If the word “union” conjures up an image of a man in a hard hat reporting for duty to an assembly line, your understanding of how organized labor has evolved over the past 50 years is a little out of date.

The typical union worker today, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is a woman between the ages of 45 and 54 working for a local government, most likely the local school board. Of the 14 million union members in the United States, half of them work for the government, not the private sector.