The presumption that the ideas we came up with in during the industrial revolutions are the best is preposterous. They might be the best (old idea aren't necessarily bad), but there are also probably modern options.
I find it frustrating to discuss the failure of unions without being labeled anti-labor. But it seems to me, the fundamental failure of unions, even when they seem to work, is setting up an adversarial system. I would posit for any social institution to be stable you need an alignment of incentives.
I disagree wholeheartedly with this idea that adversaries create instability. Stability is the result of all forces acting on an object summing to zero, to abuse metaphor. You can't have that if all of the forces are pointing in the same direction. There is a reason Nash equilibrium is called "equilibrium"; it is stable.
Unions fail primarily because they are a very shoddy bandaid. When you have commodity labor, in which each worker is the same, a union has the capacity to plausibly represent them as a group. That cooperation gives the workers negotiating power. There is A) no reason to suspect that that negotiating power cannot or will not be abused, and B) the premise is usually false. Police are the obvious target here on both counts, as a police union is nothing more than a private army, and policing is far from commodity labor. It matters a lot who my police are. I think that teacher's unions are probably a better example of the problems though because people tend to think of the police as an outlier.
I'd take these kind of complaints a lot more seriously if they were coming from people with substantial experience in unionized workplaces.
The adversarial situation you want to avoid already exists: Your boss wants to pay you as little as possible; you want to get paid as much as possible. All you're doing by disdaining collective bargaining is sacrificing leverage.
I find it frustrating to discuss the failure of unions without being labeled anti-labor. But it seems to me, the fundamental failure of unions, even when they seem to work, is setting up an adversarial system. I would posit for any social institution to be stable you need an alignment of incentives.