Either you believe many companies abuse their employees with no real consequences or you don't. If you believe the former then avoiding the solution because it is contrary to your ideology is never going to fix anything.
By saying it's the solution, aren't you the one being held by your ideology?
That they limit wages, but the screen actor's guild certainly doesn't cap actor's wages.
That they limit outside work, but for example, state employed court reporters do all their transcripts outside working hours and make quite a bit not being paid hourly for that.
Indeed they have protected pilot wages for decades beyond what would have been possible otherwise.
There is no case where an effective professional organization of some sort doesn't make things better for it members. To suppose that you as an individual will ever have any hope of negotiating on an equal basis with a multibillion dollar company because of "market forces" hand waving is utterly unreasonable and the poster child of limiting yourself due to ideology. Your one and only protection right now are few pieces of rapidly diminishing legislation.
For better or worse you live in a society where if you don't have a lobbyist you are invisible and where what is considered bribery in every other country (ie money in politics) is considered free speech. A lobbyist alone would work wonders let alone the other advantages of an organization.
You're suggesting I should join a union to have a lobbyist working on my (group's) behalf?
This seems to me like playing multi-billionaire corporations at their own game by their own rules - and playing it badly.
Where is the empirical evidence that you claim?
Confirmation bias mean that exceptional or confirmatory anecdotes are much more likely to be remembered[1]
I continue to be amazed that there armies of people who consider sentences that begin with "I know someone who..." to somehow be definitive evidence of anything whatsoever.
We are talking about benefits for people, we are not talking about abstract mathematics - you don't want to accept the situation of those people because that would be inconvenient for you, considering what you have said.
Constructive discussion is now over; you failed to convince me.
There are professional organizations for every major profession. Technically, the ACM would probably be the closest thing to a union that programmers actually need, but it's limited to the big iron scientific computing... So, yeah. I don't know if there is something for all of the webdev 2.0 gluelib writers out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_association
P.S. You're might be a good programmer. I don't know. We've never met, but stop trying to play rhetoric games. You're not very good at them.
Anyway, a professional organization will give you more far flung networking opportunities as well as intelligence on what's going on at other firms, which will increase your value as a worker, and presumably, your pay.