With slogans like "America Runs On Dunkin'," it's safe to say that Americans pride themselves on being a caffeine-driven, sleep-deprived, overworked country. 

And that's nothing new, but today's workdays are nothing like the workdays of the late-18th and early-20th centuries.

With the rise of industrialism, came the rise of industrial giants, but with a growing crew of top dog big money-makers, came an even larger crew of underdog working folks. These were the people working ten hours a day in sweatshops and living like paupers in crummy tenements.

Talk about two different ends of the spectrum.

The underdogs' contribution to any budding economy can't be overlooked. These business tycoons knew it, and the federal government knew it. And what the big guys on top might not have bet on was the fact that these underdogs would unite and stand up against big business. Working ridiculous hours for very little pay in often dangerous circumstances can only be tolerated for so long. Working conditions were improving, as were wages, but compared to today, you'd be appalled. 

Flipping burgers looks a whole lot better than 12-hour days at the steel mill. Trust us.

Like that eight-hour workday? Unions. Like that national holiday where we get a day off from work and school? Unions. Like those well-marked, unlocked exit doors preventing you from burning alive at your workplace? Unions. (Yes, that really happened.)

Over the course of more than a century, the labor movement has played a profound role—for better or worse—in shaping how Americans live and work. The influence of unions has waxed and waned during a long and sometimes bloody struggle for power in the workplace.

Despite the many benefits to labor unions, the labor movement's status has always been precarious due to Americans' love-hate attitude toward organized labor. Today, just like a century ago, some citizens passionately believe that unions are crucial bulwarks of freedom, while others feel just as strongly that they are at best, an anachronism, and at worst, an obstacle to progress.

A few fun facts:

• Unions have been growing smaller and less powerful for 40 years.
• But unions are still very important in certain areas like the auto industry, public education, print journalism, and politics.
• Unions hope that proposed changes to labor law to allow card-check voting will lead to resurgence. Many businesses hope it doesn't.

Do unions still matter? Unions have now been shrinking, in terms of both membership and power, more or less steadily for some 50 years. Today, only about one out of every eight American workers belongs to a union. And if you don't count government employees, that figure drops even lower, to about one in twelve.

With unions in the 21st century arguably having less influence on American society than they have at any time since the 1920s, are they now irrelevant? Are they just anachronistic relics of the distant past, about as important to shaping our future as the telegraph or the horse-drawn buggy? 

Well, not quite. 

Unions Still Matter At General Motors

The Detroit automotive giant—which was, for much of the 20th century, the world's largest corporation, stood on the brink of bankruptcy in the wake of the 2008 recession and was bailed out by the government.

And at GM, if not throughout society in general, unions remain strong. Indeed, that's a big part of GM's problem. The company's workers are nearly all members of the United Auto Workers union and the contracts negotiated between GM and the UAW—especially those, often negotiated decades ago, in which GM promised to pay healthy pensions and healthcare benefits to hundreds of thousands of retirees—tend to impose massive costs that the company cannot afford to pay in the 21st century.

GM, operating on much the same union-labor model as it did back in the 1950s, simply can't compete with other auto companies that don't have to bear the costs of paying union wages and especially benefits. GM's unionized workers—and retirees—are reluctant to give up what they won at the bargaining table in the past, but also recognize that they must make some concessions or GM will simply cease to exist, likely taking the union down along with it. 

Can the UAW and GM forge some kind of productive new partnership, allowing the company to become competitive again in the 21st century? Or will the UAW insist on full enforcement of its existing contracts, ensuring that GM will crash into oblivion? 

The future of the American auto industry largely depends on how the union chooses to play its cards.

Unions Still Matter In Classrooms

While unionization of workers in the private sector has long been in decline, the opposite is true for public employees. 

In recent decades, unionization of government workers—including schoolteachers—has actually increased. Today the teachers' unions wield great power—for good or ill—over the American educational system. 

Nearly everyone agrees that American public schools need improvement. Whether meaningful reforms will take place depends largely upon how the teachers' unions choose to react. Will they use their power to push for much-needed improvement in American education, making it easier for good teachers to succeed? Or will they focus narrowly on enforcing sometimes-onerous work rules and tenure hierarchies, fighting potentially beneficial changes in order to protect their own self-interest?

The future of our education system depends on how the unions choose to use their power.

Unions Still Matter In the Country's Newsrooms

The rise of the internet at the beginning of the 21st century wrecked the business model that had long sustained American newspapers. 

Today, print journalism in this country has fallen dramatically, as most newspapers intially suffered horrific losses, but have attempted to claw their way back with the internet. Major dailies like Denver's 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News have ceased to exist, with dozens of others—the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Christian Science Monitor—teetering on the brink.

The American newspaper—as we know it anyway—may soon go out of business. Most newspapers have highly unionized work forces, from reporters to printers to delivery truck drivers. The papers simply no longer have the revenues needed to sustain their large, well-paid unionized labor forces. 

As cutbacks become inevitable, the papers' viability hinges, in part, upon how the unions respond. Will they insist upon rigid adherence to the work rules stipulated in their contracts—work rules which often stifle managers' efforts to become more flexible and efficient—or will they adjust to the difficult new circumstances to help the newspapers survive? 

Unions Still Matter In Our Nation's Politics

Unions provide the backbone—in terms of both financial contributions and volunteer manpower—for the Democratic Party. In 2008, they played a major role in electing Barack Obama to the White House and enlarging Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, with the hopes that their Democratic allies would deliver labor-friendly policies. 

Whether a re-unionization of the American workforce would be a good thing or a bad thing in the 21st century is highly debatable. There is no question, though, that it would represent a dramatic change from recent decades. 

So, in American politics, unions still matter—maybe more than most of us yet realize. Will they be part of the solution to our troubles, or part of the problem? What does the history of unions in America tell us about labor's role in the current downturn? 

Welp, we're not fortune-tellers here at Shmoop, but maybe, we can let the past be our guide.