MySQL: Does the order of the ON condition of a LEFT JOIN matter?
SQL is a declarative language; that is, it does not specify how something should be done, only what the result should be. 

The computing languages I have used all respect the properties of equality, so employees.ID = unionMembers.ID is equivalent to unionMembers.ID = employees.ID 

In this case, rather than an outer join, which can generate a large data-set, you would probably want to use a sub-query or the EXISTS operator, depending on your data structure. Something like: 

SELECT   ID,
          wage, 
          unionDues
FROM      employees 
WHERE     ID in (
    SELECT    ID
    FROM      unionMembers
    WHERE     ID = 'ID001'
    );

There is an in-depth discussion here: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/subquery-optimization-with-exists.html 

HTH