The propagandists who disseminate the unblemished benefits of the technological revolution—including a considerable portion of liberal economists and commentators—claim that in the long run Americans will benefit from the demise of the old Rust Bowl industries, even if in the short term some will suffer. Both liberals and the right vehemently deny that the final tendency of the contemporary technological revolution is to permanently decrease the number of good jobs. They also reject the idea that if jobs are to become scarcer, shorter hours and guaranteed income become imperative solutions, and that refusing them will mean an inevitable reduction in living standards for perhaps a majority of the population. Instead, they stress the importance of further schooling and job training to facilitate the workers’ transformation from industrial laborers to what the former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich once termed “symbolic analysts.” What is missing from this optimistic forecast is the ratio of workers made redundant by the new technologies to the number of new good jobs that the technologies create.

The other side of technological change is the race to the bottom. Over the past thirty years, the gradual disappearance of the mass industrial worker and the weakening of the unions based on the semiskilled workers and the degradation of skilled occupations to semiskilled status has resulted in wage stagnation and decline, large-scale housing foreclosures, and growth in the number of the poor, a class largely composed of former industrial workers—now unemployed, or low-wage, or condemned to part-time service work. And the “new poor,” a class composed of the young, older workers, and some types of professionals, such as lawyers and managers, has not been created only by the depression that began in 2007; it, too, is partly the result of technological progress.

Some glib boosters do acknowledge the social and economic costs of technological change. For most of them, the solution is to accelerate the expansion of schooling, both for the young and for displaced adults. Characteristically, and in conformity with the austerity thinking that has gripped much of America, the most recent proposal and practice is to fulfill the promise of new career education by offering online courses. Once the province of for-profit colleges, Internet-driven online learning has been dramatically introduced into the mainstream and is now sponsored by elite universities like Harvard and Stanford, some of the leading public research institutions such as Illinois, and the largest urban university in the United States, the City University of New York. Faculty at these institutions are encouraged to upgrade their Internet skills to be able to take advantage of electronic study aids such as Blackboard or, more extensively, to enlist themselves as instructors in online courses.

Unwillingness to recruit professionals to the movement mirrors the unions’ similar neglect of supervisory workers. The National Labor Relations Act excludes managers from the protection of the law, and so unions came to believe that “management” was their main adversary and that supervisory workers included in bargaining units during representation elections would naturally vote against unionization. Rather than fighting for the right of managerial workers to be organized, they approved, or were indifferent to, the NLRA’s legal exception of them.

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 for centuries. The proposal provoked an intense period of debate and disagreement. ILWU leadership was convinced that resistance to technological change would condemn the ports under their control to oblivion, that other countries, particularly Canada and Mexico, and their domestic rival, the Gulf Coast, would agree to containerization and the stevedore companies would shift West Coast work to those regions. So they demanded an unusual adaptation to the new technology: the company would adopt containerization, and qualified workers would be paid whether they worked or not. This quid pro quo was radical in its implications: for the first time in U.S. history, the workers were claiming a share in the enhanced profits of enterprise not as a bonus but as a right. Under the ILWU/Pacific Maritime Agreement, as long as employees in the “A” category reported for work, they were paid full salary, whether or not they were assigned to move cargo that day. The agreement also provided for a “B” category of employees not covered by the guaranteed wage. A similar deal was concluded by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which represents workers on the East and Gulf Coasts. The only parallel agreement can be found in the newspaper industry, where printers in the International Typographical Union (ITU), whose hand-typesetting skills were made obsolete by machines, were paid to take extended furloughs for as long as six months or more. But the pattern in other branches of industrial production was that unions simply conceded the usual layoffs. In some agreements, workers were offered severance pay if they accepted permanent displacement; in others, such as the Auto Workers’, laid off employees with sufficient seniority on the job received full pay until they were offered a new job by the company. They were also allowed to refuse relocation to sites outside their residential area, but if they were offered transfers within their region they were obliged to accept them or lose their wage guarantees. The UAW Big Three and farm-equipment agreements have a “thirty and out” provision: a fifty-five-year-old worker can receive a pension after thirty years of employment. In 2000, the pension exceeded $3,000 a month. For those eligible for Social Security benefits, the retirement package has equaled their straight-time hourly earnings.

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.

[...] 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. Under these pro-capital conditions, the U.S. labor market is competitive, and in recent years, in some goods production sectors, the United States has been a favored shop site for European and Japanese corporations.

[...] 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 Engineers and the Price System. Veblen said that the AFL—a craft-based federation—was doomed to marginalization; engineers were the key to the highly mechanized labor process. However, he held out little hope that engineers could be recruited into unions as long as capital was prepared to pay them handsomely. This judgment remains a challenge to unions, one they have been reluctant to take up. [...]

In the health care field, however, as doctors have increasingly become salaried employees rather than self-employed and nurses have played a more central role in the delivery of services to patients, the main grievances are no longer about income. Doctors and nurses are very interested in workplace control. They complain that administration has subverted their autonomy, that decisions concerning patients’ health are no longer the exclusive province of the health professional. Treatment regimes are now handed down to them, often dictated from above. Management exercises control over issues of diagnosis, treatment—including choice of medication—and the organization of the professional’s time. In effect, the doctor and the nurse have been reduced to functionaries of the health care machine. [...]

Now that health care is managed by large organizations, some of them for profit, the once independent physician works under constant surveillance. Are these developments topics for union intervention? Where doctors have become unionized—about 15,000 in several organizations, most of them affiliated with the Service Employees—questions of autonomy are a theme of organizing drives. Yet once a drive is over, health care unions revert to making traditional trade union demands regarding salaries and benefits, even though for most doctors and, recently, registered nurses, physician’s assistants, and nurse practitioners, these are not burning issues. The question of autonomy is, but doctors’ and nurses’ unions have not consistently raised it.

[...] As the personal computer business grew, a major union, the Communications Workers, attempted to organize Microsoft’s Seattle professionals, but had little success, even though the company had just instituted a two-tier salary structure. The first tier enjoyed more or less secure employment and benefits but lower salaries than the precarious second tier, which had no benefits or job security at all.