Thomas Kochan, an economist at MIT Sloan, offers thoughts on how unions might adapt to the modern labor market. Some of these ideas are quite familiar, but one of them is particularly attractive as it offers a potential profit opportunity, which would facilitate the process of achieving scale — basically, a more substantial version of Glassdoor:
The development of a national on-line workplace survey that workers can use to rate employers as places to work, and then publish the results widely on an easily accessible smart phone app. Ranking the quality of employers in an industry and region would provide workers a new source of power — one that is more widely accessible and more productive than a strike.
Building something along these lines that could do a substantially better job than Glassdoor would require a great deal of technical sophistication, but it is an idea very much worth pursuing.