T he saying around Everett in 1916 was that you could tell shingle weavers by their missing fingers, lost regularly to the unguarded saws of the town's mills. You might also have been able to tell them by their "cedar asthma," contracted from the dust that blew upward from those same saws and into countless lungs, some of which stopped working as a result.

The shingle weavers were on strike that year, a consequence of both their difficult situation and a larger boom in organizing in the state's early industries. Though they had mixed feelings about it, they were supported by the Industrial Workers of the World—known commonly as the Wobblies, committed to overthrowing the employing class—who had taken up the shingle weavers' cause in part as a means of promoting their own, more radical agenda. Throughout the summer and fall, teams of Wobblies came to Everett to engage in free-speech demonstrations and were arrested and beaten by the local police—once with clubs and whips. By November, incensed at the rough treatment of their union brothers, some 300 Wobblies decided to board boats in Seattle and head for Everett. They are said to have sung a battle cry called "Hold the Fort" along the way: "We meet today in freedom's cause and raise our voices high/We'll join our hands in union strong to battle or to die/Hold the fort, for we are coming, union us be strong/Side by side we'll battle onward, victory will come."

The Verona, the first boat of Wobblies to arrive, was met at the Everett waterfront by the Snohomish County sheriff and a couple hundred deputized citizens. "Who is your leader?" the sheriff shouted, according to historical accounts. "We are all leaders!" the Wobblies shouted back. Someone opened fire, and then everyone opened fire. When it was all over, two sheriff's deputies and at least five Wobblies—the official number, though the actual number might have been as high as a dozen—were dead. Several union bodies floated in Port Gardner Bay, other union bodies (74 of them) were taken to jail, and the Everett Massacre, as it was called, entered into state union lore, alongside numerous other clashes and strikes and organizing drives that make up Washington State's deep union history.

It's a history that includes just about every single line of bodily labor that our region has ever seen: the cigar makers, the brewers, the maltsters, the newsboys, the cooks, the barbers, the waiters, the waitresses, the meatpackers, the X-ray technicians, the nurses, the truck drivers, the airplane makers. That history has grown increasingly remote, though. In recent decades, the businesses that defined the new Seattle economy—Starbucks, Amazon, McCaw Cellular, Microsoft, the biotech companies of South Lake Union, the Google branches in Fremont and Kirkland—have been able to grow huge sums of money out of the labor of nonunionized workforces. In addition to non-union-produced lattes and non-union-produced web browsers, a major product of this new Seattle is an increased number of citizens who have only an abstract awareness that this is, or used to be, a union town.

I n January of 2000, I returned to Seattle from college and walked straight into a union. That year, union membership in Washington State stood at 18.5 percent of the workforce, way down from the 44.5 percent of the workforce that was unionized in the mid-1960s. The drop is in keeping with a long, nationwide decline in union membership—a trend that now has union leaders lobbying intensely for the labor-friendly Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress to pass legislation that would make it easier for American workers to form unions. I had been hired on at the Seattle Times as a "three-year resident," essentially a long-term paid intern. Like most of the newspaper's staff then and now, residents at the Times were members of the local branch of the Communications Workers of America, a group that traces back to a federation formed by telephone operators in 1947.

Theoretically, I had the option of declining a union membership at the Times. But I had no problem with being in the union. Part of my job would be working with older reporters and copy editors, almost all of them proud union veterans. To not join their project of bargaining collectively for better wages and benefits would be a slap in the face to them. Plus, I liked the union-negotiated salary I'd be earning: about $25,000 the first year if all went well.

Ideology, in other words, had little to do with my becoming a Communications Worker of America. Joining was in line with my politics, sure, but the greater motivator was that it just seemed to be what was done in the place where I had landed. Over the course of that year, I paid $320.32 in dues to my local branch, the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. This money was deducted straight from my paychecks, just like federal income tax and Social Security payments. By November, the dot-com bubble had burst, and this union membership that I'd figured would probably be of neutral-to-no consequence led me into tense meetings at the Seattle Labor Temple on First Avenue (a place I'd previously never known existed), a raucous strike vote (I voted in favor), and then, finally, a 49-day stint on the picket line.

The issues were standard and somewhat timeless, the same basic complaints that have motivated union workers in Seattle ever since the Seattle General Strike of 1919—the first mass civic work stoppage in U.S. history—idled the streetcars, raised the ire of vigilantes who went out looking to round up "reds," and caused then-mayor Ole Hanson to pronounce a defining contest between "Americanism" and "bolshevism" (the former, it turned out, won). In 2000, we at the Times wanted essentially what the shipyard workers who triggered the general strike wanted back in 1919: better wages and benefits, a larger share in the profits our employers were earning. By the time we began passing out picket signs, I'd come to value my labor—and the notion of solidarity—a bit more highly than when I signed on, and agreed with the union's demands: a $3- to $4-an-hour wage increase over a three-year period, plus an end to a two-tier pay system in which suburban reporters received less money than downtown reporters. There were some additional demands concerning health-care and retirement plans, but as a young and healthy person I paid virtually no attention to this.

