It's adversarial relationships from top to bottom. People are clueless, and don't want to make things better. Things rot as long as people involved are accepting, or forced to accept, the situation. Actually one gig I did was newspaper delivery and it's clear that the web took a lot of the money from them and they're barely surviving at the cost of employees.
Another factor, systems struggle accelerate when out of the mean, the lower the company is the lower the work life is, the worse the employees they can get is .. less means, less profits, more work.
The issue is that when there are no economic rents, then labor unions no longer work and indeed become an added cost. A lot of people don't seem to understand that, neither do they understand that economic rents are something that dissipates over time as new entrants come in with cheaper products. Especially in the world of free trade where you are competing with China and other low cost countries (in China labor unions are controlled by the state and starting your own is illegal).
But the trouble with journalism is not that fat cat firms are swimming in loads of cash and only if workers could orgnanize and demand a bigger slice of the pot they could get that. So the job security that a union job can provide an individual in one industry is not generalizable to a dying industry where companies are going bankrupt and need to cut costs as their revenues shrink.
But, you object, what about places like Germany where basically every firm is unionized? Well, unions in Germany are very different. Germany didn't even have a minimum wage until recently. None. And pay in Germany is lower. So you can't look at, say, what an UAW worker or Teamster in the US makes and then think that's what a typical worker in Germany is making because they are all unionized. So again we have this generalizability problem, where the _real_ sources of high income for workers are not unions but increasing return to scale, high productivity jobs. That is why tech workers make more than journalists. And that is why nations like Germany or China that want a society of high wage jobs fight to keep their manufacturing sector and high value add sectors, while nations like the US that are focused on short-term GDP growth have no issue selling off their high productivity jobs and shipping them overseas, at which point no amount of unionizing is going to help bring those high wage jobs back. Similarly when your industry is going bankrupt and shrinking, no amount of unionizing is going to give you the job security and good wages the prevoius generation of workers had in the same industry. This is not a problem of labor policy but industrial policy, and no amount of labor policy intervention is going to solve the industrial policy problem.
I don't think unions are the magic wand that a lot of people assume they are
What are you proposing should replace this? Trips back to the depot would be terribly inefficient. Portapotties in trucks would be just fancier bottles. And time to visit public restrooms would be better spent taking an actual break and then still using the bottle.
(And I'm sure more things got shipped UPS than should have...I guess you'd call that "UPS's cut" of the deal.)
Apparently, drivers are given plenty of break times and are allowed bathroom breaks, but this behavior continues. I wonder what the economic impact of putting a portable toilet closet in the truck is? Each truck would have 30% less capacity? Would employees get less breaks then?
It seems to me that a lot of the problem is (and will be) the instrumenting of jobs. The ability surveil a workforce is only going to go up. Everyone, medical techs, cashiers, plumbers, non-rockstar software developers, are going to end up with that bottle.