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.During her time in office, Thatcher eliminated many of the keyachievements of the labor movement, including the requirementthat British companies hire only union members.Since then, secretvotes must be held before strikes, sharply reducing the clout of 198 GABOR STEINGARTunion leaders.Nowadays standard wage scales exist only in publicservice.Since labor s most combative days, the country s unionshave lost close to half their members, an exodus of six million peo-ple.Despite being a Social Democrat, former prime minister TonyBlair did not even attempt to revive the union movement.The retreat of unions was not to remain a British phenomenon.Nowadays Italy s labor organizations are little more than clubs ofretirees.More than 50 percent of the members of the moderate andthe socialist union are retired.France s labor unions seem happiestwhen quarreling with one another.In a population of 60 million,the membership of all labor organizations combined amounts toonly two million, predominantly in the public sector.Unions haveall but disappeared from the French private sector, where 95 per-cent of employees are not members of any organized labor group.The declining support of workers for organized labor in theUnited States led to a split in the umbrella organization of Ameri-can unions in the fall of 2005.A few days after the organization s50-year anniversary, two top unions representing four million mem-bers split off from the American Federation of Labor /Congress ofIndustrial Organizations (AFL/CIO).They accused the organiza-tion s leadership, especially its 72-year-old president, John Sweeney,of having failed to stem the decline of unions.The renegade unionsformed a federation they called Change to Win, but in reality themove, by dividing labor, has only weakened the trade union move-ment.A more apt motto would be Change to Die. But this death should be kept a secret for as long as possible.This is something on which, for once, union bosses and corporateleaders can agree.The unions are embarrassed by their own pow-erlessness, while employers fear that singing a requiem couldspark a desire for the rebirth of strong unions.The Emergence of a New UnderclassMembers of today s underclass are poorer than their predecessorswere at the beginning of the industrial age, despite the fact that THE WAR FOR WEALTH 199they enjoy a higher standard of living.They are not starving, havea roof over their heads, are not afflicted by disease, and even havesignificantly more money in the bank.In every country of theWest they are both citizens and customers of the welfare state,even when its benefits are no longer as abundant as they oncewere.In the early days, the poor slept in homeless shelters or maledormitories.They ate their meals in soup kitchens, sometimes inthe open air.The fortunes of the elderly depended on the gen-erosity of the young or religious charities.Nevertheless, workers of days gone by had many things thattoday s poor lack: a uniform and generally valid concept of theenemy, class consciousness, true opponents, and, in many cases,even a well-developed cultural life.They sang songs, chanted slo-gans, established organizations, and worshiped the great theoristsof the day, even if they never quite understood what they weretalking about.They were often able to choose among politicalgroups that vied for their approval.Looking back on the past, itis by no means an exaggeration to declare yesterday s poor thesubjects of history.But poor people today are little more than vic-tims of circumstance.Their predecessors stood on the perimeterof society, but today s poor have been excluded entirely.We now know a great deal about the members of today s lowerclasses, even though they are a largely silent group.They chooseto remain inconspicuous, burrowing ever more deeply into theirghettoes, hotly pursued by scores of sociologists.Their livinghabits have been researched like those of wild rabbits.We havedeveloped a carefully mapped out typology that enables us to bet-ter identify these strangers in our own countries.This is why we know that today s underclass people have moremoney than the workers of past generations.They also exhibitclear symptoms of intellectual decay.The new underclass mem-bers spend half of their day watching television, have a copious andhigh-fat diet, and often are heavy smokers and drinkers.They havemany children but tend to lack a stable family life
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