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Originally Posted by Rodney
No. There are many low-paying industrial and canning/foodpacking employers, some large but many smaller, who employ new immigrants or legal/illegal aliens. Because the immigrants are 1) not well educated, especially in their rights and how to obtain them, and 2) are afraid to complain because they fear they may endanger their status here, they put up with many terrible and illegal working conditions.
And that doesn't even count the people working completely off the books as casual labor for whatever reason (illegal alien, criminal record/on the run, etc.). Within a half mile of where I live is a large street-corner casual labor market where over 100 workers (most latino, some caucasian) wait every day for contractors to hire them for $7-$10 an hour. They go off in pickups and often work under terrible conditions. If they're injured, the contractor usually drops them at a drop-in medical clinic with $75 and is never seen again. There's another market like it just five miles away.
Yes, the laws are the on the books. And for the least fortunate among us, they are meaningless.
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I hate to state the obvious, but all of the situations you mention involve somebody breaking the law. When I say that certain things have been addressed by labor laws and you tell me that they aren't, you might be better off giving me examples of how the laws are not addressing unsafe working conditions in situations where everybody is actually obeying the law... and aren't we talking about unions here? If a worker is not obeying the law to begin with and wants to avoid trouble, as in many of the situations you describe, s/he is probably not going to join a union because that would only bring them closer to (you guessed it) the law.