The advantages of union organization were clear to many, but labor unions had been built by and for blue-collar workers in industry and the building trades, and until the 1960s they didn't reach much farther. Then, in a dramatic shift that gained momentum throughout the 1970s, organized labor began seeping into business offices, fire departments, county hospitals, and public school classrooms. White-collar employees and public servants of all sorts joined unions in record numbers, making up the fastest-growing segment of the labor movement in the 1970s. Between 1968 and 1978 union membership among public employees tripled, to more than two million. Another two million public employees belonged to once sleepy professional associations that, m the previous decade, had been transformed into aggressive labor organizations.

The enlistment of the white-collar workers into the union ranks substantially upped the stakes of the war on labor. Business leaders knew they needed to send more troops to the front, and they justified the deployment with a recitation of the dangerous schisms in U.S. economy, things like the cost of the Vietnam War, foreign competition, plant closures, high inflation, the energy crises, recession, and growing unemployment. All that ravaged the American worker, of course, but it was American business that went crying and gnashing its teeth to Congress. The problem, our corporate captains wailed, was the damn cost of labor. Business leaders from all sectors organized to "control labor costs"—meaning cut people's pay—initially in the construction industry. Our illustrious executives focused on construction because, they alleged, high wages in the building trades translated into high-cost construction, which meant high-cost everything that came after—the age-old "ripple effect" as applied to anti-unionism. To invert the argument, then, if business could successfully undermine unions in the building and construction trades, it could well defeat the whole of organized labor. They were shooting for the moon.