Because just about every official institution at every level is virulently anti-union. Case in point, the World Bank:

The World Bank has taken the extremely dubious science of deregulation one step further by creating a guide, known as the Doing Business report, that quantifies the regulatory “burden” that investors may face in various countries. The 2013 report was released this week.

Echoing the corporate “job creator” mythology of the Washington consensus, Doing Business encourages financiers and governments to erode public-interest protections, including safeguards for unions and workers. Labor groups say the publication’s warped views on regulation and worker protections effectively gives a statistical justification for leveraging economic aid or investment to pressure countries to privatize, deregulate and undermine unions.

Labor advocates are particularly critical of the section of the report that crystallizes these views, the “Employing Workers Indicator” (EWI) which purports to measure labor policy “as it affects the hiring and redundancy of workers and the rigidity of working hours.” Despite the World Bank’s past assurances that its analysis of labor regulations won’t factor into the main rankings on business friendliness, critics fear that these data nonetheless filter into the report’s evaluations, and in turn imply labor laws essentially impede development.

This is not just the “technocrats” who have this opinion. It’s the overwhelming majority on the so-called “center-left”.

Whenever you hear a Democrat talking about “training” so that workers are ready for “the new economy”, they are saying that they think that labor unions are an anachronism, and they won’t do anything to support them.

We need a real Labo(u)r party in the United States, because the political establishment is hostile to unions.