Individually, workers have very little bargaining power. Collectively, we have a lot of power. So unless you’re arguing that workers would deliberately argue for fewer protections, I don’t see how not having collective bargaining could lead to more workers’ rights.

The fact of the matter is, God gave us Sunday off and unions gave us Saturday off. Unions were the reason child labor was banned in the U.S. We have worker’s comp and the 40 hour work week was standardized. None of those things would’ve resulted from the benevolence of profit maximizing corporations.

Unions are the only path to success when Congress is operating in a degraded governance state. Do you know how many worker hours will be exhausted in suboptimal labor conditions waiting for Congress to pass human labor protections? Strong legislative labor protections would be wonderful, but they are not on offer in the present day United States.

Congress won't function until the cohorts who vote for representatives unwilling to champion broadly popular policy or labor protections dies out. That's going to take a hot minute, even assuming a death rate of 1.8M voters over the age of 55/year.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/what-you-need-to-kn... (Control-F "Figure 1")