I'm pretty skeptical of labor unions in the U.S., but I can see how they could help with this kind of issue.

I'm not sure they wouldn't be on the forefront of coming up with new words to add to the lists.

They 100% would be. In fact, people in the Alphabet Union are on the forefront of DEI initiatives like this.

Unfortunately most of the people pushing hardest for unionization in tech are exactly the same people pushing the woke craziness. In fact, one of the main reasons they want unions so badly is to use them to make more and more insane social justice-ey demands and add the illusion that there is broad worker support for them.

They do this with the knowledge that most people won't stand up against them out of fear, even though they don't agree with them - the sociopathic Google walkout organizers leveraged this to great effect when they collected signatures and then changed the text of what people had already signed to be a psychotic list of unreasonable demands, knowing that it'd be career suicide for any of us to complain publicly about it (there wasn't much public noise but a lot of us were really pissed about that privately). Surprise, surprise, the overlap between that group and the group later pushing for unionization was nearly 100%.

When do you feel cancel culture started?

With the rise of social media. The modern "cancelling" could not exist without the viral phenomena that social media enables. Of course, you could always be fired for saying unaceptable things in the past, but now it actually ruins your entire life, you can't escape it.

Please see my response in this thread.

Started kicking off in universities around 2014-2015, really accelerated on social media (and by extension legacy media) through the Trump years, and has been solidly established across the corporate world as the college students of 2015 entered the workforce.

In the United States the fundamentalists have been doing it for much longer then that as well as people such as the members of the Parents Music Resource Center who controlled a considerable amount of political power.

This idea that it is a recent invention isn't really supported by the reality on the ground. Things like the satanic panic, Dungeons & Dragons / Metal being satanic, Rock being evil, and a host of other things have long been used to remove "undesirable" people for a long time before 2014 on both the local and national level.

The extremes have always used shunning and economic warfare tactics to shut up those who disagree with them.

The majority imposing language norms on the minority is fundamentally different than a minority using their influence over media, corporations and institutions to impose language norms on the majority.

Uhhh ok yeah all those people who lost jobs and couldn't find employment because they listened to rock music/played DnD. Sure.

The DnD panic was about kids. It was about kids. I find it absurd to go after DnD like that but I don't recall ever reading about people being shunned, losing there jobs etc as happens these days.

Having lived it yes people got shunned and people got fired for it. Same thing for daring to say that LGBTQ deserved equal rights or to use the term from that time gay people. Much the same happened to some who said that black people deserved equal rights.

People have, for many many centuries use various shunning tactics to enforce their will upon others.

Lol, come-on, do you really believe this? The first victim of what people call "modern cancel culture" were the Dixie Chicks (now The Chicks) when they made an incredibly mild criticism of president Bush a few days before the invasion of Iraq during a concert in The UK. It costed them their position as one of the top country acts in the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy