Why not ask the reverse question? “Why do we have a government instead of just having a workers union?”.
This is actually the political project of anarcho-syndicalists [1]: workers could self-organize the production and the collective life through democratic federalist instances. The idea has been theorized since at least 1906 in the Charter of Amiens [2], an historical text of syndicalism [3]: https://www.marxists.org/history/france/cgt/charter-amiens.h... where we can read “the union, today a resistance group will be, in the future, a group for production and redistribution, the basis of social reorganization.”.
At least in France, the biggest workers union (CGT) is still organized in a way that would allow this, by having both geographical and per-industry-branch instances (sorry I lack the proper words to describe this in English).
It is also what the Spanish CNT did during and after the Spnish Revolution of 1936 [4,5].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Amiens
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution_of_1936