In the second half of the episode when Richard is discussing the two different options the working class had to respond to businesses giving their jobs to computers or sending their jobs over seas, he mentions that the working class did not choose the banding together option “partly because the kinds of organized militant workers had been hounded out of the working class, given a way out of the popularity they might have had by the previous thirty years of this country’s history.”

My question is what or who exactly is he referring to with this statement?