In the past forty years, unionized industrial capitalism has declined in the United States and the Western world at large. The rise of neoliberalism is concurrent with a shift from factory and agricultural labor to service work, such as retail, customer ser vice, and fast food. While in 1955 a significant 28 percent of the workforce was unionized, in 2011 only 11 percent of Americans held union jobs. Real wages have stagnated since the 1980s. Large corporations have moved many manufacturing jobs overseas, and replaced other positions with automated machinery. In this environment, a worker trained for repetitive tasks, manual labor, and Pavlovian-style responses is at a disadvantage. A different set of skills is needed to succeed in a neoliberal environment, both as a worker and consumer.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 35