Workers' Movement: Dead?

[Lateralus]

Unless you count the I.W.W then it's sort of dead. Labor unions were beat out of the collective mindset of the population by force, there are worker owned and operated business's but not real collectives unless i'm wrong (i'm no expert believe me)i haven't heard of any in recent memory.

[alexander]

My observation—which I have made first-hand—is simply that there is no homogeneous Working Class™ that's out to save us against the evil bourgeois. KyXen says the working class is revolutionary by definition, reducing it to banal tautology—fine by me, but that wasn't the working class I was commenting on.

To address the thread's original question by way of another one: was there ever a working class? Or is that just an idea?