> precisely, those people have occupations that are defined as
> requiring educations and/or possessing power over their clientele.
> they are seen as superior to their clientele, for the most part.
> (as opposed to customers).
What makes a crucial difference, it seems to me, is not workers' power over clientele but relative difficulty of the management to replace teachers, librarians, police officers, fire fighters, transit workers, etc. in the event of their concerted activities in comparison to, say, retail workers at Wal-Mart and the like. The government can't just round up any old unemployed workers to replace striking teachers and transit workers, for instance, but the corporation can easily do that to retail workers. Some occupations do require more skills, credentials, etc. than others, and those give workers leverage they can use against the management. Some occupations -- like transit jobs -- are so strategically located in the entire local (and sometimes national) economy that workers gain leverage from this very fact alone. Also, there are a lot more market pressures on corporations in low-profit-margin industries such as retail than on the public sector even in the age of privatization. Service workers in the private sector have a tougher time organizing than service workers in the public sector, *even when the jobs done in the former are exactly the same as those done in the latter.* These objective differences matter the most.
I'm sure cops, teachers, transit workers, etc. side with management against their clients more often than retail workers side with management against their customers (in fact, workers' right to fight against customer abuse is in their *union contracts*), but that doesn't stop cops, etc. from getting organized and bargaining hard with management for better pay and the like because they, unlike retail workers, play functions of strategic importance, have jobs that are difficult to quickly fill with replacements, and/or are not under as much market pressures as retail workers. The question is how much leverage workers have in a given economy, how militantly workers exploit it, etc.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>