I was 23. In the back of my car, I carried a red, white, and black "On Strike" sign affixed to a wooden stake. I drove it around far more than I held it aloft. Part of me didn't like being involved in a large, top-down, slogan-chanting group—a common reaction among reporters, who tend to be suspicious, cynical, hard-to-herd types. But another part of me was excited about being involved in something bigger than myself. It felt dangerous and powerful and table-turning. One day the rumor mill reported that a striker had shouted "scab!" at Times publisher Frank Blethen—and maybe even spit on him—as he was crossing the picket line. Polite Seattle types were aghast; union-forever types felt emboldened. The staff of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, also part of the newspaper guild, was on strike with us, making parallel demands of their newspaper's owner, the Hearst Corporation. All told, we were more than 800 people passing around union placards, temporary-job tips, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and bargaining-session gossip.

What we had launched was, as the New York Times noted, "the first newspaper strike in this heavily unionized town in 47 years." What none of us realized then was that the industry we were demanding more from was on the verge of a huge change that would make our strike look, in retrospect, poorly timed and even more poorly executed. Neither did we have a clear-eyed view of the long change that Seattle itself was undergoing. True, relative to the rest of the country, this region is still heavily unionized; a 2008 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics placed Washington State fourth in the nation in terms of union density. But it's nothing like it used to be. Today's nonunion programmers, espresso makers, and lab-coated gene manipulators didn't—and would never—shut down the city in solidarity with striking newspaper workers (or striking Boeing employees, for that matter) in the way that Seattle's trade unions collectively shut down a far less high-tech version of this city in 1919 out of solidarity with striking shipyard workers.

T here's no way I came out ahead financially on the Seattle newspaper strike. Over those 49 days, I lost about a month and a half's worth of wages from the Times: roughly $3,000. During the same period, I received $2,000 in strike pay from the newspaper guild and roughly $500 from other odd jobs. Net loss: $500.

Plus, when the strike was settled, the wage increase we'd "won" was exactly the same as what the Seattle Times Company had been offering us before the strike: $3.30 an hour over six years (instead of our demanded $3 to $4 an hour over three years). A lot of pain for the same, slow gain. The two-tier pay system was eliminated as a result of the strike, and the amount the company paid toward health- insurance premiums went up from 66 percent to 75 percent—outcomes the union described as a "victory." But for a healthy young city resident like me, those gains were of little consequence. I was certainly happy for those helped by what we'd all "won," and I was grateful for the time I'd spent standing around the burn barrel and arguing in the union hall with people I'd previously known only in an on-the-job context. But the atmosphere at the Times after the strike was strained and unpleasant; I'd lost a work environment that I hadn't realized was exceptionally nice. Over the next year and a half, I paid $671.46 in union dues (further increasing my net financial loss from striking), and after a series of discouraging events that have since been explained to me as a consequence of my enthusiastic work for the strike paper, the Seattle Union Record, I decided to try a different way of doing journalism, and I quit.

A union, I learned on the picket line, can be a powerful thing. But it is not an inherently good thing, as some of the standard rhetoric on the left often suggests, and a union strike must be understood as a radical proposition—as radical as the idea of confronting an armed sheriff's posse on the Everett waterfront or shutting down the entire city of Seattle or picketing the Boeing plant after World War II. To launch a successful strike, workers must cede their individualism and commit to a radical form of collective disruption, the act of shutting down their employer's means of production. They must also have broad support. They cannot expect to win otherwise. The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild had among its striking members the white-collar journalists, advertising salespeople, page designers, and circulation workers of the Times and P-I. It did not, however, have the blue-collar printers and delivery people. Those delivery drivers were Teamsters, and most of them declined to strike with the newspaper guild. Hence the papers got printed and delivered, and their increased wire copy and decreased original content and nonunion temporary staffing didn't matter one bit. Word was that people actually called the Times newsroom during the strike to say they appreciated having thinner papers and fewer stories; it made them feel less overwhelmed.

This was humbling. And it taught me that we had not only overvalued our labor as journalists but had also overestimated the depth of pro-union feeling in this supposedly pro-union town. We'd missed the actual change beneath the window dressing of standard Seattle sentiment. Sure, certain city officials declined to give interviews to nonunion reporters during the strike, and some people canceled their subscriptions (including my parents, who dropped the Times in protest of Blethen's adversarial posture toward his strikers). But one would assume that in "heavily unionized" Seattle, newspapers with picketing employees wouldn't have been able to find a person in town who wanted their product anymore—even if most of the Teamsters were still willing to drive it around—and that this would have forced management to make concessions. Not so. The union was reluctant to even suggest people cancel delivery, and the vast majority of subscribers stayed.

