Organized labor went through a wrenching revolution last week when two of the nation’s largest unions bolted from the mighty AFL-CIO. OK, so you probably heard about it on Headline News when you were working out at the gym. But were you really listening? Was anyone?

Unions are not a very big deal anymore. They may have been 50 years ago when union membership made up around a third of the workforce. And they still retain a kind of “Norma Rae” goodwill about them who can argue with better wages and benefits for the working man?

But membership has plummeted to around 12 percent of all U.S. workers and there have been just too many cases of union honchos padding their own pockets, mismanaging local coffers and playing lots of golf during the workweek. Among unions that get the most attention longshoremen, professional athletes and Hollywood talent come to mind six-figure salaries and overly generous perks somehow rub the non-organized rank-and-file the wrong way.

Yet for all that, can there be any denying that the average low-wage American worker is getting shafted big time? They are the janitors and hotel maids and dishwashers and home health care workers whose weekly take-home pay would barely cover a couple’s dinner at Matsuhisa. This blatant inequality is so embedded in L.A.’s fabric that anyone with means either looks the other way or sniffs about how the poor schlubs are the only ones willing to clean toilets and dry off cars.

Upward mobility for the working class? It’s a crock and has been for years.

That’s why Andy Stern is onto something. Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, is chief renegade in last week’s meltdown of the AFL-CIO and he’s after those low-wage workers. In a nutshell, he believes too much time and money has been spent on getting politicians elected rather than getting workers organized.

Certainly, his handiwork has been seen in Los Angeles, where five of the 10 largest unions are affiliated with the SEIU (L.A.’s Local 434B is bigger than the entire United Mine Workers). Just last week, janitors who work at several big aerospace firms ended a three-week strike by agreeing to a new contract.

“Unions work,” Stern told Lou Dobbs last week on CNN. “But they only work when they’re growing stronger, when they’re flexible, when they’re dynamic and when they’re innovative. This is a very different economy from the 1930s and unions need to change.”

Stern talks a very good game good enough to convince the Teamsters and its president, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., to join him in bolting from the AFL-CIO. But his record has more than a few blemishes, especially in the private sector. As noted by former union organizer Robert Fitch in Slate, the SEIU has over-counted the number of workers who have signed up since Stern came to power nine years ago.

In some cases, the union has actually lost ground. Fitch notes that in real terms, janitors are paid half what they were in the 1980s. Even in the most recent janitor dispute, the gains are paltry: workers currently earning $7.25 an hour will see their wages increase by 85 cents an hour over the next three years. Don’t spend it all in one place.

But to quibble over Stern’s scorecard really misses the point, which is simply that the low-wage worker needs help not just to negotiate a few more bucks in wages or help elect some local politico, but to have an advisor for everything from filling out bank forms to arranging car pools to identifying low-cost health care.

As Harvard University economist Lawrence Katz told the Wall Street Journal last week, “There is a view that people want something that looks more like a voice in the workplace and less like collective bargaining and conflict with management.”

Will any of this work with union membership making up just 12 percent of the workforce? Andy Stern and his minions are about to find out.

*Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal. He can be heard every Tuesday morning at 6:55 and 9:55 on KPCC-FM (89.3).