By the twenty-first century, the working class in America was different from what it had been even thirty years ago, and certainly different from what it had been 50 or 100 years before. Perhaps the most important change is that industrial zones (the most important being the Great Lakes region) lost their specific gravity in the national economy while at the same time industrial production decreased and the number of industrial workers declined. The decline of the role of the industrial working in the working class, not only factory workers but also miners, utility workers, construction, and transportation workers, weakened the economic and social power of workers. The objective decline of the working class was also accompanied by a subjective decline. The working class at the same time faced the enormous task of assimilating the large numbers of African-Americans, women, and immigrants into the workplace and into union organizations, a task that was often mishandled by unions. Tremendous efforts were necessary to create a new multi-ethnic and multi-cultural union identity, something achieved by only some organizations. The government and employer attack on unions from the late 1970s into the 1990s proved devastating to union organization and to union consciousness. When the attack came on in full force in the 1980s, union leaders had proven lacking in foresight, in skills, and in courage. Workers had always been suspicious of the pork-choppers and the pie-cards, that is, of the full-time union officials, but now by and large they simply had no faith in the union. Workers’ centers and other new forms of worker organization, while exciting experiments, remained marginal and small, and proved incapable of substituting for a real union movement. The organized American working class, the real militants, found themselves once again, as in the 1920s, reduced to a small band, deeply committed to the fight and waiting for an opening.