> plenty of hungry workers.aka a reserve army of labour, just on a global scale. It's the XI century but Engels still makes quite a bit of sense when you think about it.
However you look at it, the game is still fundamentally the same; it's just that one side can play it so much better than the other. It's like that period in the '90s when football clubs using the offside trap and applying pressure up the pitch dominated the European scene.
> Ultimately unions have only one effective negotiating tool: the strike.
That's not correct. Striking is the only legal negotiating tool; but it's not always been legal, nor the only tool. Striking is a type of industrial sabotage; being the most innocuous one, it's the only one that was made legal (and even there, its legal deployment has been progressively restricted in most countries since the '80s). If shit really hits the fan, a compact unionized workforce can do much more damage than "down tools". We've forgotten a lot about industrial relations, sooner or later we'll have to relearn old lessons.
> UK public opinion turned against unions when they rationed electricity to 3 days a week.
That's a problem for public services only (most recently, with the London tube). Unions in public sector and public services refuse to understand that their exposure damages the whole movement. It's a historical issue in most countries, a huge strategic problem for any progressive movement.
Most private companies likely wouldn't get public support in a fight with unions, but because public-service ones can (and will) abuse their role, the whole movement gets a bad rep.
> A lot of people have cited Piketty as the next Marx
Unfortunately, with all due respect, Piketty's contribution is nowhere as significant as Marx. Piketty tried to prove what a lot of people suspected, but I don't think he managed to reveal so many new elements about the structure of the game in the same way as Marx did, nor did he articulate solutions as powerfully as Marx did. Besides, there is little point in waiting for a messiah; what is required is a combination of analysis and prognosis that can resonate with an atomized and oevereducated white-collar workforce.