Tens of millions of workers in the United States want a union at their workplace, but do not have one. This unfortunate state of affairs is normally blamed on external obstacles such as our country’s broken labor law regime. But there are also significant internal obstacles within the labor movement that prevent it from scaling up to meet the widespread demand for workplace representation.

Unions frequently refuse to lend support to workers who reach out for organizing help in part because labor’s predominant unionization approach is so staff-intensive and expensive — costing up to $3,000 for every new worker organized and generally requiring one staffer for every hundred targeted workers. Instead, they generally only take on workers who are in a big enough workplace to justify the cost of winning and servicing a contract, who are in a locale where the union already has an institutional base, and who have agreed from the outset to unionize, not just fight for immediate demands.

The deeper problem is that labor does so little to proactively reach out to and support the countless people who could initiate organizing campaigns on their own if given the proper encouragement and training tools. With most unions refusing to use their coffers to widely encourage such worker-initiated drives — and to turn those that catch on into ambitious campaigns with a strategic plan to win — it is not surprising that union density continues to drop each year.