During the 2016 Democratic National Convention, four major labor unions broke from the AFL-CIO Labor Caucus and caucused separately. Few people noticed the breakaway, and those who did likely thought it insignificant or at most slightly peculiar.

Yet the move is very significant. It’s part of a broader shift in American labor — a drift away from class-conscious unionism, unionism that believes fighting corporate power and the 1 percent is an unavoidable necessity.

The caucus break represents the culmination of a long, steady trend in American trade unionism toward neoliberal unionism — a unionism that espouses collaboration with corporations instead of conflict and upholds free-market capitalism as reconcilable with labor’s interests.