ABSTRACT
American trade unions have historically been adaptive institutions responding vigorously to changing circumstances. If sometimes rather belatedly, they have over the past 100 years transformed themselves from craft-centered organizations with guild-like characteristics to powerful enterprises for organizing massproduction and semiskilled workers into huge industrial unions. But now they seem to have stumbled. Faced with dramatic reductions in the proportion of workers who produce goods, trade-union leaders are confronted with the task of bringing a new generation of service-sector workers into their ranks. So far, the results have not been auspicious. Although the highest rate of growth is among service workers and some of the largest unions are in the service sector, privatesector trade-union membership has declined to 13 per cent of the labor force-its lowest level since the early 1930s.1 And public sympathy with trade unionism is at a low ebb.
