I almost think we don't need labor unions, but we need consumer unions. Collective bargaining for housing, for instance. I dunno how you'd swing that, to be honest, but it's an interesting thought. Make a resident-owned real-estate conglomerate, with the goal not of making money, but of keeping prices down.
Uh, swinging that is what you call price/rent controls? "Consumer union" is ostensibly a, y'know... government. They do things like that sometimes, and oh but does it make certain talking heads
howl.
That's also where a universal labor union would be coming from, for that matter. Tighten up labor laws and employee protections to the point you de facto have one, basically. Anything lower level than that and by the time you actually have it, you... have a government built up.
It's not even an impossible thought to think, you'd just need to see a lot of CEOs at a minimum get their back broken, and I'm not sure how metaphorical that condition would be. Then you'd need a persistent effort to keep those backs shattered in perpetuity.
My other concerns are the unions are targeting the employers - which are the entities that generally are actually creating wealth - instead of targeting the industries that are charging people lots of money. You don't get a functional economy by stressing the entities that actually create wealth.
I mean, you're not entirely wrong on that last sentence, but you're
wildly wrong on the first?
Employers rarely create much or any wealth, they extract it from employees and anyone else they can manage to squeeze money out of. That's functionally the entire friggin'
point of a capitalist system, at the end of the day, folks with money/administrative control shaving wealth off the efforts of workers. It's one of the reasons the greatest type of theft in the US by a pretty bloody long shot is
wage theft.