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THE past 30 years have been dismal ones for the labour movement. In the American private sector trade-union density (ie, the proportion of workers who belong to unions) has fallen from a third in 1979 to just 7% today. In Britain it has dropped from 44% to 15%. Nor is this just an Anglo-Saxon oddity: less than a fifth of workers in the OECD belong to unions.

There is one big exception to this story of decline, however: the public sector. In the Canadian public sector union density has increased from 12% in 1960 to more than 70% today. In America it has increased over the same period from 11% to 36% (see chart). There are now more American workers in unions in the public sector (7.6m) than in the private sector (7.1m), although the private sector employs five times as many people. Union density is now higher in the public sector than it was in the private sector in its glory days, in the 1950s.

This private-public shift has transformed the trade union movement. In the 1950s unions were solidly working class, dominated by men who had left school at 16 and leant left on economics but right on social issues. Today they are much more middle-class: more than a quarter of American unionists have college degrees, and even more have liberal views on social and environmental issues.

The shift has also created tension between the public and private sectors. The private sector is dominated by competition and turbulence. Performance-related pay is the norm, and redundancy commonplace. The public sector, by contrast, is a haven of security and stability. Many people have jobs for life and performance measures are rare. The result is a paradox: the typical public worker is better off than the people he is supposed to serve, and the gap has widened significantly over the past decade. In America, pay and benefits have grown twice as fast in the public sector as they have in the private sector.

Public-sector unions are some of the world’s most powerful interest groups. Many of them have large memberships and comparably large wallets: the American National Education Association, the main teachers’ union, has 3.2m members, an annual budget of over $300m and a vibrant tradition of political activism. But their influence goes much deeper. In many countries unions prop up the left. In Britain Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, owes his job to trade-union votes. In America Andy Stern, the head of the Service Employees International Union, was the most frequent guest at the White House in the first six months of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Public-sector unions enjoy advantages that their private-sector rivals only dream of. As providers of vital monopoly services, they can close down entire cities. Economists still debate exactly what impact public-sector unions have on pay. Evidence from the American Bureau of Labour Statistics support the conservative argument that they have used their power to extract a wage premium: public-sector workers earn, on average, a third more than their private-sector counterparts.

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One of the consequences of this can be seen starkly in Britain.  During the 1980's Thatcher managed to nudge Britain back towards some sort of free market capitalism and trade unions declined.  In the public sector union entrenchment continued.  In schools, the education system is run by equalitarian fanatics and British education has become a disgrace