Public-sector workers: the new vanguard?

This article discusses the shift in union members to a more white-collar, highly educated and female composition made up of employees from the public-sector who work in bureaucratic environments and are sheltered from market-forces; a comparison between private- and public-sector union memberships among industrialized countries internationally is given, all of which had a larger proportion of public-sector members over private-sector members. Manual labor is a little more than a quarter of the work-force, while services orientated employment has increase; this may be a cause for the decline of the manufacturing industry's hegemony over labor relations and the rise in public-sector union memberships.