It’s sad to see the anemic state of organized labor in this country today. Worse, it kills me to admit that, to a large degree, the erosion of the labor movement is the fault of the unions themselves. Their refusal or inability to change with the times, to keep the movement relevant in the face of globalization and the digital conversion — the so-called new economy — has been disastrous.

Disastrous, I might add, for union members and nonunion workers alike.

Just as the Democratic Party has largely ceded the battlefield to Republican stridency in recent years, so, too, has organized labor wilted before an economy where the unrestrained market rules all. The result is unsurprising: The rich get richer, the shareholder is valued more than the employee, jobs are eliminated in the name of bottom-line efficiency (remember when they called firing people “right-sizing”?) and the gulf between the rich and the working class grows wider every year.

You see this libertarian ethos everywhere, but nowhere more clearly than in the technology sector, where the number of union jobs can be counted on one hand. Tech is the Wild West as far as the job market goes and the robber barons on top of the pile aim to keep it that way. They’ll offshore your job to save a few bucks or lay you off at the first sign of a slump, but they’re the first to scream, “You’re stifling innovation!” at any attempt to control the industry or provide job security for the people who do the actual work.

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/theluddite/0,70858-0.html?tw=rss.index