The state and labor in modern America

Abstract One of the distinctive developments of the postwar era in the United States has been the relative decline in the economic significance of labor unions. Melvyn Dubofsky offers the hypothesis that this has resulted from a shift in public policy that represents a return to pre‐New Deal notions of the proper relationship between government and unions. But a much more likely explanation lies in the changing nature of American life. Increases in education and advances in transportation and communications have weakened greatly the traditional worker‐versus‐capitalist paradigm that is at the core of Dubofsky's thinking. As this has happened, labor unions have increasingly become relics of a previous age.