Unionization is an attempt by workers to build structural capital (the union itself) between them and derive rents on it, countering the ability of the company to derive rents on its capital. The company, in deriving profits off of their ownership of the physical capital that the workers must work with, makes their share of the pie larger, making the workers’ smaller — so the workers respond by making their share larger, making the company’s smaller again. However, the workers can never claw all of the value of their labor back from the owners — if they did, there would be no more incentive for the company to invest or even to operate. The union is the result of workers making the best of a bad situation.

As the forms that capital takes have shifted, unionization runs into more difficulties. This is not the factory-dominated (and, thus, physical capital-dominated) economy of the 1800s and 1900s. This is a “service economy” or “knowledge economy” — a post-industrial economy, which has less and less use for massive machinery and more and more use for creativity, intensely specialized skills, and caring labor — i.e., work that is really only doable by human beings.

A post-industrial economy is one that is dominated by intangible capital. If you do a valuation of the full (both physical and intangible, rather than merely physical) capital stock of America, at least some people put the value of physical capital at less than 10% of the value of the total. Human capital is probably most of this total.

This means that in many workplaces most of the means of production (by monetary valuation) are already in the hands of the workers. In the case of human capital, those means of production are the workers. In the case of relational capital, the relationships between the workers, and of workers to clients, are difficult for the firm to seize and difficult for the firm to replace — though, firms are known to attempt to do so; my mother was fond of telling the story, from her hairdresser days, of how one of her employers tried to make her use a false name to lock in her client-base and prevent them from finding her easily if she attempted to go and work elsewhere. In the form of structural capital, the intangible capital is — essentially — in the hands of whoever is able to exploit and control the procedures of the company; approximately, this is the managers, though the natural seniority of long-time non-managers knowing how things are done does have an effect.

If all this is true, and the workers already have most of the capital, what is there to seize? What need do the workers have to beat the boss — when they could just continue onwards without him?