The answer to Dr Alf’s question is ‘yes’. Let me restate the question for convenience:
Is there still a place for organized labor in the twenty-first century, viz. trade-unions or are we witnessing their slow demise?
There will be less labor needed as automation, robotics, expert systems, AI, cybernetics take over and eventually implanted chips in people will decimate the higher education sector and do away with the need for professors, middle-class professionals and call center workers, manual workers and socio-economic groups C1, C2, D and E.
Specialist craft workers, innovators and scientists will be needed along with courtroom lawyers, detectives and medical specialists working on afflictions not known to expert systems.
Practically everyone else, including soldiers who are already being replaced by robots, will be surplus to requirements for any form of feudal or oligarchical society.
A modern market driven economy, like the one we now have, requires people to be in work with sufficient purchasing power to be markets and to pay taxes.
We are evolving into a society which is more intrusive, more controlled and which has not yet come to grips with these issues and one in which the present politicians and elite have no wish to discuss openly.
There will be more part time working during the interim period and living standards for most people will fall as Trades Unions become obsolete and even more irrelevant than they are today.
Dr Alf's Blog 