The most important thing important thing that ever happened to build the middle class in America was the hard fought success of the labor movement. Much of what we today take for granted is owed to the effectiveness of organized labor. But that's 20th Century history. Things are different now.
The decline of membership in labor unions is likely to continue its historical trend. During the Fifth Party System, in which the Democratic Party was dominant, organized labor was THE key pillar of the party's institutional strength. The United States is a nation of private institutions that operate separately from government, but because of their economic, political or civic importance are influential on government. The Media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Academia, religious institutions and a massive array of civic groups, charitable foundations, and professional sports are examples of what I mean.
Unique actors within these various groups come and go, but as a group these institutions have a solid foundation and a permanence to them. Except for Organized Labor. Organized Labor has been the one large institution that has been in sharp decline with seemingly nothing taking its place. There is of course more workers than ever, more productive than ever, but the number of people who are members of unions is declining in actual number and as a percentage of the workforce. There is no reason to believe this trend will not continue.
Politically, the Democratic Party has suffered a serious of heavy blows as a result of the collapse of labor unions. Most of the wounds have been self-inflicted. First, for reasons that have nothing to do with labor issues, a large number of union members began voting Republican. Those same Republicans then began changing laws to curb, block, and in some cases break private sector unions. In many unfortunate cases, union management turned away of organizating new workers and instead conducted a defensive war of attrition on individual contract negotiations,scattering their strength while membership and thus dues, declined. With no money to finance Democratic campaigns, unable to deliver its members to the polls uniformly, and beset with internal fueds and in a few cases organized crime, Democratic politicians turned elsewhere for voters. This set in place a sort of vicious cycle: Unions can't deliver voters and money, Democrats look elsewhere, anti-union politicians win, then hurt unions more. Now the GOP has tuned to break the public sector unions which which has to be considered near total defeat.
Even though unions of late have turned to broader advocacy on public policy as their general activity, I don't believe the labor union as a major institution can be saved.
So what's next? Unfortunately, nobody knows what to do, especially the union leaders. Perhaps some fresh thinking is needed as striking, collective bargaining, and political agitation are no longer strong bargaining chips they once were. Certainly being a typical political group that runs ads during elections isn't helping.
If it were me in charge, I'd be thinking about a shareholders union. You might not know this, but actually the American public owns more corporations more broadly than any of you realize. Pension funds, mutual funds, mutual insurance companies, and other entities control vast shares of American and foreign businesses. However the rights exercised by these shareholders are some of the least democratically administered wealth in the world. It is literally a vast, vast fortune under the tight control of very few people. Seems to me like a person who owns a bit of apple stock should have some say on where it puts its factories, for example. Vanguard Mutual Funds is a huge Apple shareholder, the largest in fact. Vanguard is owned by its mutual funds and its mutual funds are owned by their shareholders... who number in the millions. Pension funds too. Somebody ought to think about organizing those shareholders to have more say so and votes on major decisions like mergers, wages and salaries, etc. If you all own Vanguard and Vanguard owns Apple, you should get some say-so at Apple is how I see it. And if laws are an impediment, well that sounds like a perfect public policy issue. And my kind of populism!