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[...] Craftspeople and semiskilled operatives were once central to industrial production and services. Today, engineers, scientists, and managers control them, through computer and other electronically mediated technologies. This shift was recognized as early as 1921, in Thorstein Veblen’s book _En…

[...] Even in some unionized workplaces—never mind the vast majority of nonunion private sector plants and offices—the power to hire and fire belongs exclusively to the boss. U.S. unions have agreed to two-tier wage systems and wage freezes and for the most part have not resisted the runaway shop. …

In December 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded just over 8 million production workers. Also in 2012, BLS reported that some 17 percent of the labor force were office employees and 5 percent were professional and technical employees. This translates into more than 26 million office worker…

The boldest union adaptation to new technology was made by the West Coast’s International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The industry wanted to introduce containerization, an automated shipping and cargo-loading process that replaced most of the hand-loading that had defined longshore work f…

[...] New York’s other unions, some of them among the largest and most powerful in the country, were mostly indifferent to public employees and particularly unsympathetic to teacher unionism: teachers were college-educated and their collective profile did not fit into a labor movement of more than …