I've done about a dozen trade shows and have done both of those things, from personal experience. (This anecdote comes up frequently in these discussions and I always wonder where from, because it's not anything like I've seen...)
I worked in a government office where only unionized IT workers were allowed to move computer equipment. My boss gave me his old monitor after upgrading and I had to wait until after hours to move it. This was around 2018.
So the electrical strip thing seems plausible to me.
Where does it come from? I saw it myself at the 1981 NCC in Chicago. The Xerox trade show staff person with a roll of $100 bills for paying off the unions.
Yeah, I guess things might have been different then. I was 3 at that time, and in doing occasional trade shows for the last 7 or 8 years (so, from mid 2010s on), I've just never experienced it; not in Seattle, San Diego, Baltimore, nor a handful of smaller cities in NY and DE.
Maybe the world has changed in the last 42 years, and it'd be helpful to qualify stories like these (where the original poster says he is not allowed, present tense) with where and when they've happened.
