(FORTUNE Magazine) – We read the other day that nonstop air service from the New York area to Las Vegas is again available to ordinary mortals -- it never went away for the high rollers -- and had the darndest free association. Suddenly leaping into memory was an argument we got involved in seven years ago, in the course of presiding over a FORTUNE round-table program. Round-table subject: the future of the American labor movement. Participants: six eminent economists, one of whom we actually agreed with. The other participants seemed to feel that unions were basically a positive force in American life. Several also hypothesized that the union movement -- which then represented a bit over 20% of the American labor force, down from 35% in 1950 -- was perfectly capable of a comeback. Barry Bosworth of the Brookings Institution said organized labor might well capitalize on the ''unaddressed concerns'' of the growing female labor force. John Dunlop of Harvard, dean of American labor economists and a former Secretary of Labor, said we should put the unions' decline in perspective. There had been declines in the past, he observed, but they were always followed by renewed explosive growth. (''The labor movement has always grown in surges.'') Looking at the unions' recent record, we judge the surge to be still on hold. The late news tells us that even in a period when pilots are in short supply, the strike by Eastern's own pilots is collapsing. The auto workers' prodigious effort to organize the new Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, was shot down in a 2 to 1 vote against the union. Professor Leo Troy of Rutgers now estimates the unions' strength at only 16.8% of the nonfarm labor force -- down five percentage points from 1982. He puts the union share of the total labor force at only 13% -- and projects single digits before 2000. Back to the round table. The one participant on our own wavelength was Morgan O. Reynolds of Texas A&M, who was something of an outcast in the crowd. Precipitating mournful sighs and elevated eyebrows among his fellow scholars, Reynolds cast the unions as simple worker cartels and urged repeal of all existing labor laws, beginning with the arrangements that exempt picket-line tough guys from the usual rules about coercion and peaceable behavior. He argued that the surges of the past had typically been driven by government policy -- the Wagner Act, the War Labor Board's efforts to buy labor peace during World War II, the Kennedy Administration's decision to encourage public-sector unionism -- and said it was perfectly natural for the unions to be collapsing as American markets became more competitive via deregulation and free trade. Reynolds added, for good measure, that non-union arrangements are good for the people. In raising employers' production costs, he observed, ''unions reduce the standard of living.'' It was this line that suddenly came back when we read about the resumption of direct flights to Las Vegas. And noticed that the only airlines offering this service to low rollers -- Continental and America West -- are staunchly non-union.