If you listen to the breathless proclamations of the business press, everything in the US economy has changed. The era of stable employment and benefits is over. We’re awaiting the coming freelancer majority, in which we all cobble together incomes from whatever temporary gigs we can get our hands on. Get used to it.

Along with the end of stable work comes the end of worker organizing. Even many in the progressive press have bought into the idea that huge swaths of the twenty-first-century economy can’t be organized.

The few unionized workers left should hold on for as long as they can, so the thinking goes, but they’re fighting a losing battle, clinging to an outdated model of worker empowerment that has little relevance in the new 1099 economy.