No need for a union if peole recognize a few facts:
-- If it is not an employee-owned company and an at-risk employee doesn't own significant shares of the company, a company can can that person
-- if an employees is highly competent and the company, punctual, professional, and well-liked, and the company is not in dire straits, the employee's departure will likely be by choice, not duress
-- if a company pays well, trains well, takes remedial action to keep distractable employees on track, then it is less likely to face creation of subversive or overt unions
-- if employees take honest intellectual stock of themselves and avoid slipping into tardiness, rustiness, or incompetence, and finds that those negatives are self-made, then one has little basis for blaming the company if it terminates that or other employees who are inefficient, untrainable, disproportionately expensive, etc.
-- businesses are NOT charities unless the owners/managers CHOOSE to keep on a dreg or limited individual, maybe in a support role that can do little damage, similar to Japan's "window seat" sidelining of once-key employees who were hired before the 90s, usually meaning "hired for life"
-- "hired-for-life" is dead. The more companies that work off of GAAP and other business mantras will no longer keep people on and pay for expensive benefits, perks, pensions, and the like. Only governments can get away with that, and even then not forever, as local governments file for bankruptcy
Apple is too chic and hip and swift-moving to tolerate a union. Dell workers, maybe. HP workers, maybe. But, Apple tolerating a union.. maybe for temporary humor, then it will "promote" the worker to a dead-end or grueling position away from susceptible union-sympathizers. As long as apple pays its own employees better than prevailing wages, offers superior benefits, grants flex time and allows employees a degree of autonomy so long as they are hitting or exceeding targets, and as long as Apple's HR ruthlessly screens for tighter fits, then unions will likely NEVER gain traction in companies like Apple, revered or reviled.
If i create a company, I will take great pains to make sure that the employees are compensated above prevailing wages, challenged commensurately to the skills, recognized, motivated, and rewarded, and kept interactive, and mediated for if there are issues somehow escaping resolution. Unions don't need to exist. They do because inept organizations are coercive, power-hungry, or insensitive. Unions exist because many workers cannot own up to the fact that if they are incompetent and deserve firing, it WILL catch up with them, one day, and they'd serve their best interests by always having a backup plan or being nimble enough to recover without a real backup plan. Weak-spined governments also help foster or perpetuate the existence of unions, mainly by taking their money during elections cycles.
Now, if one or more co-workers are filled with bile and malice and out to sabotage co-workers, then that is when law enforcement or arbitrators come in. Unions might only ameliorate to an extent, maybe by shuffling people around, in the name of not undermining loyalty of paying members.