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Modern working conditions are also an important factor. Union strength builds largely on discontent; today's worker, with his high wages and fringe benefits, finds less and less to be discontented about. He works, says A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Kassalow, "in one of these clean, modern, well-run factories [that] do not strike with the same force that hit the young farmer who came up to the dirty tire plants of Akron or the hot, badly ventilated assembly lines of Detroit, 15, 20, 25 years ago." Union leaders realize that they have come a long way since then. Says Jerry Holleman, president of the Texas A.F.L.-C.I.O. council: "We have made substantial gains in the past few years and are at a point where we do not push as hard as we did."
Mass production unions have been deeply affected by the fact that the unskilled worker, once the core of their power, has become the vanishing American. Highly mechanized plants have forced workers to develop new skills; the new class of skilled labor has fractured the monolithic front that the mass-production unions once presented to management. To hold the allegiance of skilled workers, unions are revising their organization. The U.A.W. recently amended its constitution to allow skilled workers to veto contract clauses that affect them, took great pains in last summer's contract negotiations to win an extra 8¢ an hour for them. All of these trends, says the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Economic Review, "are producing a virtual revolution in industrial life. These changes are bound to place unions in a less friendly environment." If their membership continues to drop in relation to the total work force, unions may well find that they can count on less public sympathy for strikes, less power at the polls, and more demands for laws to prevent fewer and fewer workers from throwing more and more out of work.