Labor Day weekend is a good time to reminisce upon the American labor movement, and muse a bit on its future. I begin with stark statistics. Overall, private sector unions represent just 6.7 percent of workers, while public sector unions represent 35.3 percent of those workers. Both types are in long-term decline. Fifty years ago, a third of workers belonged to organized labor; now it hovers just above 10 percent and dropping.

Many theories underlie this stunning decline. I think the best evidence suggests that there are two dominant factors: job changes and union goals. Since the peak of union membership, employment in the large, union-filled shops has dwindled and assembly line jobs in large factories are increasingly rare. Today, most new jobs require at least some college experience, and the skills of the individual worker play a greater role in the success of that employee. A large, homogenous assembly line has been replaced by smaller, more technically savvy workplaces. As a consequence, the typical employee is more closely connected to the success of his/her employer than the success of his/her economic class. This is a natural sentiment in an environment where easy to measure and reward individual skills and effort.

In that sense, the American workplace is now more like the early 19th century of de Tocqueville, filled with independent workers than it is to industrial revolution that informed the political perspective of Karl Marx. At the same time the typical American workers are more affluent than they were at any other time. In that sense things are far better for the typical household, even if everything isn’t rosy. Household income is becoming more bi-polar, with less of a middle class majority. Much of this has nothing to do with the workplace, but it is too early to know what that dynamic will yield economically or politically.

For much of its history, the American union movement lived and breathed the class struggle dynamic. During the Cold War, many unions linked their efforts to a stronger democracy, but the argument of industrial and public sector unions has always been about more than the workplace. The results of this are mixed, but for good or ill there seems little prospect of unions regaining their fire. Now that class struggles have been largely replaced by identity politics, expect more of the Bernie Sanders versus #blacklivesmatter tussle and less of Mother Jones versus the coal mine operators.

Some unions are saddling up to change. Something known as Alt-Labor is taking on many of the non-workplace issues. These are groups of non-affiliated activists, so their sustainability model is questionable. I think far greater success will be seen by industrial and public sector unions adopting the trade union model. The industrial union model has failed, while skilled and professional trades from doctors to plumbers has a few hundred years of success. The modern trade union movement won’t be adopted by all unions, just those likely to survive in the 21st century.