but, over time (unless some dope cuts an underground cable) it is less expensive to maintain, has a HIGHER capacity, and is pretty much resistant to induced noise.