Seattle's dailies went almost straight from the strike into the downward spiral of lost revenue and increased internet competition that last month claimed the 146-year-old print edition of the P-I. This same spiral currently threatens bankruptcy (or worse) for the drastically downsized Times, now staffed at a fraction of its prestrike levels. Along the way, the pages of the two shrinking newspapers chronicled the changing union landscape. In 2001, Boeing moved its headquarters out of town, saying it was looking for a "business-friendly environment." Production plants remain in the area, and so does the tradition of aerospace-worker strikes, but things are different. A Boeing machinist strike in the fall of 2008, which ended up coinciding with the Wall Street collapse and widespread recognition of the current recession, had mixed results and took 52 days to resolve. About a third of the Weyerhaeuser workforce is unionized, but the timber workers don't fight management like they used to. Public-employees unions—from teachers to Metro bus drivers—have lately been stymied in their attempts to raise their pay because of severe budget cuts related to the economic slump. While Washington's shrunken union density has been on the rise since the 1980s—due in part to the success of the Service Employees International Union in organizing workers in the health-care and public-service sectors—in the long view, it's still way down. Between 2007 and 2008, union density in this state reversed course and dipped slightly because of the recession, from 20.2 percent to 19.8 percent.

Unions are paid tremendous lip service as a positive social force. They can be and are rightly lionized as a huge, helpful presence in this city's industrial and blue-collar past. They are idealized by certain members of the left who still believe that unquestioning pro-union sentiment is the sine qua non for liberal identification. But they are not quite the feisty power brokers that they used to be. Even stalwart union defenders, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Joel Connelly, have largely abandoned the all-encompassing commitment to solidarity. Connelly took a cut in benefits to join the new, union-free online P-I and says he is "torn" about whether he'd prefer the operation be unionized. "Deeply believe in unions as agents of social justice and defenders of the middle class," Connelly wrote in a recent e-mail. "But the 2000–2001 strike was horribly organized. We were denied vital information at the time of the strike vote, i.e., whether Teamsters would back strike. It had a destructive impact on journalism in Seattle."

"Things have changed," admitted Rick Bender, president of the Washington State Labor Council. "Tactics are changing. You don't see the strikes being used as much as they were in the early days of the labor movement." Still, he said, if Congress passes the Employee Free Choice Act of 2009, the legislation that labor leaders are pushing for to rebuild union strength and numbers, "you're going to see some changes." Today there are 60 million people in the U.S. who would join a union if they could, Bender claims, citing recent union polling.

An open question, however, is whether unions make sense anymore in certain industries where they have long had footholds. Newspapers are a prime example. The Times is now the only union publication in town (except for the Daily Journal of Commerce, which has two union employees), and lately the main role of the Times' union is to help its members decide how to absorb the 12-percent cut in employee-related expenses that the Times management said it needs to make in order to keep the paper solvent. (On April 9, guild journalists at the Times voted to do this through furloughs and a halt to wage increases.) A case could be made that the P-I—now in the midst of a painful, rapid reorganization due to the internet—would have been more nimble and successful at adapting if not for the presence of a union, which can prolong major decisions, reward seniority over merit, protect useless employees, and even thwart desperately needed changes. Of course, to make that case one would have to show that the newspaper's executives had long ago hatched brilliant plans for meeting the challenges of this era, only to have those plans foiled by a recalcitrant union. There is no evidence for this. Newspaper executives in general share as much of the blame for the current state of their businesses as anyone else, and so it's not surprising that their union workers are currently grateful for the clauses in their union contracts relating to seniority, severance pay, and buyouts.

In the seven years since I left the Seattle Times, I've done all right as a solo bargainer. This isn't proof that individual workers everywhere are capable of representing themselves without the help of a union, but it's a strong counterbalance to my strike experience. Meanwhile, I've watched with sympathy as the collective bargainers who remain at the Times suffer through group pay freezes, group layoffs, and other cutbacks.

On April 10, city hall hosted a sparsely attended forum on the future of news publishing in this city. A number of unemployed former P-I journalists were there, and two of them spoke about the new online-news ventures they hope to launch. "There are important voices that the community has lost that I think it is important for us to keep," said Kery Murakami, a former columnist and newspaper- guild shop steward at the P-I. He was talking about the voices of his former coworkers, now out of work—and out of the guild. He did not once mention the idea of unionizing his new venture, nor did anyone else with a bright idea for the industry's future.