That's fucked up. Hopefully we can change that law some day.

Contractors make all these issues muddy and provide easy loopholes.

Generally a company will sign on a contractor with specific requirements. If the contracting company can no longer financially meet them, such as due to unionization, the contract is cancelled.

The rub is probably that the contract terms are not achievable while being fair to the end-of-the-line workers. I’m not sure how to fix this.

I’ve accidentally caused this myself. I put out a publicly funded contract with stiff terms to ‘keep the contractors honest.’ What that ended up meaning is that the contractor became a horrible place to work since they cut corners, and the company still makes their money. That contract was eventually canceled due to documented violations, so then all their employees were just plain unemployed.