Most important, they knew, for better or worse, that unions had power. Sixty years ago, the UAW or the Mineworkers or the Steelworkers, not only deeply affected crucial sectors of an industrial economy, they also demanded respect from broader society—demands made manifest in the “political strikes” they organized, whether legally or not, to protest the issues of the day. Millions supported these strikes, millions despised them—but nobody could ignore them. The charismatic leaders of these unions, men like Walter Reuther and John L. Lewis, were household names to most Americans. Jimmy Hoffa was thought by many to be a “thug”, but his union, the Teamsters, could stop interstate commercial transportation in the country. Such was the power that John Sweeney, the former president of the AFL-CIO, sought to evoke when he assumed office in the mid 1990s on a platform of union reform and growth. Sweeney was not a great public speaker, but he did use one great line that always got boisterous cheers before audiences of union members (including me). He would speak about the enemies of the labor movement and say something like, “Well, they’re calling me a ‘big union boss.’ All I can say is: it’s a lot better to be a big union boss than a small union boss.”

Today, by contrast, with several notable exceptions—the housekeeping workers in Las Vegas’s casinos, the UPS drivers, the hotel workers of New York City, pockets of militancy among the Latino immigrant community in Los Angeles—the sources of union strength are diminished. Membership is much smaller and declining, workers aren’t aggressively seeking to join unions. And the most famous union president today is probably the recently retired Andy Stern of SEIU. Stern has had a 60 Minutes segment dedicated to him, and has been featured in major magazine profiles; he was a frequent visitor to the Obama White House; he is smart and dynamic. But how many Americans today know who Stern is? Five percent? That many? The fact is, the SEIU, as resourceful and influential as it is, can’t make a serious claim to power over the American economy—janitors and nurse’s aides today can’t bring the economy to a halt, as autoworkers, steel workers, and truckers could claim to be able to do in the 1950s.

This is a result of structural economic changes in postwar America, but it has had immediate political and social effects. In 1947, Harry Truman unsuccessfully vetoed the Taft Hartley Act, which restricted tactics for union growth and codified those limitations into federal law. Truman wasn’t particularly supportive of unions—he had threatened to conscript the military to break a railway strike the previous year—but he understood that the strongest bulwark of his political support was organized labor. In our day, by contrast, Barack Obama could not even bestir himself to more than nominally support a pro-labor card check bill. The causes of this failure weren’t personal, but structural: There is a vast difference between the over 30 percent of the workforce unionized in Truman’s time, and the less than 12 percent today (and a microscopic 7 percent in the private sector.)

Tellingly, this diminishment has not been accompanied by rage, but indifference or even befuddlement. Unions are like manual typewriters, oh hell, electric ones—pretty cool in their time, but who has even seen one today? Several days ago, Joe Nocera, the New York Times columnist, expressed a mild astonishment that unions just might be part of the solution to income inequality in this country. Nocera acknowledged that he was from a union town, Providence, and had two parents who were unionized teachers. But, as he noted, (without even a nod to the standards of the Newspaper Guild, from which he has benefited), “….I have never been a member of a union, and I viewed them with mild disdain.”