It's an extensively treated paradigm in sociology. With sociology being a "soft" science and not having access to a methodology as rigorous as physics, it's certainly contestable and there are of course many sociologists who have made arguments against it or that simply don't consider it convincing, but it's not just some casual insight and certainly not someone's "joke".

The reason I mentioned it, in any case, was to relate it to previous commentor's supposition that unions were excluded from their "rule" (which was a casual insight). You needn't take either this perspective nor theirs as true yourself, but there's not much case to exempt unions if you're going to start looking through the world from that lens in the first place.