Striking Wal-Mart workers aren't just fighting their employer. They're fighting a whole system.

[FarCenter]

15. Union membership, 2011

In 2011, the union membership rate—the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union—was 11.8 percent, essentially unchanged from 11.9 percent in 2010. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.8 million, also showed little movement over the year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers.

In 2011, 7.6 million employees in the public sector belonged to a union, compared with 7.2 million union workers in the private sector. The union membership rate for public-sector workers (37.0 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private-sector workers (6.9 percent).

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2012/ted_20120130.htm

Unions represent a small special interest group, primarily public sector workers and a tiny minority of workers in older, industrial and mostly dying businesses.