> or when they’re so bad that people might actually die

Care to elaborate? Am I understanding correctly that the implication here is that there is some condition for which a software engineer having a union agreement could prevent that worker from dying?

Yes, certainly: the ability to say “no” to abusive labor conditions without risk of irreversibly losing any source of income while living in a society that treats lack of income as deserving of whatever pains and suffering come with it.

The word “any” is doing a lot of work here—I’m implying a denylist or “social credit score” or other way of persisting punishment against an individual beyond mere job loss.

You’re right that we’re not there right now. We’re in the wide middle and still closer to the “we have lots of bargaining power because we’re in demand” end of the continuum—_directionally_ it does not feel that way, but we don’t have a ton of folks dying of Boolean lung in the code mines. But I’d not rule out the possibility. The range of possible human experiences is vast.

Or prevent that worker's work output from killing innocent, uh... Externalities. Folks. Animals. Ecosystems.