MY COLLEAGUE asks an excellent question: if stronger private-sector unions aren't in the cards in America, then what? What other force do progressives think might play the role unions played in the postwar era, providing greater negotiating power for the working and middle class, so that they can try to claw back some of the 52% of all US GDP growth from 1993-2008 captured by the top 1% of the income scale and organise politically for concerns like universal health insurance? (Or, my pet beef, more vacation time. Why on Earth do Americans settle for two weeks' vacation time per year? Have we no unemployed people? Have we no robots? Isn't the whole point of advancement in technology and efficiency to give us more leisure time? Ever notice what words make up the phrase "labour-saving devices"? Okay, I'm done.)

Kevin Drum poses precisely the same question in his new article in Mother Jones:

Unions, for better or worse, are history. Even union leaders don't believe they'll ever regain the power of their glory days. If private-sector union density increased from 7 percent to 10 percent, that would be considered a huge victory. But it wouldn't be anywhere near enough to restore the power of the working and middle classes. And yet: The heart and soul of liberalism is economic egalitarianism. Without it, Wall Street will continue to extract ever vaster sums from the American economy, the middle class will continue to stagnate, and the left will continue to lack the powerful political and cultural energy necessary for a sustained period of liberal reform. For this to change, America needs a countervailing power as big, crude, and uncompromising as organized labor used to be. But what?

Mr Drum doesn't have an answer, and at the moment, I'm pessimistic. I don't see a realistic alternative organisation that can enlist and mobilise manpower in the interest of middle-class and poor people's pocketbook concerns. A number of alternative models were created in the 1970s, including Ralph Nader's PIRGs and the poor people's participatory-democracy organisations that eventually became ACORN. They were never more than marginal players in power politics, and ACORN was ultimately destroyed essentially with a flick of the organised right's thumb. Organisations like the Campaign for Community Change sweat blood and tears to try to make poor people's voices heard in government, but the evidence is that government just doesn't listen to poor people. Progressive mass organisations formed along other identity-based or single-issue lines, such as the National Organisation for Women or the Sierra Club, are inevitably going to be dominated by well-off people with leisure time; even those folks are hampered by the fact that people in America have less and less leisure time (see above). Most important, there's really no way in the long term for organisations that depend on voluntary donations to take on organisations that have dedicated funding streams based on real profits. The Sierra Club will never be able to match the mission intensity or the funding consistency of the National Association of Manufacturers.

In the 1990s, some progressives were briefly seduced by utopian emanations from the dreamier sides of the internet boom. The notion at GovWorks.com was that somehow the participatory democracy of the future was going to demand nothing more than mouseclicks in pajamas, that it would emerge spontaneously from the architecture of cascading style sheets, and that it would itself also be a corporation in which everyone could own shares (and that, having all gotten rich off the IPO, we could then spend the rest of our time sitting around in our pajamas engaging in participatory democracy). A decade on, only a tiny minority of us, including myself and my colleague, can actually sit around in our pajamas getting paid to pretend to engage in participatory democracy, and the pay...well, let's say it probably accurately reflects the real social value of what we're doing.

As for private-sector unions, I've been hearing the left talk about the need for a renaissance of the union movement since the early 1990s, at least, and it hasn't happened. Heck, I don't belong to a union; unlike Matthew Yglesias's father, I never wrote enough television scripts on union shows to make it into the Writer's Guild. I've always liked the idea of belonging to a union, but then again they always seemed orthogonal to what I was actually doing with my life. The one time I found a union useful was when I used something called the freelance writer's union to get health insurance in the mid-90s. When I fantasise about what a union could be in the modern economy, I think of a kind of one-stop-shopping membership club that takes up all the public-goods and collective-action deficits of the fluid contemporary multi-career worker: not just help in negotiating better wages and benefits with your employer, but group-rate health insurance, baby-sitting co-ops, get-out-the-vote drives, carpooling, affordable music and art after-school programmes to make up for public-school arts budget cuts, maybe with a nice coffee shop area with WiFi so you can hang out and get some work done while your kid's taking his lesson. Neat, right? Also clearly in the realm of cosseted liberal fantasy, and mostly unrelated to the lives of the people who really need unions to defend their wages and benefits: meat-packing plant workers, hospital and hotel employees, and so on. (Apart from the health insurance and child care. Everybody needs health insurance and child care.)

I also think that, while some of the decline of American unions is due to the success of the business class in destroying union power since Taft-Hartley, and while some is due to specific American ideological tendencies that I think are mistaken and should be argued against, a lot is due to inevitable historical and economic developments. Globalisation makes unionisation harder; it's hard to control the labour market when there are at least a couple of million people in China who could probably do your job. People are less likely to identify as workers in a single profession when they change careers multiple times during their working lives. I even have some ambivalence about high unionisation rates in Europe, which do partly contribute to labour-market rigidities that make economies and societies more hide-bound and less entrepreneurial.

And yet. Over the past week I've been researching the issue of migrant Eastern European labourers in the Netherlands, who are getting routinely stomped by the employment agencies that recruit them in Poland and Bulgaria, in ways reminiscent of Mexican migrant workers in the United States. The agencies tell them they're coming to Holland to work in retail, or hotels; they deliver them by bus to a meat-packing plant. They're housed in huge camps in empty vacation trailer parks, or filthy broken-down apartments, four to a room, and paid €250 a week; the companies deduct €60 per week in rent, and periodically company inspectors come around, announce the apartment is too dirty, and fine the workers €50 each. Unable to speak a word of Dutch, the workers can't understand the monthly invoices explaining the multiple charges that have been deducted from their salaries. There are people in Holland who are reaching out to these Polish and Bulgarian workers, finding out what their problems are, helping them access lawyers and go after employment companies that cheat them. Those people are labour-union organisers. Labour-union organisers care about these abuses partly out of the self-interest of their members: if scammy employers can stomp the Poles, it won't be long before they can stomp the locals too. But that doesn't capture it. There's also something basically spiritual about what they're doing. They're essentially motivated by solidarity. While other working-class Dutch are letting their resentment at economic uncertainty drive them into racism and xenophobia, solidarity gives labour-union organisers a paradigm that lets them reach across boundaries and see how workers of different ethnicities and nationalities are fundamentally in the same boat. Solidarity is a word you almost never see in American political discussions, since the decline of unionism in the 1970s. But those Polish migrant workers may be more familiar with it, as I believe it played an important role in Polish history at one point. At the time, I think both right- and left-wing Americans embraced the slogan, and maybe even the idea behind it, too.