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I think that this the opposite of good. It is pure rent-seeking. If everyone does that, you end up with the medieval guild system. Want to bake and sell bread? Sorry bro, you must be in the baker's guild to do that. No, you can't just join the guild. The best you can do is to beg for an apprenticeship with a guild member, and after a decade of working for pitiful wages and playing politics, you might earn your cushy guild job. Or the son of a baker might get that job instead. In such a system, nobody has any incentive to work on innovation or efficiency.
Today, you would end up with a system where you can't fill your gas tank by yourself, because the gas station attendant union lobbied against it, nor change your own car tires, because once the car replaced the horse, the blacksmith's union transitioned from changing hoof irons to changing tires.
There are never enough cushy union jobs for everyone. The net effect is a transfer of wealth from the the people who are not in union jobs to union members through increased product costs.
I am not as rabidly anti-union as the Mindkiller podcast people, and think that historically, unions were probably net-good at times. From a gut feeling, collective bargaining feels more acceptable if exploited factory workers do it than if a cartel does it. But messing with the forces of a functioning market is rarely beneficial.
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