Chapter 6: Workers Without a Church
One hundred and seventy million Americans go to work every day. They produce the value — every building, every meal, every road, every shipment, every line of code, every shift, every patient cared for, every truck driven. They are the country. And neither church has a pew for them.
The Democratic Party talks about unions. It rallies behind organized labor, marches on picket lines, champions collective bargaining. It’s a beautiful sermon. It speaks to roughly eleven percent of workers. The other eighty-nine percent — the 153 million who have no union card, no contract, no collective bargaining, and no organized voice at work — sit in the back of the sanctuary, ignored, while the clergy celebrates the congregation that showed up fifty years ago.
The Republican Party talks about “job creators.” It preaches the gospel of the entrepreneur, the small business owner, the risk-taker who builds empires and hires workers out of the goodness of the market’s invisible hand. It’s an equally beautiful sermon. It speaks to the employer class — roughly ten percent of the labor force — and to the mythology that makes the other ninety percent identify with their bosses instead of their coworkers. The gig worker driving for three apps simultaneously, the retail employee whose schedule changes on Thursday for Friday, the hospitality worker who hasn’t had a raise in four years — these people are not job creators. They are the people who do the jobs. And they’re unchurched.
Both parties like it that way. An unorganized workforce is a compliant workforce. A worker with no contract has no leverage. A worker with no union has no voice. A worker with no seat at the table is furniture — present, useful, and never consulted about the room’s design. The party establishments don’t mention the eighty-nine percent because the eighty-nine percent are the profit margin. They’re the difference between what workers produce and what workers take home. That difference — the wage share that dropped from two-thirds to one-half over the last fifty years — didn’t vanish. It was taken. And the two parties that don’t mention the eighty-nine percent are the same two parties that rewrote the laws to make the taking legal.
Consider the arithmetic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 10 percent of American wage and salary workers belong to a union — 14.7 million people. Another 1.8 million are covered by a union contract without being members, bringing the total represented to 16.5 million, or 11.2 percent of the workforce. That means roughly 153 million workers — ninety percent of the labor force — have no union, no contract, no collective bargaining, and no organized voice at work. In the private sector, the number is even starker: 94 percent of private-sector workers are non-union. The union membership rate in private industry is 5.9 percent. In finance, it’s 0.8 percent. In professional and technical services, it’s 1.3 percent. In food service, it’s 1.8 percent. These are not sectors on the margins. These are the sectors where most Americans work.
This is not because workers don’t want organization. Gallup has consistently found that half of non-union workers would vote for a union if given the chance. The reason they don’t have one is structural, not voluntary. The law says they can organize — and then the captured government doesn’t enforce it. You try to organize your coworkers and you get fired. The National Labor Relations Board takes two years to hear your case. By then, the organizing committee is scattered, the leader is unemployed, and the company has replaced everyone who was brave enough to stand up. The right exists on paper. The enforcement doesn’t exist at all. And the two parties that write the laws — that control the appointees who run the NLRB, that set the budgets that fund enforcement — are the same two parties that serve the employers who benefit from the gap.
The wage share tells you what the gap costs. Union members had median weekly earnings of $1,404 in 2025. Non-union workers earned $1,174 — 84 percent of what union members earn. That’s a $230 weekly difference. That’s $12,000 a year. Twelve thousand dollars: the difference between having a contract and not having one, between having a seat at the table and being the table. Multiply that by 153 million workers, and you begin to see the scale of the transfer — the wage share that was cut from two-thirds to one-half, wearing the face of everyday life.
And what does that everyday life look like? You work the same hours your grandparents did, but you can’t afford a house on one paycheck. They bought at 3.2 times their income. You face 5.3 times yours. You save like you’re supposed to, but you can’t cover a $1,000 emergency. You cut expenses, but your debt grows anyway — credit cards, medical bills, payday loans, the math of insufficient income, not insufficient discipline. You contribute to your 401(k) like the ads say, but retirement keeps moving further away. They replaced the pension with the 401(k), then hollowed out the wages that were supposed to fund it. You budget for groceries, but you still choose between items at the register. You maintain what you own, but one repair breaks you — the car, the roof, the tooth. You want your kids to have what you had, but you can’t give it to them. You put up with a bad boss, a toxic shift, a schedule that wrecks your family — because you can’t afford to walk away. You love your aging parents, but you’re choosing between your kids’ needs and your parents’ dignity. You told your kids to work hard and they did, but they’re signing loan documents at eighteen anyway. You planned to retire like your grandparents did, but now you expect to work until you can’t.
These are not different problems. They are the same problem — the wage share was cut from two-thirds to half — wearing different faces. You produced the value. The payoff didn’t arrive. Every item on that list is what the stolen wage share looks like in your daily life. And every item on that list is something neither party mentions, because mentioning it would require explaining who took it and how — and the explanation indicts both churches.
