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 workers and nearly 8 million professional and technical employees. The private sector had about 22.5 million office workers and 6.5 million professional and technical workers, not counting service professionals in nonprofits. Adding nurses, physicians, and other health professionals brings the total to 11 million professional and technical workers, almost half as many workers as in the industrial sector. Include teachers, social service workers, and professors—both full- and part-time—and there are more than 16 million professional workers. In sum, the professions now account for about one in eight members of the labor force. Apart from the health and higher education professions and public school teaching, where the density of unionized labor is high (80 percent in the K–12 schools, 25 percent in higher education and health care), the organization of private-sector professional and technical employees and the overwhelming majority of office workers has been negligible.

What these numbers tell us is that unions today do not speak for the whole working class, which includes the employed middle class, and that omission is killing the labor movement. Unions have organized only a narrow segment of workers in production, services, and public employment. It is not a question of lack of union density, where density signifies the proportion of union members in the overall workforce, but of a lack of breadth, of inclusion. It is the movement’s limited diversity that makes it easier for labor’s opponents to label the unions a pressure group that represents only its ever shrinking membership.