The Wizard of Speed and Time is a great film about how difficult it is to be an independent creator in Hollywood due to the costs of getting anything started. The unions make it very hard to bootstrap anything without massive financing.
That said the very same union would frequently respond with that's not our responsibility when I pointed them to take up actual legal issues that they were responsible for.
A lot of the old union representatives were there for decades with no desire to change anything and enjoying the good relationship they had built with the leadership.
At the end of the day any human organization that grows too big seems to end up in its own lazy comfort zone, whether it's the employer side or the employee representing union side.
The thing about forming your own union is that major unions also have big lobbying institutions saying that their union is the only thing with real power, while the other side has their own lobbying groups pressuring workers into believing that all unions are bad.
Adding any security technology is a nightmare because they have an obsession about being spied on.
Take a standard EDR: the security team just wants the company to be safe from hackers. The unions think that all they wish is to spot on them. What will happen is that the company will crash after repeated hacks and they know they will be the last to be fired because they are there to protect people...
Of course this is just une side, unions are fantastic when they actually do their job and this is thanks to them we have the Labour Law we have. It is just that the people today are not the same as the ones who actually cared.
Take for example machine learning algorithms, a lot of the actual model definition you could just copy yourself even when there is DLP. What you can't take with you is the source data and the labeled data.
DLP allows you to prevent people from leaking sketchy and incompetent leadership from investors, SEC and law enforcement. I get the logic behind it, but most of the actual critical stuff you can just take with you in some fashion or another. The situation is obviously a bit different when you're talking hardware manufacturing, CAD models etc.
Don't want to operate a holywood-style guild? Then don't.
I want to add that disruption is what huge unions excel at, so if anybody wants to keep them out of tech, the best approach might be to fill the space they'd otherwise sweep into unchallenged with a compelling organization.
But I don’t see this as a problem in tech that needs to be solved. The barriers to entry and exit are so low to me as a programmer that I think organizations already have to compete to hire and keep me. So any unions wouldn’t do much to help me and seem like an extra layer of bureaucracy that would stop me from having fun while I work.