The Democratic Church preaches solidarity, but its congregation is shrinking. Union membership has been declining for fifty years — from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 10 percent today, from 24 percent in the private sector to 5.9 percent. The party’s labor policy is like a church that keeps holding services for a congregation that already left. It speaks the language of organizing, but it doesn’t fund the organizers. It champions the right to collective bargaining, but it doesn’t enforce the law that makes it possible. It holds the NLRB hearings in a building named after a president who broke the air traffic controllers’ strike. The sermon is stirring. The pews are empty.
The Republican Church preaches opportunity, but its congregation is imaginary. The “job creators” it celebrates are the employers who’ve captured the wage share — the same class that lobbied for the right-to-work laws, fought the minimum wage increases, replaced pensions with 401(k)s, and classified gig workers as contractors to strip them of every protection the labor movement won. The Republican platform promises economic freedom, but the freedom it delivers is the freedom of the employer to pay you less, schedule you unpredictably, classify you as a contractor, and fire you for organizing. The church calls it liberty. The congregation calls it survival.
Neither church serves the worker who shows up every day and takes home half of what they produce. That worker is the unchurched majority — 153 million people with no organization, no contract, and no party that speaks their name. They outnumber the members of either party by more than two to one. They outnumber the 30,000 mega-donors who fund the capture by roughly 5,700 to 1. They outnumber the 535 members of Congress by 318,000 to 1. They even outnumber the voters who actually decide congressional elections — because in the districts that matter, the margins are measured in thousands, not millions.
Thirty thousand against 170 million. That’s not a contest. That’s a rounding error. The only reason the 30,000 win is that the 170 million don’t vote like 170 million. They vote like 80 million — or 60 million — or they don’t vote at all. The capture doesn’t need a majority. It needs a majority that doesn’t show up. And for forty years, that’s exactly what it’s had.
The unchurched worker doesn’t need a new church. They need disestablishment — the end of the state’s power to entrench two organizations that serve everyone except them. The Democratic Party won’t organize the 89 percent because the 89 percent’s wage share is the donor class’s profit margin. The Republican Party won’t organize the 89 percent because the 89 percent’s leverage is the employer class’s cost structure. Both parties serve the people who pay for campaigns, not the people who cast ballots. The worker who shows up, produces the value, and takes home half is the commodity both churches trade — their votes harvested to legitimize a Congress that works for someone else.
The parallel to religious establishment is exact. In colonial Virginia, the Anglican Church was the established church — funded by taxes levied on everyone, including Baptists, Presbyterians, and Quakers who had their own congregations. You paid for a church you didn’t attend, and if you wanted civic participation, you went through the established church to get it. Today, you pay for party primaries with your tax dollars — including the closed primaries that exclude you if you didn’t register with the right congregation. You want a candidate who represents your economic interests? You have to pick one of the two the party machine pre-approved. The Money Primary selected them before you arrived. Your vote ratifies a choice someone else made.
Workers without a church aren’t irreligious. They believe in work. They believe in the deal — the one where you show up, produce the value, and take home enough to live with dignity. They still believe in it because they’re still showing up. They’re still producing the value. They’re still doing everything right. The deal didn’t hold — not because they broke it, but because the two churches rewrote it without their signature. The wage share that covered two-thirds of production when their grandparents worked now covers half. The missing third didn’t vanish. It was taken by the employers who fund both parties, written into law by the Congress that serves those employers, and enforced by the party machine that makes sure no candidate who would change it ever reaches the ballot.
The 153 million are not a special interest. They are not a constituency. They are not a voting bloc. They are the country. Everyone who works for a living is already in the majority. They don’t need to build one. They need to act like one. And the first step toward acting like a majority is recognizing that the two churches that claim to represent them — that claim the ballot, the primaries, the committee assignments, the legislative agenda, and the campaign finance pipeline — represent someone else entirely.
Disestablishment doesn’t ban parties any more than the First Amendment banned religion. People will always organize around shared views — that’s freedom. But the state doesn’t have to entrench two organizations over all others, give them the ballot, the primaries, the committee assignments, and the campaign finance pipeline. The churches can keep their congregations voluntarily. They just lose the power of the state — the power to exclude 153 million workers from the conversation, to pre-select both candidates before the voters arrive, and to enforce a binary that serves the donors, not the workers.
Workers without a church don’t need a new sermon. They need a seat at the table — the one where decisions about their wages, their healthcare, their kids’ schools, and their community’s future are made right now by corporate lobbyists, party bosses, and billionaires. They earned that seat. It’s not being saved for them. And the two parties that control the chairs aren’t offering them one.
In the next chapter, we’ll meet the faithful who still sit in the pews — the 55 percent who still identify with a party but know in their gut that their church has abandoned them. They’re not heretics yet. They’re not apostates. They’re congregants who keep showing up because leaving feels impossible. The binary trap is the church door: you’re either in or you’re out, and out means you don’t matter. Their doubt is the most dangerous thing the party machine faces — because doubt is the first step toward disestablishment.
