People deride unions, but collective bargaining has also been a very effective solution in the past.

And that's why people deride unions. It's a defence mechanism.

...why would a defence mechanism for worker health be something people deride?

To weaken it, so that it has less people and less power, and is not respected by the rest of the population.

Why would anyone with sufficient money and organization to support a candidate support one who would change the rules in favor of the working masses?

For the same reason the mouth passes food to the stomach instead of keeping it to itself. The same reason we remove tumors from the human body. The whole organism (or in the case of human populations, superorganism) depends on nourishment flowing through the whole organism, not concentrating in small pockets.

Not everyone is a sociopath.

Just everyone with power

It's a process of selection...

> To win a nice guys award? To get a warm, squishy feeling inside? Why not? There are plenty of well-natured, kind people in the world. The price of being not nice is quite high.

Or stop putting band-aids in a fundamentally broken system, and change it altogether.

To... what?

We haven't reached the peak of human wealth distribution systems with a byproduct of the fall of feudalism. Let's rack our brains, I'm sure we can figure something.

Instead of being cryptic and beating around the bush, why not suggest a system if you've already racked your brain and figured something out?