As for the rest of the country–well, have you come across anyone who wasn’t rooting for the flight attendants? Such nice, cheery rebels! By contrast, management appeared Dickensian. Robert Crandall, a perfect road-company Uriah Heep, had lost his airline a lot of money by cutting fares unduly and was trying to make some of it back by squeezing the workers. His arm twisted by the president, and by the union’s steadfastness, he was reduced to complaining about the specter of arbitration, where the tendency–cruel fate!–was to “split the difference.” Isn’t it interesting how few of the usual suspects rose to his defense? Not even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page could rouse itself to blast the president for jumping into a labor-management spat in a manner Ronald Reagan or George Bush would have found appalling.

The flight attendants did Brother Kirkland a favor. They breathed some life into his wispy movement. They were a reminder that the face of labor doesn’t always have wattles and burst capillaries, that the battles aren’t always rearguard, NAFTA-like campaigns to rescue the past. Of course, there once was a time when organized labor served a useful purpose in this country. In fact, an argument can be made that labor played a crucial role in creating the broad, deep, American middle class that emerged after World War II (and now seems to be receding).

The argument goes like this: the Great Depression of the 1930s wasn’t only caused by Messrs. Smoot and Hawley, and their high tariffs. It was also caused, in part, by the low wages of the 1920s. “Wages didn’t keep pace with productivity,” says Stephen Marglin, the Harvard economist. Workers didn’t have the money to buy many of the new products they were making. The union-organizing drives of the 1930s and ’40s helped rectify that. The United Auto Workers went so far as to demand a direct link between wages and productivity, which became a model for many other basic industries. By the 1950s, the workers had the money to create the “aggregate demand” that caused the consumer economy to explode; the more they were paid, the more they bought.

This was a felicitous state of affairs. Everyone did well for a while–from 1947 to 1973, to be precise. What happened then? A lot of little things, and one big thing. The big thing was the law of supply and demand: a global market developed in unskilled labor. The supply of blue-collar workers increased exponentially, and their value decreased accordingly. Companies could move to Memphis, Mexico or Malaysia and buy labor cheaper. Soon, most didn’t even have to go that far: all they had to do was hint they might. Labor’s leverage was lost (except in the public sector, where there was no competition–New York couldn’t move its government to Malaysia). Management also discovered–as Thomas Geoghegan points out in his engaging book, “Which Side Are You On?”–that labor law in America didn’t have teeth. Unions could be snapped like twigs and, starting in the ’70s, they were.

Labor didn’t do much to help itself, to say the least. it grew fat, stupid, corrupt, bureaucratic; it never had been very democratic. The unions lost touch, became dinosaurs, tried to preserve standardized, assembly-line contracts in a fluid, customized, hard-wired world. By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had firmly re-established the entrepreneur as the great American hero, and rightly so. Entrepreneurs take risks. They create jobs. They should be rewarded handsomely for that. But they also, sometimes, mistreat the help. There is a need for a countervailing force, if for no other reason than to make sure entrepreneurs pay their workers enough to buy the products other companies are producing. The waning of organized labor has had this effect: wages are no longer keeping pace with productivity, just like the 1920s. “You ever wonder why consumer confidence is staying so low, even though the economy is beginning to pick up again?” Geoghegan asks. “You think maybe it could have something to do with the lack of job security, pensions, health insurance? If everyone is at a Kmartwage level, where do you get your confident consumers?”

You may not, ever again, have a country where a single semiskilled factory worker can comfortably support a family. The downward pressure on wages seems global, irreversible. But if labor is to have any future–and it’s an uphill climb–it may have to change its focus, from the past to the future, from preserving existing jobs to helping create new ones. Its next role may be to infiltrate, cooperate; to seduce management away from its worst excesses–to steer corporate resources toward long-term development (and away from short-term gain); to encourage its members continually to improve themselves, to innovate, to excel. Labor will have to become more flexible. jobs will appear and disappear like soap bubbles; work rules will have to come and go as easily. Some workers may be paid more than others. Seniority may not mean as much. In the end, the movement’s best hope may lie in its initial appeal: building floors–minimum standards for wages, health care, physical safety on the job-rather than ceilings. Each worker should be free to raise the roof beams as high as he or she can.