But semiprofessional workers of all sorts are currently experiencing new levels of uncertainty. At the same time that the baby-boom generation is entering mid-career, corporations have embarked on an unprecedented and often ruthless restructuring of their white-collar and management staffs. . . . The tension is increased by the fact that many semiprofessionals are at the center of the most dynamic and productive parts of the economy. These are "knowledge workers," who are frequently portrayed as the saviors of American competitiveness (Heckscher, 1988, p. 240).
When high-tech workers entered the workforce, displacing unionized manual-labor workers, they did so with little regard for the displacement. Meanwhile, the unions greeted them with hostility. What should have happened is that the unions should have courted and organized the knowledge workers, to forestall precisely the situation described above. It did not happen, even though high-tech workers are in the psychological condition that motivated the organization of industrial workers in the US a century ago.
The high-tech scenario, meanwhile, does not account entirely for the decline of union membership in the basic industries. Management decisions to take manufacturing operations offshore and thereby take advantage of lower labor costs have also contributed to the phenomenon. Thus for various reasons the membership of unionized industries has declined in the U.S.
In recent years, the bulk of hard data on the initiatives that labor and management have taken to improve their respective positions in industrial relations has been in the category of measurement of worker dissatisfaction. Heckscher tracks this in various ways, concluding that "more than three-quarters of the work force [blue- and white-collar alike] is undergoing significant disruption of expectations" (Heckscher, 1988, p. 241). In this regard, Harrison and Bluestone (1988) describe the 1980s phenomenon of a ...