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Originally Posted by Supple Cow
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.
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A law that is ignored is nothing to be complacent about. All of these things happen in plain site, especially the streetside labor markets. We have all sorts of wonderful laws on the books that are ignored or not enforced, and the labor laws are increasingly irrelevant to the poorest among us. Hey, and a lot of those workers are illegal, and where's the INS? Where's the IRS? Nowhere to be seen. Why? People _want_ those workers there: businesses, contractors, even individuals. They want a cheap source of exploitable labor.
As for poor workers not wanting to form unions, one of the few places where unions are doing well are in lower-income industrial facilities. They fight not for higher wages but better working conditions. It's difficult because union organizers don't have the access to industrial facilities that they had 30 years ago. More of those "new laws which protect us."